Nordic consultant matchmaking platform Worksome enters the UK
The UK market for freelance consultants is getting busy, and so too is the arena for matchmakers, who can link their skills with the needs of clients. Just months after both Germany’s Comatch and the US’ Catalant entered the UK market for high-skilled independent consultants, now Denmark’s Worksome is doing the same.
According to Consultancy.uk analysis based on the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics ONS) and the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed (IPSE), the industry currently contains a labour pool of around 5 million people (or around 15% of the workforce), having increased from 3.3 million (12% of the workforce) in 2001. This includes a burgeoning independent consulting sector, which is winning an ever-widening segment of work from the traditional consulting scene.
Issues relating to pricing and agility mean clients have seen sourcing freelancers to staff projects as a major asset, with many of the professionals in the gig economy having exited larger firms with years of training and experience, which they can now tap without the broader fees of an attached company. According to the CTA's second annual Future of Work survey, 92% of businesses will need more employees with technical skills; however, 74% believe finding people with the right skills will be harder. Since the consulting industry is not chartered, anyone can call themselves an independent consultant – making it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to recruiting talent.
This has spawned the dramatic rise of the matchmakers to the fore of the consulting market. Matchmaking firms help connect the needs of clients to consultants with the relevant skills, price range and availability in a short time frame, while also ensuring a degree of quality control, as they feature a number of requirements for professionals to join their networks. Demand for this service has risen hand in hand with demand for gig economy consultants, and has seen a host of new firms created or arriving in the UK in recent years, including the likes of Catalant, Outsized and Comatch, among many more.
Enter: Worksome
The latest of these arrivals is Worksome, joining the UK’s increasingly crowded market from its origins in the Nordics. The holistic business-to-consultant matchmaking platform is making a strategic foray into London’s growing IT and digital consultancy marketplace, having already demonstrated its success in Denmark. With the search for talent becoming ever more challenging, Worksome was established to cut candidate search from a 6-week average down to 24 hours, offering a 4% flat commission fee versus the industry standard of 15-30% – in a bid to undercut its competition.
Worksome provides a speedy end-to-end recruitment process, challenging the traditional search average of 42 days – with some cases taking as much as 6 months. Addressing this inefficiency, the matchmaking algorithms within the Worksome platform engender a more proficient experience for the users, slicing weeks off the process, meaning best candidate matches can become available within 24 hours. With more than 6,000 users and hiring companies on-board the Worksome platform in Denmark, early signs of growth in the UK point towards an equally strong pick-up.
CEO and co-founder, Morten Petersen is a future of work specialist. Commenting on the launch of Worksome in the UK, he said, “In Denmark we have already seen businesses reaping the benefits from the platform but with the UK being a much bigger player in the flexible worker market, it has massive potential to really assist with the digital skills gap that is cited as being a big issue… Companies are suffering from a talent scarcity problem and freelancers make it possible for businesses to hire the most skilled and suitable talent, with far less financial risk attached… It is encouraging that even in our early days here, we have already seen a quick uptick in both user and hiring company numbers. We are excited about growing Worksome’s UK position and delivering an important solution to the digital recruitment and skills-gap problem.”
