How businesses can solve the quality freelance problem

Companies spend vast amounts of time and considerable resources in attempting to locate the best person for the job, only to be met with frequent disappointment and less-than-stellar results. A platform called Toptal aims to overcome those challenges by connecting carefully-screened freelance tech workers and engineers with clients who are struggling to find the perfect candidate.

The problem isn’t so much the quantity as it is quality. While numerous reports have indicated that qualified workers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (“STEM”) fields are not in short supply, there are varying degrees of competency and expertise within the respective fields, making the hiring of employees for short or long-term projects daunting at best, and overwhelming at worst. A 2012 Microsoft study stated that the U.S. needed “more engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, healthcare professionals, STEM teachers and other highly skilled workers.” This alarm has been echoed at high business levels, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg helping to organize a $50 million fund in 2013 that lobbied for legislation to included steep increases in the number of "STEM" visas, the coveted H1-B that enables foreign workers to stay and work in the U.S.

As University of California economist Gordon Hanson wrote in a 2011 study, “(i)mmigrants are far more likely than natives to study science and engineering and more likely to produce innovations in the form of patents.” Foreign workers constitute a large majority of under-30 tech workers.

Toptal allows tech companies to connect with qualified workers all over the world. The company, headquartered in Palo Alto, has an elite network of curated engineers around that world that it can contract to companies on-demand. They’ve completed a range of international projects in a wide variety of locales, including Japan, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, and the United States. On their website, they state they’re “generally able to relocate Toptal engineers to these locations in less than a week and can always connect you with our developers working remotely from anywhere in the world.”

Language is one of the key factors in determining not only opportunity, but suitability to a project. Lack of proficiency in English can make some workers “ineligible for higher paying managerial roles,” as Techcrunch’s Gregory Ferenstein wrote in 2013. Toptal ensure a careful curation of qualified candidates for skills not solely in engineering, design, and related fields, but English language fluency as well. As Toptal co-founder and CEO Taso Du Val explains, “We screen at a very rigorous, deep level, the talent that comes into our system, where others don't. We're really a curated network of engineering talent.”

That network is reflected in their active social media presence, as well as their blog and their numerous top-flight testimonials and reviews from a variety of esteemed figures in the tech and developer worlds. If the signs pointing to a new dot-com bubble are any indication, engineering skills may be more in demand than ever.

As Robert D. Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, stated in Washington Monthly in March 2014, “(t)he goal of economic policy should be a ‘larger pie’ via increased productivity, innovation and competitiveness.” Toptal’s watchful candidates selection and mindful curation allows for that increased productivity to flourish with ease and efficiency, an approach that the company’s CEO says makes a big difference to clients. “Our acceptance rate is only 3 percent. Consider that we get tens of thousands of applications, “ Du Val says. “We are trying to be the McKinsey for engineering.”

Michael S. Teitelbaum, author and a senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, has attempted to debunk what he sees as the myth around the United States’ widely-reported need for qualified tech workers. He wrote in a Huffington Post column in June 2014 that “(s)ome may not really believe there are shortages, but know that such alarming assertions have a long history of success in convincing the federal government to support increased Federal funding, tax benefits, or visas for foreign workers in these fields.” He states that “(n)o one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher.”

What the many reports on the issue have failed to address is the proper match of talent with company and project, a notion that takes into account a more macro (if not altogether refreshing) idea of emphasizing quality over quantity. Du Val emphasizes that his company screens candidates “at a really high calibre. We look for both hard and soft skills by having in-person interviews with every person who comes into our platform. When we do that, you have engineers screening other engineers, so they have that understanding of not only technical aspects, but the tangential qualities that make for a great engineer.”

He says a key to Toptal’s success has been their adaptation of Google-like methodologies in screening talent, and discerning how that process might work best within the freelance/tech-hire world, all while developing what he calls “a feel for who you are, for every single person in our network.”

It’s that combination of high quality experience and the personal touch that makes Toptal a force to be reckoned with, in Silicon Valley, in the tech world, and far beyond.