Nearly half of full-time employees in one workforce study said freelancers help fill important gaps in the work around them. The bigger shift is not simply more freelance hiring. Companies are starting to separate the skills they need from the jobs they permanently employ.
A company can know exactly what skill it needs and still have no good reason to create a full-time job for it.
Maybe the expertise is needed for three months. Maybe the technology is changing too quickly to know whether the role will look the same next year. Maybe the company needs a specialist now, while training someone internally would take considerably longer.
Businesses have traditionally had a fairly obvious answer to a missing capability: hire another employee.
That answer is becoming less automatic.
A 2025 skills report from Upwork found that 49% of full-time workers surveyed relied on freelancers to address critical gaps that helped them do their work. Technical expertise was particularly important, with 41% turning to freelancers for skills including web design, data analytics, product management, generative AI and video production, according to the research on changing skill demand and freelance hiring.
The figure does not mean half of all employees personally hire freelancers. It describes full-time workers reporting that freelance talent is being used to fill important gaps around their work.
That distinction matters, but it does not make the number less significant.
It shows how far independent professionals have moved from being extra capacity on the edge of a business. In many teams, they are becoming one of the ways essential expertise enters the organization.
The skills gap is much bigger than freelancing
The 49% figure makes more sense when placed beside what employers are saying about skills generally.
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 survey of more than 1,000 employers found that 63% considered skills gaps in the labor market a major barrier to business transformation, making it the most commonly cited obstacle.
Employers also expect the problem to keep moving. The same research estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets will change or become outdated between 2025 and 2030.
Companies are responding in several ways. Eighty-five percent expect to prioritize upskilling their existing workforce, while 70% plan to hire people with new skills.
Those strategies make sense, but neither is instant.
Developing a skill internally takes time. Permanent recruitment takes time too, particularly when the expertise is scarce, technical or newly emerging.
A project does not necessarily wait.
That creates space for a third option: bring in someone who already knows how to do the work.
This is where freelancers become more interesting as a workforce strategy. They allow a business to access a skill without first deciding that the skill needs to become a permanent job.
A skills shortage is not always a headcount shortage
Imagine a company wants to introduce a new analytics system.
It may need a data engineer to prepare the infrastructure, a specialist to connect different systems, someone to build dashboards and another person to train the internal team.
Those are real skills gaps.
They do not necessarily represent four permanent vacancies.
Once the system is running, the volume of work may change dramatically. Some skills may be needed occasionally. Others may become part of an existing employee’s role. One specialist might be essential for only the implementation stage.
Hiring every capability permanently can therefore create the wrong workforce for the problem.
Freelancers make it possible to treat the missing expertise as a project requirement rather than automatically turning it into a job description.
That does not mean permanent employees become less important. It means the boundary between an organization’s employees and the people contributing to its work becomes less rigid.
Research into broader workforce planning is already picking up the same shift. A 2026 Deloitte analysis of hidden workforce capabilities notes that contract, contingent and other nonemployee workers already make up a substantial share of the workforce inside many US corporations, yet they are often left out of formal workforce planning.
That can create an odd situation. A business may depend heavily on people who barely appear in its traditional view of the organization.
The org chart shows employees.
The work itself shows something much more fluid.
Technical skills make the case especially clearly
The fact that 41% of surveyed full-time workers reported relying on freelancers for technical skills deserves particular attention.
Technical capabilities can become valuable faster than companies can build them internally.
Generative AI is a good example. A business may decide it needs model evaluation, AI automation, data annotation, machine learning or agent development long before it has a mature internal career path for those skills.
The original skills research found that executives believed only about one quarter of their employees could effectively work alongside AI systems, while just 19% could proactively use AI to solve problems.
At the same time, marketplace demand for specialized AI capabilities was moving quickly. AI data annotation and labeling was among the fastest-growing skill areas in the dataset, while generative AI modeling commanded a substantial rate premium.
That combination creates a familiar business problem. The capability is needed before the organization has had time to develop enough people who possess it.
Independent specialists can bridge that period.
Flexable’s report on jobs fixing AI-generated work shows another version of the same pattern. As businesses produce more work with AI, they are also hiring specialists to inspect, repair and improve what those systems create.
The skill gap therefore does not always appear before a technology is adopted. Sometimes it appears because the company adopted the technology first and discovered later that it needed deeper expertise around it.
Companies are becoming less interested in where a skill came from
Using freelancers to solve capability gaps fits another change happening in hiring: employers are becoming more willing to evaluate what someone can actually do instead of relying only on conventional credentials.
The same 2025 research found that 81% of surveyed C-suite executives said their organization was taking steps toward skills-based hiring, including reducing degree requirements or increasing the use of skills assessments.
That shift is visible elsewhere.
A 2025 analysis of skills-based recruiting found that companies making the greatest use of skills-based candidate searches were 12% more likely to make what the platform defined as a quality hire. They were also 33% more likely to hire people in the top quarter of recruiter demand.
The logic becomes even stronger when hiring independent professionals.
A business commissioning a six-week machine-learning project is unlikely to care deeply about where the freelancer went to university if the person can demonstrate that they have already solved the same technical problem successfully.
The unit of value becomes the capability.
This helps explain why freelance hiring and skills-based hiring fit naturally together. Both reduce the importance of the traditional package around a worker, such as a particular degree, career path or job title, and place more weight on evidence that the person can perform the work.
For people new to independent work, Flexable’s guide to what freelancing is and how it works explains how that project-based relationship differs from traditional employment.
Speed is one reason companies go outside
Skill development inside a company can be valuable precisely because it creates long-term organizational knowledge.
It can also be slow.
Someone has to identify the future need, design the training, find the right employees, give them time to learn and then give them enough real experience to become good at the skill.
Recruiting externally has its own delays. The more specialized the requirement, the smaller the suitable talent pool may become.
Freelance hiring changes the sequence. A company can search for someone who already possesses the capability and bring that expertise into a particular project without committing to a permanent role.
This is especially useful when demand is uncertain.
A business entering a new market may need local research for two months. A startup may need a security specialist before a product launch. A marketing team may need a video producer for a campaign. A finance department may need a fractional specialist during a transaction.
None of those situations necessarily justifies another permanent employee.
They still require serious expertise.
That is an important reason the growth of freelancing should not be reduced to companies looking for cheaper labor. In many cases, the useful characteristic is not lower cost. It is access to specialization without permanently restructuring the workforce.
Freelancers are starting to sit closer to core operations
Another finding from the research makes the shift harder to dismiss.
Among surveyed C-suite executives, 29% said freelancers were so important to their operations that the business could not get by without all of its freelance support. Another 51% said conducting business would be difficult without freelancers.
Those numbers should be read cautiously because they come from the same research program and survey population as the headline finding.
Still, they suggest that external talent is not always being used for peripheral work.
When a company says it would struggle to operate without freelancers, the relationship has moved well beyond occasional overflow.
The freelance workforce starts becoming part of the operating model.
That is consistent with a broader change identified in Deloitte’s research on skills-based organizations. In that study, 36% of respondents said work was increasingly being performed by people outside the organization who did not have defined internal jobs.
This is a useful way to understand where workforce design may be heading.
A company still needs employees. It may also maintain a network of independent specialists, contractors, agencies, service providers and other external contributors around those employees.
The workforce becomes less like a fixed roster and more like a combination of permanent capability and expertise that can be brought in when needed.
There is a risk in making external talent the answer to every gap
The case for flexible expertise is strong, but there is an obvious limit.
If a company repeatedly hires freelancers for the same capability without developing anyone internally, it may not actually be closing the skill gap.
It may simply be renting around it.
That can work perfectly well when the capability is genuinely occasional. It becomes more problematic when the knowledge is central to how the business operates.
A company that continuously outsources its most important technical judgment can become dependent on people who may not be available when needed. Internal employees may never develop enough knowledge to supervise the work properly. Valuable context can leave when a project ends.
This is why external talent and internal development are better viewed as complementary strategies.
The World Economic Forum’s employer data reflects that mix. Businesses are not responding to skills shortages with one solution. They are simultaneously planning to train existing employees, recruit new people, redeploy workers and adopt new technologies.
Freelancers add another option to that portfolio.
The question for a company is not simply whether a freelancer can do the work. It is whether the skill should remain external, be transferred into the organization or eventually justify a permanent role.
A short-term gap and a permanent capability problem are not the same thing.
External specialists can also transfer knowledge inward
One of the more valuable uses of a freelancer can be temporary expertise that leaves the internal team stronger than it found it.
A company may bring in a specialist to build a system while internal employees work alongside that person. The freelancer solves the immediate problem, but also documents the work, explains decisions and helps employees become capable of maintaining it later.
That model turns outside expertise into a bridge rather than a dependency.
It also expands the definition of what businesses are buying from independent workers.
The deliverable may be a website, model, campaign or analysis, but part of the value can come from exposing the existing team to skills it did not previously have.
That is particularly relevant as companies struggle to keep employee capabilities current. In Flexable’s report on how quickly skilled freelancers are learning new skills, the larger issue is not simply who learns more. It is how quickly expertise now has to move as tools and client demands change.
For businesses, external talent can sometimes provide access to that learning before it has spread through the permanent workforce.
The best freelancers become more than extra hands
The traditional image of freelance hiring is fairly simple: the team has too much work, so it brings in another person.
The 49% finding points to a different model.
The team does not necessarily lack hands.
It lacks a particular capability.
That changes what makes a freelancer valuable.
The strongest independent professionals in this environment are unlikely to compete only on availability or price. They bring knowledge the client does not already possess, can enter a project quickly and require less time to become productive.
That also changes how freelancers should think about positioning themselves.
A profile that says “I am a developer” tells a client less than one showing a clear specialty in a problem the company is currently struggling to solve. The same applies to designers, marketers, analysts and consultants.
For professionals deciding where to find project work, Flexable’s guide to the best freelance websites for finding clients covers the broader marketplace. The more important long-term question, however, is which capability the freelancer can provide that a client cannot easily find inside its existing team.
As skill requirements become more specialized, that distinction matters more.
The future workforce may be built around access, not ownership
For most of the modern corporate era, workforce planning has focused heavily on headcount.
How many employees do we have? Which positions are open? Which roles need to be created? How many people can each manager oversee?
Skill shortages make those questions less complete.
A company might have plenty of employees and still lack the one capability required to move an important project forward. Another company may have access to exactly the expertise it needs without employing that person permanently.
That shifts the planning question from “Who do we employ?” toward “What capabilities can we access?”
The difference is subtle, but it changes how organizations can respond to new technology, uncertain demand and specialist work.
The 2025 Future of Jobs research found that 70% of employers expect to hire people with emerging in-demand skills by 2030. At the same time, companies are training existing employees, redesigning work and using external talent.
Those strategies do not compete with one another. A business can build skills internally while buying temporary access to capabilities it needs immediately.
This is where freelancing becomes more strategically interesting.
It is not a replacement for the permanent workforce.
It is a way of making the boundary around that workforce more flexible.
What the 49% figure actually tells us
The headline statistic traces back to workforce research conducted between April 16 and May 5, 2024 across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
The full survey included 2,500 respondents: 1,250 C-suite executives, 625 full-time salaried employees and 625 freelancers.
The 49% finding applies to the full-time employee group, not to all 2,500 respondents. Those employees reported relying on freelancers to address critical gaps that helped them perform their work. Forty-one percent reported using freelance talent for technical capabilities including web design, data analytics, product management, generative AI and video production.
This is self-reported survey evidence. It does not measure the percentage of every company’s workforce made up of freelancers, nor does it show that freelancers are the best solution to every skills shortage.
It also comes from research produced by a company whose business benefits when organizations hire independent professionals. That commercial context is worth keeping in mind.
The finding becomes more convincing when placed beside independent evidence showing that employers broadly consider skills shortages a major constraint, that job requirements are changing quickly and that work is increasingly being organized around capabilities rather than conventional job boundaries.
The most useful interpretation of the 49% figure is therefore not that freelancers are replacing employees.
It is that a large share of employees already work inside teams where the skills required to get the job done extend beyond the people on the permanent payroll.
For companies facing fast-moving skill requirements, that may increasingly become normal.