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People and businesses have responded quickly to shifts in the economy. Through forms of part-time employment, self-employment and piecework, the world of digital ecosystems and platforms will change dramatically in the next few years.
About the expert: Andrey Ryzhenkov, co-founder and CRO of the Console platform for automating the work of companies with performers in different statuses: self-employed, individual entrepreneurs, individuals under a GPC agreement and non-residents.
There are more self-employed in our country: according to the latest data from the Federal Tax Service, in 2022 the country will more than 4 million people have received this status, and their number is growing every month. There are several reasons for this trend: some earn extra money in parallel with their main job amid falling incomes, others master new competencies – from IT and consulting to repair and copywriting, and still others decide to optimize the tax burden.
Let us add to this that the self-employed are those who have gone abroad, our country, who continue to provide services to compatriots and Russian businesses remotely. The law allows you to do this legally with minimal deductions to the Federal Tax Service: 4% of the check for individuals and 6% for legal entities.
Ecosystem of self-employment
The self-employment market is gradually becoming more civilized: aggregator services appear where you can find private performers of completely different services: they look for blue-collar workers on Profi.ru or Avito, designers and illustrators on Behance, and rare IT specialists with the help of Skipp, AmazingHiring or Head.z.
Today, through such platforms More than 3,5 million people from our country are already looking for work. Moreover, the services themselves are interested in minimizing risks – this affects their own reputation. So, feedback systems and ratings allow you to select those who will do the job efficiently and on time. This is especially useful in the case of representatives of working specialties, where the entry threshold is lower and random people can come across. And for specialists, for example, with a specific skill stack in IT, platform teams often independently check competencies before entering them into the database.
Additionally, support services for businesses are being developed that make it easier to work with the self-employed: platforms automatically issue checks for performers, check the relevance of their status (for example, if a person has already provided services for more than ₽2,4 million since the beginning of the year, then he cannot continue to work as self-employed ), transfer the process of signing contracts, applications and acts into electronic form, and so on.
The use of platforms is also convenient for the self-employed: some help to find clients and eliminate the need to prove their competence to the customer every time, others take on the mandatory bureaucratic procedures.
Three motivations for the self-employed
According to According to a study by McKinsey, all performers working through digital platforms can be divided into three types:
Lovers. They do business because they love it. For example, millennials who are just interested in doing tasks and meeting new people, or older generations who register as taxi drivers and do private cabs to make up for a lack of communication (or to make up for lost income due to retirement, which is more applicable to our country) .
part-time. They are driven by material motivation, but such work is not their main source of income. The money brought by freelancing is important for them, but there are other factors: it is both a way to build competencies and the opportunity to engage in interesting, but not very profitable projects.
Free Players. This includes two types of self-employed: those who are forced to earn a living by self-employment, but would prefer regular employment, and in-demand specialists, for whom this format is simply more profitable. They have made a name for themselves, have a steady stream of clients, and see no point in sharing profits with an employer.
“Liquid” teams and vertical platforms
The interaction of platforms with the self-employed and customers of their services is gradually becoming more complex. One of the new formats is “liquid” or “super mobile” teams (Liquid Super Teams). Their essence is the constant cooperation of a small number of professionals with specific skills for substantive work on projects. At the same time, a freelancer can combine participation in several projects at once.
Previously, such “liquid” teams were formed according to the principle of “weak ties” – by acquaintance with former colleagues or by recommendation. Today, some specialized platforms provide services for the selection of performers for such teams, acting as a kind of technical consultant for HR companies.
All this requires not only special knowledge from platform representatives, but also the expansion of information about candidates up to the creation of a “digital book” about each of them. The services will improve information collection tools, use depersonalized data following the example of mobile operators that offer services based on user activity tracking and Big Data (it is easy for them to track where we go, what establishments we visit, what we are interested in).
Algorithms for evaluation and ratings will improve, which will make the reputation and, to some extent, the life of a freelancer transparent: it will be possible to determine his earnings, the number of projects, the average check, the speed of completing tasks, how satisfied the employer is with the cooperation. There will be more evaluation parameters, and the search will become more skillful.
In connection with the development of services and competition for customers, today one can already observe a trend towards platform specialization: some are associated with IT, others with couriers, and still others with construction specialists. There will be fewer attempts to make a universal platform for all professions. With a high degree of probability, everything crystallizes within understandable verticals, where there are employees with a similar background.
Formalization and regulation
Platform employment and self-employment has already turned from a niche history into an independent element of the labor market, which easily adapts to personnel transitions and structural shifts in the economy. On the background decrease in real incomes, people will turn towards the PIT regime (tax on professional income) and flexible part-time jobs. There will be more of those who, conditionally, taxi during the day and deliver orders in the evening, so they will be able to earn extra money and maintain their usual lifestyle, flexible approach to the schedule.
For our country, this phenomenon is not new: a phenomenon familiar from the nineties is called secondary or precarious employment and is a consequence of the primitivization of the economy. In practice, this can be seen in the growth of blue-collar vacancies. So, in May 2022 on the market more builders (+28%), couriers (+26%), equipment repair specialists (+45%) were needed.
The legal framework will be tightened after the market, closing the existing gaps in precarious employment, so that employers are not afraid to hire self-employed people because of the risk of re-qualifying relations with such contractors as labor, and the performers themselves receive social guarantees and security. In 2021, the Ministry of Labor announced that is working on a draft law that will allow introducing forms of labor relations related to digital ecosystems and platforms into the regulatory field. This will allow developing, for example, voluntary insurance mechanisms.
In parallel with this, legislation in the field of personal data collected by digital platforms will be improved in order to maintain a balance between the privacy of performers and the interests of customers who want to learn the maximum about candidates and quickly select the right professionals for their needs.