The Open Talent Economy

Managing talent used to involve at least a few certainties. You knew what roles you needed to fill and where you could find the talent to fill them. When people worked for you, they came to your building in the morning and left at the end of the day. You could see and interact with them. And they could see you.

Today things are different. Changes on a global scale have upended these familiar patterns, and talent and employers now seek each other out, on more equal terms, from anywhere in the world. The evolving workforce is a mixture of full-time employees, contractors and freelancers and—increasingly—people with no formal ties to your enterprise at all. People move more freely than ever from role to role and across organizational and geographic boundaries. Global markets and products, driven by rapid innovation and post-digital disruption, seem to demand new talent models that can be rapidly configured and reconfigured. Businesses expect agility, scale and the right skills to be available faster than ever—in real time.

Welcome to the open talent economy—a collaborative, transparent, technology-driven, rapid-cycle way of doing business. What the open source model did for software, the open talent economy is doing for work.