Idea in Brief

The Challenge

As highly skilled professionals increasingly choose freelance work over in-house employment, companies are struggling to recruit and retain the talent they need to transform their offerings, processes, and infrastructures.

The Implication

A new model for how work gets done is taking hold, one that blends in-house and freelance talent. In particular, the role of the manager is changing, along with the skills needed to respond to the very different needs, goals, and interests of these two groups.

The Lessons

This article looks at successful efforts to manage the blended workforce at companies such as Microsoft, M&C Saatchi, and Mars and lays out some of the most helpful lessons they have learned.

Marta, the CTO at a sporting goods company, scans her operating metrics and flinches at the continued “red” status of her team’s technical capability. The board is concerned that upstart competition is nibbling away at market share, so Marta is under intense pressure to help the company move faster to market by implementing more-sophisticated digital and conversational AI capabilities. But her in-house talent lacks the deep expertise and experience necessary to transform the company’s offerings, processes, and data and security infrastructures, and her recruitment team has been unable to pry away top professionals from tech firms, despite making generous offers.
A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Read more on Talent management or related topics Human resource management, Managing employees, Hiring and recruitment, Onboarding and Employee retention