NEW DELHI: Gone are the days when gig workers were associated with just blue-collar jobs. Of late, there has been an increasing demand from big companies for high-skilled gig workers. Large enterprises such as Tata, Infosys, and Britannia, among others, looking for high-skilled workers, are now increasingly trying to benefit from the evolving gig economy, primarily for two reasons - to cut costs and to access talent across locations.
They are using gig worker platforms to look for talents. Gig work platform Awign has grown 10-fold in the last 18 months in terms of topline and bottom line, according to Annanya Sarthak and Gurpreet Singh, co-founders of Awign. “A lot of large enterprises have increased. Our average revenue per customer has grown close to 5x in the last 18 months,” they said.
Some of the big companies and established start-ups that are increasingly looking for gig work on the platform include Infosys, Tata, Wipro, Britannia, Ola, Fresh to Home. Explaining the growing interest of large enterprises, they said, “About three years back, there used to be a lot of growth-stage customers that used to adopt gig.
But in the past one-and-half years, 70% of our business is coming from large enterprises - either brick and mortar enterprises having a turnover of over 1,000 crore or scaled up growth companies like the Swiggy, Ola and Byjus, which have already established themselves as large enterprises and have a very predictable sort of planning or runway with them.” According to them, these big enterprises are looking for gig work either in niche roles like a product manager, developer or for their assessment or proctoring operations. Less than 10% of clients on Awign are start-ups.
Another gig work marketplace Taskmo is also seeing more big enterprises moving towards gig work lately. “In the past one year alone we added 430-450 new task listings, 20% of which came from enterprises,” said Prashant Janadri, co-founder, Taskmo. “This is a relatively new trend, which will take time to grow but we foresee the momentum picking up as companies look at Flexi-hiring to rationalise their talent acquisition costs,” said Janadri.
“There is also a common misunderstanding that gigs are only for blue-collar jobs. Given the symbiotic benefits for both parties, across industries, companies are increasingly looking for gig workers for high-skilled roles.”