![Robert Half - One Third of Global Workforce Expected to be Contractors by 2023]( "Robert Half - One Third of Global Workforce Expected to be Contractors by 2023")
Global research by international recruitment firm Robert Half found that business leaders aim to achieve a 66:34 split between permanent and temporary workers by 2023.
According to Robert Half, this split highlights how the professional gig economy is transforming traditional staffing and recruitment strategies.
Robert Half’s research polled over 3,800 business leaders in 12 countries worldwide, and the research also found that 97% of business leaders identified benefits of adopting a more flexible approach to recruitment in the years to come, including more control over staffing and recruitment costs (36%), support for long-term absences, such as parental leave, secondments or sick leave (34%), and better management of workload fluctuations (32%).
This compares to 31% who respectively referred to access to new ideas/initiatives to support innovation and providing a stop-gap when permanent hiring takes too long. Furthermore, 30% respectively said flexible recruitment would provide access to technical/niche skillsets and knowledge transfer to existing employees.
Andrew Morris, Director of Robert Half Australia, commented, “The gig economy is crucial for addressing businesses’ demands for greater flexibility, both today and in the future. Growing technological complexity is changing businesses, requiring more specialist and hard-to-find skills, and with traditional job roles evolving rapidly, businesses need to adopt more flexible approaches to recruitment to find the right balance of skills.”
Robert Half stated that the increasing adoption by employers of the gig economy and a flexible workforce is being driven by several factors, mainly by new technologies that allow for greater workplace flexibility such as collaboration tools which offer businesses a more flexible approach to how they manage key project initiatives and workload fluctuations. Other contributing factors include the difficulty of acquiring specific skills on a permanent basis owing to the worldwide war for talent, and the evolving complexity of traditional job roles.