Name: Why Toptal Believes the 'Talent Economy' is the Future of Work
Uploaded: 2019-08-15
Duration: 5 min 32 s
Description: Recent IPOs point towards the imminent rise of a distributed workforce and a 'talent economy,' says Taso Du Val, CEO, Toptal.

[ MUSIC ] Taso tell us a little bit about Toptal just to get started and why you've been so successful in matching tech freelancers with companies that need short term help. Well, Toptal was created to contract out the best software developers and really talent globally. And we've done that really well with lots of clients all over the world. There has been such an explosion of this so- called gig economy. But you say actually the real opportunities are in the talent economy. What do you mean by that? Sure, so we discern the gig economy and the talent economy quite distinctly. We look at the gig economy as temporary work that can be done that's rather a femoral, low skilled labor, so on and so forth. Whereas the talent economy is really about long term opportunities, high skilled labor, so on and so forth. And so if you break them out, you'll see a very big difference between the gig economy and the talent economy. And we focus on the talent economy primarily because that's really the future of work in the truest sense. It's the future of remote work. It's the future of how companies are recruiting and it's really a new wave of how companies are acquiring talent. So you see this as a paradigm shift in the workplace? It's not just a temporary fix. To get someone to fill in for a shortage of tech workers, I mean, is this the future? Well, this is absolutely the future and there's many data points to let's say, corroborate that if you look at get lab, the company that was just recently acquired, they are approaching 1000 full time employees 100 % remotely. If you look at Envision there are approaching 2000 employees as well. Or remotely. Automatic the company that owns WordPress. Again another company that's completely virtual approximately 800 full time employees, predominantly high skilled labor. And so if you look at that and you look at the composition, you look at. How companies are acquiring talent in this new what we think of as the town economy. It's much different than recruiting locally, just acquiring talent based on where people are and working to get that talent in that way. It's really about how globally can we we attract the best talent and create a true town economy for, well in our case Our company and our network and in their case their companies. Here at the Fortune CEO initiative conference. One of the concerns for big and small companies is getting skilled workers and getting them quickly. People who are experts on AI and blockchain and data analytics. But they may not be comfortable with this remote concept, but how do you satisfy this huge demand for talent? Well, you really have to understand it and embrace it. And if you look at Zoom, if you look at Slack all these successful IPOs that are coming to light, what do they do? They really Allow remote work to happen, that's pretty much all they do. And so all these companies whether they be startups or large enterprise companies that understand remote they're adapting these technologies to speak to those individuals. And so as it develops as a true economy. Then we'll see, let's say more people adopt this. Well, you know, as you know, most fortune 500 companies rely on the traditional staffing companies- Yeah. To fill their needs. I mean, given everything that you've been just talking about what are the pros and the cons of sticking with that formula? Well I have a rather subjective view on this, and that view is that there really are only cons. The future is remote. The future is working in a distributed model, agile workforces, as some people call blended workforces, as others call it. However There are so many people now that actually won't go back to working in an office. Because working remotely has proven to them to be so successful, both personally and professionally. And so, it's not just the fact that they can work remotely and it actually works for their profession, but it also cuts down on their commute. It allows them to spend more time with their family or on their hobbies, so on and so forth. And so. Really accommodates a work life balance that is very compelling to those individuals that going into an office just can't satisfy. So what's the single most important advice you would give to CEOs on this whole new staffing world? Understand what it takes to build and maintain infrastructure for a remote workforce, you can't just say I believe in that idea and go and recruit remote talent. You need to have the systems in place. You need to have the policies in place. And probably most importantly, especially in large organizations, you need to have buy in from all the constituents across the organization. So it's very important to have a very holistic approach to The town economy, working remotely, and really everything that comes with that. How far off is this kind of buy- in? Well, let me use some data to corroborate my answer. About ten years ago, there was really one company that existed that had a distributal workforce. Today, about ten years later, there's approximately a hundred companies that are fully distributed That are, let's say 50 fulltime employees or more. Just plot that on a chart and that'll be your answer. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Why Toptal Believes the 'Talent Economy' is the Future of Work

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Recent IPOs point towards the imminent rise of a distributed workforce and a "talent economy," says Taso Du Val, CEO, Toptal.