(Digital) skills for 'rent' with the Talent as a Service method

Attracting people, retaining them and enabling them to express their full potential: however you want to describe it, the ability to make the most of the resources at one's disposal is a dowry coveted by any company that has the ambition to constantly renew itself in order to continue to grow and remain competitive. Amidst the uncertainty of the socio-economic scenario and investments that must absolutely be functional to business development, the critical point of the issue is linked (often and willingly) to the model to be followed to achieve the objective of maximising the value of the human capital present in the organisation.

One of these models, which for years has been widespread in the United States (thanks to players such as TopTal, Braintrust or A Team, which have already received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding) and more recently has been progressively adopted in several European countries (in Italy it is still struggling to penetrate due to a certain conservatism in search and selection procedures), refers to the meaning of the acronym TaaS, 'Talent as a Service', i.e. a service that allows talent to be hired 'on demand'. I

According to the latest 'Market Outlook' drawn up by analysts at Future Market Insight, global turnover in this sector is expected to exceed USD 1.1 billion by 2032, compared to around USD 387 million at the end of 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of just under 12%.

How it works is quickly explained and is reflected for instance in the proposal of the French start-up Malt, one of the main players (as well as a pioneer) of TaaS in the Old Continent: a self-service technology platform, a community populated by thousands of independent digital professionals, and the conditions are in place to bring together supply and demand of skills in a very fast and simplified way, with the promise of generating benefits for all.

For businesses, the advantage declared by those who are riding this model, such as the Italian start-up Cosmico, specialised in the 'bridging' of talents from the digital world (around 16,000 professionals are registered on the platform), is essentially that of being able to have the best professionals available on the market, overcoming the limitations revealed by other ways of searching for qualified figures. Classical recruiting, the company's managers point out, is an always less effective option because it suffers from the costs and bureaucratic-administrative delays (we are talking about weeks or months on the whole) of the exploration process that leads to the candidate's hiring, and the same goes for alternatives such as outsourcing, which focuses on outsourcing specific projects to third parties instead of finding the resources to carry them out and develop them internally.