One of the possible reasons for the stagnation is that the freelance market has always been dominated by one main product: service. Since the birth of the whales that are freelancers, FL.ru and Weblancer, and until 2020, the format of all exchanges is still focused on the selection of services for orders. However, customers come to freelance not only for services, but also for performers. The two most notable additions to the market since then, Freelance and Kwork, did not change the paradigm of freelancing as a service market, and Kwork also increased the degree of depersonalization of services. The fact that customers come to freelance not only for services, but also for performers, continued to be ignored.
And now, after five years and several new projects that have not changed anything, the first site finally drew attention to the fact that customers come to freelance not only for services, but also for performers. Topfreelancer , by the way, launched Kwork, clearing its karma with the first Russian freelance project that made the performers themselves their product, not services. This is still a niche project, moreover, a fundamentally niche one: now only developers and designers are hired on Topfreelancer.
However, it can become the first swallow of the second freelance market: already as a qualifications market, sharpened by customers looking for suitable people, and not just services. There will be room already for performers who sell their professionalism, not a set of skills, and want to demonstrate their qualifications, and not cut pictures into a portfolio. A new dimension of freelancing - all the prospects that open up with it.
Now freelancing as a market for services - that is, the ability of a freelancer to perform a one-time task - sounds self-evident, because it is the cornerstone of the idea of ​​modern freelancing. It is much less obvious that there were always two of these stones, just the second was ignored. Perhaps the one-sidedness of the initial concept became that recurring mistake, due to which all new projects continued to come out so monotonous, and the market seemed to be in stagnation from the moment of registration.
Despite the fact that an alternative approach, the emergence of projects focusing on the freelancers themselves, rather than the services in their portfolio, will cut many pain points of freelancing, in which the convenience of some is incompatible with the tasks and positioning of others, from which the most qualified freelancers now suffer more. Freelancing services were not created for them, and their irritation reveals a hidden demand for an alternative: freelance qualifications.
Freelance product concept # 2: qualification instead of service
Freelance services and freelance qualifications are two approaches to freelancing as a product that is sold on the market (to customers) depending on what they are looking for: a solution to a problem or a specialist capable of solving a problem.
Freelance qualifications is a search for freelancers by matching the skill level to the task level.
Freelancing of services is a search for a performer who can perform a specific task, according to the existing experience or portfolio.
The difference between these approaches is what the customer is looking for. To select a performer capable of performing a specific task, a rough assessment of the portfolio may be enough without requiring an assessment of general competence. If the customer needs a performer, in principle, to perform tasks of a certain category, then he needs a service tailored for selection by the level of competence - freelance qualifications.
Freelance existing today in Runet is freelance services, the product of such services is the services provided, and the interaction is built in the "task-service" format. Freelancing of qualifications, in which the product would be suitable qualifications, and the interaction would be built in the "need-qualifications" format, has not yet existed. Topfreelancer is the first example.
The idea behind Top Freelancer is to create an exchange offering the market a limited number of freelancers, selected by skill level. The seriousness of the selection is promised by the graphics of filters with a dropout rate of 90% right on the site. 9 out of 10! On the one hand, those who have selected the strongest specialists in the typical mass of responses knows that there may be one in dozens of them. If we take for a random sample, conditionally, 40 responses to the project and count how many high-class specialists will not be ashamed to select for performers in the artel, who Obviously, the service wants to test this approach as a method of ensuring a different level of quality. It was created by the Kvork team - the most original in terms of mechanics of freelancing service in Runet for today, and the idea of ​​Topfrilancer develops his concept of a well-functioning freelance,on "Kwork" implemented through full control over the process of completing the task by a freelancer, and now used to select the freelancers themselves.
However, for the market as a whole, there is much more to the idea behind Topfreelancer, even for its creators. In search of uniqueness in the current market, they came across a new approach to freelancing in general.
New type of freelance product: performer instead of service, qualification instead of portfolio
From Weblancer in 2003 to today, all freelance platforms have sold one main product: one-time services. They sold to the market, that is, to customers, as a response to their one-time tasks. The idea of ​​freelancing as a place where a customer finds a performer is not entirely accurate in this sense. The traditional freelance exchange (all up to Topfreelancer, apparently) is the place where the task finds service.
The difference between “search for a service” from “search for a contractor” determines all the resulting relationships of the parties. “Finding a service” depersonalizes the process by separating the work from the performer. Customers are offered services that already include a freelancer as a person, specialist, his qualifications, experience and personality traits. Kwork, by the way, is an example of the development of strengthening this paradigm through an even greater reduction in the personal factor in the process of service.
Depersonalization is both a big plus and a neglected minus of traditional freelancing. Many customers and performers consider the depersonalization of relationships to be a virtue of freelancing: if you get a task, if you complete it, it's over. No unnecessary fuss. However, depersonalization also has a downside: in many cases, on the contrary, it interferes with meeting the right performer. Aversion to the “personalization” of work relationships is usually directed at cases where the inability to behave culturally enough (possibly mutual) poisons the entire work with stress. The problem here is not personalization, but the cultural level. Such a thing as qualifications, expertise, work experience, etc., refer to the level of personality traits, professional personality traits in this case. They cannot be transferred by means of a portfolio and similar works. Avoiding humanizing contact,deliberately limiting ourselves strictly to the task, freelancing can work perfectly as a performer. However, when looking for a specialist, finding out broader professional information about him and his experience, on the contrary, can be useful. At the service level, the desire to depersonalize the service limits the possibilities of a deeper professional contact and search for a performer based on qualifications, rather than a narrowly focused set of skills.
Topfreelancer made the product of the service provider. That is, in this case, the service responds to the needs of customers by offering a specialist who can provide the service, and not the service itself. And here you can rightly argue that why do you need to represent a whole performer, when there are enough suitable works in his portfolio for a specific task. And this is true, but here, as in the case of the "service / freelancer" mixture, it is overlooked that customers also do not always look for a specific service as a solution to a one-time problem.
Often, customers are looking not so much for a solution to a specific problem as for meeting the need for solving similar problems. In the first case, the customer is looking for a service. However, to close the need for solving certain problems, a person is required.
The traditional freelance format is focused on finding services for tasks. In the absence of other formats of tasks and services, customers often try to find a solution to the need for such tasks through it.
It turns out worse when the customer tries to solve the need for a person for a category of tasks, selecting him to complete specific ones. It is not always possible to argue that a person who has solved a specific problem will pull all of the same type. First, you still need to be able to set a task that will demonstrate the professionalism and potential of the specialist as a whole. Secondly, many customers do not even think about the task as a way of assessing the qualifications of the performer in general, but directly extrapolate the result of one specific task for the ability to universally solve all similar ones. However, you need to take into account the difference between service and qualifications: not always the best performer of a specific task will be able to cover the need to solve all such tasks. Solving the problem in general, as opposed to in particular,can add the required hidden competencies - and the performer can really be a narrow specialist. Whereas a professional, for example, may not be particularly attracted to a specific task, he would have done an excellent job as part of a larger project - but it is easy to overlook it with a narrow focus on the quality of execution of specific tasks.
So the forest is hiding behind the trees, and the master performer of tasks becomes blurred when their scope expands, and wide expertise and the ability to solve original problems goes unnoticed behind a typical task.
Freelance market - second freelance market
In the freelance market, both products are in demand: services and qualifications. Moreover, understanding the separateness of these entities, that different relationships are built on them for different tasks, is more important than an attempt to offer both options. Considering that there is a lack of projects focused on the search for services, there is no need to deal with them at all - I think that this is how the “freelance killers” who then disappeared into oblivion appeared.
Topfreelancer is so far the only project that has shifted its search focus to specialists. Despite the fact that the very approach, in which the platform does not sell the work of a freelancer, but the qualifications for its implementation, a combination of experience and skills, targets exactly the heart of the hidden demand in the market. The new approach opens up a new market, in which at first the principle of "who got up first, and the sneakers" will again operate.
At the same time, while Topfreelancer recruits only developers and designers, most of the specializations remain open in principle - including those in which the nonlinearity of the ratio of the level of completion of a particular task and the level of a specialist as a whole can be even higher. This is especially true for texts and art, in which one-time orders are often viewed as test tasks for wider cooperation. However, it is usually extremely difficult for the customer to see the author behind one text, and the artist behind one picture. Perhaps that is why one-time freelance orders rarely develop into cooperation even after successful completion. In this sense, for non-technical specialties, the qualifications of which are more difficult to translate into quantifiable categories and express through examples of works, services,which will put in focus the presentation of a complete professional portrait of a freelancer even more necessary than IT specialists.
From the point of view of a freelancer
The emergence of services that specialize in freelancing "need-qualifications" will be especially useful for high-class professionals. The paradox of a freelance professional: the higher the qualifications of the market average, the more difficult it is to demonstrate this difference.
On freelancing services, communication between the needs of customers and the capabilities of performers is carried out in the language of individual tasks and individual works in the portfolio. Freelancing services encourages selection by the likeness of work, encouraging performers to fill the portfolio according to their popularity with customers, and not according to their own experience, specialization and qualifications.
This format is not suitable for needs outside the specific task. For them, you need to look for a specialist, and searching for services can only be confusing. "Similar jobs" does not mean relevant experience. "Similar jobs" is a similar result. And in order to assess the relevance of an experience, you also need to know the process.
The more difficult the task or need, the less likely it is to find someone who has already done exactly the same, and the more important is the correspondence of the required skills and experience in solving problems of the same level. For complex tasks, it is not experience that is important, but qualifications. For complex needs and tasks, matching the level of a specialist is more important than the accuracy of matching his experience. The level of a specialist means the level of problems that they are capable of solving. This is difficult to demonstrate under the conditions of selection by the likeness of experience.
Freelance services are focused on demonstrating the experience of providing services through individual works in a portfolio format. As a result, class specialists do not have the opportunity to convey the specifics of their qualifications - only a portfolio of works. The problem is that many freelancers can put in their portfolio the most impressive one-off jobs that they have been involved in. The battle of “my expertise” versus “my best works” in a format tailored for the best works cannot be equal. A resume format is better suited for selling qualifications.
And a portfolio with the best works often clogs up the air even when looking for specific services. With their “cover”, the best services in the portfolio affect the expectations of customers, although without everything that remains behind the scenes of the best works: tasks, process, other participants, role and contribution of a freelancer, it is impossible to assess how adequately they convey the quality of experience.
Perhaps that is why everyone has excellent portfolios on modern freelancing, but you will not find good specialists.
Projects selling qualifications on freelance will no longer be able to limit themselves to the portfolio format - it is simply impossible for an objective transfer of experience, specialization, level. The portfolio format allows you to give the impression of the required qualifications, which is often enough for freelancing. A service whose freelance product is at the level of a specialist will need a more rigorous and holistic approach.
When customers who need qualified specialists for their range of tasks are allowed to part ways with everyone else who is looking for one-time services and looking at the experience of similar work, they will feel relief. And maybe even a freelance swamp will turn out to be a beach.