Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK), the world’s work marketplace, today announced a major expansion of its offerings, making full-time hiring available to all customers for the first time. A new end-to-end solution enables businesses of all sizes to find, vet, hire, onboard and pay highly skilled professionals for full-time work arrangements, without the complexity commonly associated with global hiring.

Businesses pay a price when they make a bad full-time hire, and professionals are often asked to commit to working full-time for a company they aren’t already comfortable with – real risks on both sides magnified by current economic uncertainty. Upwork’s proven track record of helping businesses and talent from over 180 countries and across more than 10,000 skills forge trusted, long-term relationships in a freelance capacity can now be applied to full-time work arrangements as well. Several new product features and enhanced capabilities allow clients to quickly and easily discover, evaluate, hire and work with a vast global pool of more than 2 million highly skilled professionals on Upwork who have already indicated openness to full-time work, all within a centralized platform.

“Today, hiring full-time talent around the globe is an expensive proposition and a leap of faith for everyone involved,” said Dave Bottoms, General Manager of Marketplace, Upwork. “With this expansion into a full-time hiring solution for all our customers, we have mobilized Upwork’s longstanding expertise, experience and technology to further help businesses and skilled professionals build trusted, long-term working relationships. We aim to provide customers the flexibility to choose the work arrangements that best fit their needs, and empower people on both sides of our work marketplace to thrive in today’s ever-changing world of work.”

Highlights of Upwork’s new end-to-end solution for full-time hiring include:

• A mutually beneficial way for all clients and talent to trial a contract-to-hire working relationship before they commit to a long-term, full-time engagement. In fact, since the beginning of 2023, clients testing this feature have posted over 40,000 contract-to-hire jobs on the Upwork marketplace.
• Expanded availability of Upwork’s world-class payroll, compliance and contract management tools – formerly reserved for Enterprise Suite clients – to help small and mid-size businesses classify and pay talent, whether found on Upwork or sourced through their own network.
• Enhanced Enterprise Suite capabilities for large businesses to classify, hire and pay full-time talent at scale, powered by customized onboarding workflows, systems integrations, and advanced reporting that accelerate talent innovation.

Survey data gathered for Upwork’s 2022 Future Workforce Report shows that 93 percent of hiring managers often or occasionally convert freelancers into full-time employees. The top reasons hiring managers convert freelancers to full-time include the quality of the freelancer’s work (71 percent) and, notably, the ability to try working with professionals before hiring them as full-time employees (41 percent).¹

“At RSMC, our mission is to provide the highest quality fertility care services, but we can’t accomplish our mission without highly skilled talent. Whether they’re freelancers or full-time employees, they factor into the work we do and the services we deliver as part of the patient experience,” said Julianna Nikolic, Chief Strategy Officer, Reproductive Sciences Management Company. “As our business needs change and grow, having experience working with a freelancer allows us to move them into full-time roles with confidence, because we’ve already seen their best work and we know there’s synergy in the working relationship. Because we’re first able to work with them under a freelancing contract, we can identify skill sets they have and match those with full-time opportunities within our company. Upwork has allowed us to convert many people into full-time roles that are really integral to our business.”

To learn more about full-time hiring on Upwork, read the blog post: https://www.upwork.com/blog/expanding-the-worlds-work-marketplace.

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