Talent Acquisition in the Gig Economy

Sanjeevani: Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI-powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement.

Sanjeevani: It's genuinely thrilling to see how fast the workforce landscape is evolving. Traditional employment methods are being challenged and redefined by the rise of the gig economy. A World Bank report found the gig economy accounts for up to 12% of the global labor market, much higher than previously estimated, and even more promising for women and youth in developing countries. Given its scope, many people are opting for freelancing, contract work, and temporary positions, and businesses are being compelled to rethink how they attract and retain talent. This brings us to yet another episode, I'm your host Sanjeevani Saikia, and today we'll discuss talent acquisition in the rise of the gig economy. Joining us is Lavanya Nandakumar, Vice President and Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Prodapt. Let's begin our conversation with her. Hi Lavanya, thank you so much for being here with us today. Before we dive into today's topic, could you share your professional journey so far?

Lavanya Nandakumar: Hi Sanjeevani, great to connect with you, and thank you so much for the opportunity, I truly value being part of the Vantage HR circle. I've been in the talent acquisition space for the last 25 years, in the IT services industry, predominantly in talent acquisition. I spent close to two decades at Cognizant before joining Prodapt, and before that I worked with organizations like GRO and SRA Systems, across IT solutions and BPO. So all 25 years have been in and around the IT industry.

Sanjeevani: Thanks for sharing that. With your permission, I'd like to begin today's conversation. The gig economy has undeniably transformed how companies approach hiring, with more people choosing flexible work arrangements, and traditional talent acquisition strategies that worked for decades may no longer be as effective. How has the rise of the gig economy reshaped traditional talent acquisition strategies?

Lavanya Nandakumar: Great question, and the timing is right to ask it. The pandemic triggered heavy growth in certain industries, e-commerce, and the gig economy along with it. Before I go further, let me clarify what we mean by "gig economy": freelancers, people spending part-time hours on work, and people working independently, all of that constitutes it. Right now, over 15 million workers are already part of the gig workforce, and it's expected to grow to represent 45 to 50 billion dollars by 2030, roughly 5% of India's total working population choosing independent or flexible work, which is a huge number. In revenue terms, the gig economy is already worth $455 billion, growing at around 17% CAGR, this isn't a marginal, informal segment anymore. Even five years ago, we called this the "unorganized sector," thinking mostly of low-skilled personal services, ride-hailing, home cleaning, personal care. But today, close to 42% of the gig workforce is skilled, IT services, design, content writing, pharma, oil and gas, and that's expected to keep growing significantly, not over a decade, but within the next three to four years.

Given that context, this has changed recruitment substantially. Today, when clients ask us about timelines, we can no longer confidently say "this will take 60 or 90 days" for certain skills, there's a large available workforce ready the next working day for a lot of generic, legacy skill categories, staffing companies already have people on the bench, ready to be deployed. That's made sourcing and reaching talent somewhat easier in some ways. At the same time, this is a contingent workforce, which often costs more than a regular full-time employee, and talent acquisition has to adapt to that reality. I don't think emerging technologies, AI, cybersecurity, multi-cloud, are going to be sustained purely by full-time employees for long, a lot of that work is going to come from this contingent workforce, and we're no longer talking about an unorganized sector.

Sanjeevani: Integrating gig workers offers real benefits, but also unique challenges, they often work remotely, keep different schedules, and may be less integrated into company culture. What are the key challenges organizations face integrating gig workers, and how can they be overcome?

Lavanya Nandakumar: We do have platforms and ERPs designed specifically for contingent workforce management, so that part exists. But the real challenges: first, commitment levels from the workforce side will naturally be lower. If someone's booked for four hours a day, the clock stops at four hours, unlike a full-time model where you're often expected to extend your hours. That's not a flaw, it's just the nature of the arrangement, you're leveraging exactly the time they've committed to. But it also means morale can run low, because when your long-term dedication and effort aren't going to be measured, recognized, and rewarded through promotion or a raise the way a full-time employee's would be, that changes the psychological relationship. It's also often a disconnected, isolated workforce, remote, without the informal peer group most employees have beyond just work, which means they're more independently minded, mentally, too. So engagement models genuinely need to be designed specifically for this population, real interfaces between HR and contingent talent, and treating them on par with full-time employees, not just in benefits, but in how you actually care for them, healthcare, career growth. The mindset shift needed across talent acquisition is recognizing that regardless of employment type, these are people creating real impact on your revenue and growth, and the benefits conversation needs to extend to them too. I think the labor code the government is working on needs to formalize protections for this workforce as well.

Sanjeevani: You've mentioned skills will be central to gig-economy hiring. The qualities that make a great gig worker can differ quite a bit from what full-time roles require, full-time employment benefits from deep cultural integration and long-term commitment, while gig workers need to be more adaptable and self-motivated. How does talent acquisition differ when recruiting gig workers versus full-time employees, and what skills are particularly valued?

Lavanya Nandakumar: Right now, we have very limited platforms exclusively built for hiring skilled gig workers, we do have some, but the space needs to grow significantly, there's a lot of room the industry hasn't leveraged yet to bring this talent together effectively. If you search any platform today for part-time or freelance skilled workers, you won't get particularly meaningful results, we need far more intentional focus on reaching this population inclusively. Talent acquisition plays a big role starting at the job description stage, we should be normalizing language that says we're open to full-time, part-time, freelance, and remote talent, this needs to become standard, not something used only as a "plan B" when full-time hiring falls short. Second, compensation: today, almost every organization's compensation grid is built for full-time employees, so TA and HR teams genuinely need to build out real benefit structures and salary ranges for this workforce, that infrastructure mostly doesn't exist yet. Third, regulation and protection: gig workers still work within your organization day to day, so how do you protect them, not just physically, but from things like online harassment or other risks, since most work remotely. Talent acquisition needs to think this through from the job description stage all the way through referrals and onboarding, essentially replicating everything already done for full-time employees, for contingent workers too.

Sanjeevani: What do you think companies are doing to protect gig workers today, is it enough, and what more should they be doing?

Lavanya Nandakumar: This is no longer theoretical, it's very practical now. Given that 42% of today's roughly 15 million-strong contingent workforce is already skilled, if I decided to become a gig worker tomorrow, I'd know exactly where to register and who to reach out to, that access isn't the problem. What I think is genuinely missing is bringing this workforce into the organization's actual talent accounting, how you engage with them, track them, and count them as part of your real workforce. Today, they get hired, their contracts get renewed as needed, but you rarely actually meet them beyond issuing an employee code, ID card, and login credentials, there's very little real engagement. We need to regulate this more deliberately, an HR function that seriously engages with contract talent, not necessarily converting them to full-time, but treating them as real contributors to revenue, human beings who deserve respect. Just as HR regularly checks in with project managers or team leads on the floor, the same needs to happen with contingent workers, are they finding it easy to collaborate, is their performance improving, is there a mismatch between what they were hired for and what they're actually delivering? That gap is real and largely unaddressed today.

Sanjeevani: What role does technology play in recruiting and managing gig workers, and what innovative tools or platforms are being used today?

Lavanya Nandakumar: For low- and medium-skilled gig work, especially ride-hailing and personal services, aggregation is already mature, those platforms rate, protect, and pay workers transparently, everyone listening already knows how they work. But in the high-skilled environment, that aggregation hasn't happened yet. We have some technology here, but nowhere near enough to reach this audience efficiently, everything today is mixed together, job seekers and gig-seekers in the same undifferentiated space, with no clear signal about whether a listing is for contingent or full-time work. We need much more organized tools, chatbots and AI that can genuinely engage gig workers with queries and clarifications, and platforms that can label and map available talent by type, full-time, part-time, white-collar, blue-collar, skill level. If I'm a white-collar contingent HR professional, for instance, there's no consistent way for me to be labeled as "available as a freelancer" across platforms today, even though building that labeling system is technically straightforward, you could survey the existing subscriber base directly. Background verification tools also need real work here, when I send someone for BGV today, the vendor's tools should be able to identify and validate that this person has been freelancing across multiple companies for the last ten years. There's real room for technology to improve this whole space.

Sanjeevani: Ensuring a positive experience matters for engagement and retention even in temporary roles. How can companies create a genuinely positive experience for gig workers throughout the engagement and beyond?

Lavanya Nandakumar: Organizations need to start feeding this population into the same ERPs, performance tools, and HR engagement systems used for everyone else. Contingent workers shouldn't just be backend paperwork, contract renewals, extensions, terminations, they should show up in your actual skill matrix: this person was a contingent Salesforce specialist, that person worked in ServiceNow, here's how effective they were during their tenure. We simply don't maintain that kind of database today, we don't actually know who the top talent is within this 15-million-plus workforce that's projected to keep growing over the next six to seven years. There's very little open, honest conversation or regulation around this yet, even though the research clearly points toward this being the direction things are heading, loyalty, commitment, pride, and team collaboration are all going to be reconsidered by organizations as a result. Every forum talks about AI and digital transformation, every DEI conversation should include the gig workforce too, this is no longer deniable. It started in blue-collar work, but it's already moving into white-collar roles. Practically, this means more HR policy, more tooling, and managing gig worker identity and history the same way we do for full-time employees, why not extend health insurance for their engagement period, why not offer training and certification? Nobody works 35 years at a single company anymore anyway, so the same growth principles, the right opportunities, the right certifications, the right mentors, apply here too.

Sanjeevani: Looking ahead, what trends do you foresee in gig-economy talent acquisition over the next five years, and how should organizations prepare to stay competitive?

Lavanya Nandakumar: Compensation needs to become genuinely competitive and skill-based rather than tied to employment type. That skill-based approach is going to dominate over the next five years, which means compensation strategy has to shift entirely, away from "B.Tech or M.Tech with six years of experience falls into this pay band," toward "this person has demonstrated these specific skills, delivered for these clients, in these environments," with pay tied directly to validated skill and experience, often per hour or per day. Offer letters and benefit structures for this population need real depth too, since regular employees have ongoing access to HR to resolve questions, we need an equivalent interface built for gig talent. From a TA perspective, that starts with labeling people by skill rather than by employment category. Background verification will also need to change significantly, do you verify education and full employment history the same way for someone who's worked across a dozen employers and geographies in a single year? BGV vendors have real work to do here, in terms of how they verify and report on skilled gig workers. Getting this labeling and verification infrastructure right saves real cost and time. Travel, leave management, and time off matter too, even in contingent arrangements, giving people time off matters, and today, a lot of this workforce is treated as ineligible for insurance, travel support, or holidays entirely, that needs to change if we're moving toward a genuinely skill-based workforce. Research also shows Millennials and Gen Z lean toward gig-style work over locking into a single employer long-term, that's not a fringe preference anymore. We're talking about at least 5% of the total working population today, expected to exceed 10% within the next decade, that's enormous. Medium-skill work is expected to fade over time, but low-skill and high-skill segments will keep growing, so the real task is building the working model, technology, process, regulation, and data, to properly leverage a workforce that's already generating enormous revenue for the economy, and organizations and aggregators need to talk about this openly and build it together.

Sanjeevani: You've answered all our questions so clearly, I'm sure our listeners will walk away with a completely new perspective on gig workers and how talent acquisition is evolving in this space. We've reached the end of today's episode, any final message for our listeners, and how can people reach out to you afterward?

Lavanya Nandakumar: My message, for everyone listening, not just gig workers themselves: we need to adapt quickly. There's a huge amount of technology transformation and disruption happening, everyone knows about AI, and there's a very different generation, an "Alpha generation," coming into the workforce too. Adoption, adoption, adoption, that's the only way forward, and we need to let go of the stigma around some of the traditional workplace norms we've held onto for the last three decades. The economy needs to grow, and that means moving quickly into these newer models, whatever level you're at, embrace and enable it. To reach me, I'm very active on LinkedIn, Lavanya Nandakumar, I work at Prodapt managing global talent acquisition. I wish everyone listening the very best, let's all put our best foot forward and embrace this generation and this new working model.

Sanjeevani: Thank you so much for joining us today, Lavanya, your insights were amazing.

Lavanya Nandakumar: Thank you, Sanjeevani, I truly appreciate the way you let me think through and validate my own thoughts here, it's been a great opportunity, all the best to you.