Freelance.com: Overview

The Consultancy Services Company for the Internet Age
Every company in the world must reduce time-to-market with new products and services, and the key to competing successfully is often finding staff with the right skills to implement new projects.

The traditional route is to use a recruitment consultancy to find contract and freelance staff, but this can take weeks, or at best days, to have the right people in place and working productively.

Staff recruitment has always been a mediated business, with the emphasis on telephone contact between recruitment agency and client. The agency then has to operate a manual search on its freelance database, and further manual intervention has been required to fax profiles of potential candidates to the client. Because of the need for constant telephone contact between client and agency, it can be several days before the client is in a position to interview short-listed candidates.

The Internet offers an opportunity to connect large enterprises with pre-qualified freelance professionals, thus accelerating the process of identifying suitable staff. The key to the success is two-fold. The first is to offer a high-tech, high-touch value proposition, ensuring quality control and client service through dedicated account managers. The second is to allow the freelance professionals to pre-register into the database from anywhere in the world, where local sales managers can screen and confirm their suitability. Using the Internet, it becomes possible to give corporations anywhere in the world access to the right skills, just in time, for the best price.

Birth of an e-Business
Freelance.com started life in 1990 in France as an association of independent IT professionals, Freelance Technologies, and was incorporated in 1995 as a commercial entity by experienced IT industry veterans Andr� Martinie and Sylvain Vieujot.

In 1996, the two launched the start-up subsidiary Freelance.com. Their vision was to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet to increase the speed with which a company seeking particular contract or freelance skills could recruit the right individuals.

1998 and 1999 were years of significant expansion. New offices opened in Belgium, Spain and the United States in 1998, then Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Caribbean. Finally, a branch office opened in Germany in 2000.

Freelance.com now has over 35,000 qualified professionals on its books and is recruiting more than 500 new freelance specialists every week.

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