Upwork Broadens to Support Full-Time Hiring, Increasing Access to the World’s Work Market for All

With capabilities to manage complexity and risk, a new end-to-end recruiting solution enables firms to identify, evaluate, employ, and pay global talent for full-time work.

Upwork, the world’s job marketplace, has announced a significant expansion of its operations, including full-time hiring for all clients for the first time. A new end-to-end solution enables organizations of all sizes to discover, vet, employ, onboard, and pay highly competent people for full-time work arrangements without the complication that is sometimes associated with global hiring.

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Businesses pay a price when they recruit a terrible full-time employee, and professionals are frequently asked to commit to working full-time for a firm with which they are unfamiliar – genuine risks on both sides exacerbated by present economic uncertainties. Upwork’s established track record of assisting organizations and people from over 180 countries and over 10,000 talents to create trustworthy, long-term connections in a freelancing capacity may now be extended to full-time job arrangements as well. Several new product features and enhanced capabilities enable clients to quickly and easily discover, evaluate, hire, and collaborate with a vast global pool of more than 2 million highly trained individuals on Upwork who have already indicated an interest in full-time work, all from a single platform.

“Today, hiring full-time talent around the globe is an expensive proposition and a leap of faith for everyone involved,” said Dave Bottoms, General Manager of Marketplace, Upwork. “With this expansion into a full-time hiring solution for all our customers, we have mobilized Upwork’s longstanding expertise, experience, and technology to further help businesses and skilled professionals build trusted, long-term working relationships. We aim to provide customers the flexibility to choose the work arrangements that best fit their needs, and empower people on both sides of our work marketplace to thrive in today’s ever-changing world of work.”

The following are some of the highlights of Upwork’s new end-to-end solution for full-time hiring:

• This a mutually advantageous opportunity for all customers and talent to test out a contract-to-hire working relationship before committing to a long-term, full-time commitment. Clients testing this capability have posted over 40,000 contract-to-hire jobs on the Upwork marketplace since the beginning of 2023.
• Upwork’s world-class payroll, compliance, and contract administration capabilities, which were previously reserved for Enterprise Suite clients, are now available to assist small and mid-size enterprises in categorizing and paying personnel, whether recruited on Upwork or sourced through their own network.
• Enhanced Enterprise Suite features enable major enterprises to categorize, hire, and pay full-time employees on a wide scale, enabled by bespoke onboarding procedures, system integrations, and enhanced reporting that drive talent innovation.

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According to survey data obtained for Upwork’s 2022 Future Workforce Report, 93 percent of recruiting managers frequently or infrequently transition freelancers into full-time employees. The quality of the freelancer’s work (71 percent) and, importantly, the option to experience working with experts before engaging them as full-time workers are the main reasons hiring managers to convert freelancers to full-time employees (41 percent).

“At RSMC, our mission is to provide the highest quality fertility care services, but we can’t accomplish our mission without highly skilled talent. Whether they’re freelancers or full-time employees, they factor into the work we do and the services we deliver as part of the patient experience,” said Julianna Nikolic, Chief Strategy Officer, of Reproductive Sciences Management Company. “As our business needs change and grow, having experience working with a freelancer allows us to move them into full-time roles with confidence because we’ve already seen their best work and we know there’s synergy in the working relationship. Because we’re first able to work with them under a freelancing contract, we can identify skill sets they have and match those with full-time opportunities within our company. Upwork has allowed us to convert many people into full-time roles that are really integral to our business.”

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