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Every company is now a tech company.
If you don’t want to take our word for it, that’s fine: Take it from the Wall Street Journal.
This is where the last two decades of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 have been leading, where technology is ubiquitous at every level of every business.
As a customer, you may interact with a company on social media accounts, login to a customer portal or buy a product through their website or on ecommerce platforms.
But the impact of technology on companies is even more profound, because the need to innovate is no longer a nice to have.
It’s now a necessity for survival — as Peter Drucker famously put it, companies must “innovate or die.”
Consider consumer-focused companies, such as the CPG, retail and auto industries, which must reiterate old products and create new ones while facing exponentially increasing competition and regulations.
It’s no wonder that the consumer sector is leading the charge to hire knowledge workers driving innovation, with 35% of those businesses making Braintrust’s inaugural Knowledge Work Demand Index.
That need to innovate is true across industries, including tech and health care, because competition is rapidly increasing.
In 1965, corporations in the S&P 500 Index stayed for an average of 33 years — by 1990, their time on that list lasted 20 years. The top companies of today? By 2026, S&P 500 longevity is only expected to average around 14 years.
At that churn rate, half of today’s S&P 500 firms will be replaced in a decade.
So companies that can’t innovate will become obsolete — whether they’re based in New York City, Denver, San Francisco or Mumbai, Lagos, London, Buenos Aires.
And regardless of geography, the greatest resource for the companies that survive will not be the tech that’s built, but the talent who build it.
Traditionally, companies face three options when hiring top tech talent — and none are ideal.
The global economy has made tech essential everywhere.
But while every company now has tech needs, not everybody has access to nearby talent that can meet those needs.
Companies historically have looked to hire full-time employees based locally in an office. But that approach necessarily restricted companies to a small geographic area, and the limited talent pool residing within it.
Now, many companies are trying to adapt, understanding that looking further afield allows greater access to talent.
It’s clear that the ones who succeed will win.
However, those who use the typical talent acquisition methods are doomed to fail due to some serious drawbacks with each method.
Option One: Engage a big consultant firm.
Hoping to find top talent, some enterprises resort to the big name consulting firms, places like McKinsey & Company, Deloitte or PwC.
That may seem like a good choice — talented people work for those firms!
However, those firms are, by design, incentivized to work against the interests of the companies that they do business with.
Large consulting firms profit from the spread between how much they charge the client and how much they pay their Talent.
The more they can charge their clients while paying their talent less, the more they make.
Their business model is built on warehousing high-quality talent, then imposing a hefty markup on their clients, which allows them to pay for expensive overhead and enrich those at the top, leaving those actually producing their value behind.
Plus, there is next-to-no network transparency around their services, making it difficult for both clients to know the true quality or market value of the services they pay for.
Why did the model become popular? There historically have been few alternatives for securing top talent on a project basis.
Consulting firms ultimately hurt companies, who are held hostage to the exorbitant prices of these talent network giants.
Option Two: Source from a traditional staffing firm.
The outlook isn’t better for companies trying to find great Talent through recruiting firms.
The quality is questionable. There is a significant markup, in this case through the recruiter’s take. Even worse, the Talent may not stay for long — leaving the company holding the bag for the cost of having secured them.
As the minds at Hack Upstate in New York note, the biggest expense in this hiring process almost always ends up being recruiter fees that often range between 20% to 25% the talent’s first year salary.
With the average starting tech salaries surging to $139,000 for data scientists and $146,000 for software engineers, that cost could easily surpass $30,000.
That hefty upfront price can be even more costly when considering the average tech worker stays less than three years.
Option Three: Find Talent through your own networks.
Companies can also work to hire individuals through grassroots outreach or referrals.
However, the process is slow. There is no standardized vetting or screening process. Plus, it’s often difficult for larger enterprises to get individual contractors through their onboarding process, where HR and procurement hurdles abound.
Those can be tremendous hurdles, when considering that the average enterprise is actively hiring for 66 knowledge worker roles, according to Braintrust’s Knowledge Work Demand Index.
With half of all roles taking at least 30 days to hire, that’s the equivalent of three years of hiring talent that needs to be hired now.
Decentralization presents a new talent network solution.
Web 3.0 technologies enable a new model that solves for the issues found using traditional methods for finding talent.
Companies using Braintrust have access to a single source for consistent, top global talent, who are attracted to the network because it is a model that serves them better.
Instead of taking six months to find that talent, clients are matched with top candidates within 48 hours, allowing companies to quickly scale to meet their changing market needs.
That talent is globally curated, vetted, and pre-screened by other industry peers — who are motivated to refer great talent to the network because they earn BTRST tokens to do so.
That means no more sifting through hundreds of unqualified profiles or resumes.
And unlike centralized talent networks, clients and talent have full network transparency. Ratings, reviews and work history are stored securely on the Ethereum blockchain, which is permissionless (meaning everyone with an internet connection can access it) and immutable (meaning it cannot be changed).
Clients pay just 10% in fees — much less than the 60% to 70% markups levied by other options — and those fees are directly reinvested into the network, rather than going to paying back investors or shareholders.
What Braintrust enables
Using its decentralized model, Braintrust is able to help companies scale quickly to meet their most pressing challenges.
That doesn’t just mean saving time. It can also mean opening the door to huge new market opportunities — as Nestlé did when it used Braintrust to onboard six freelancers in 48 hours rather than the typical four months, while also saving $310,000 in traditional agency fees.
The first decentralized talent network helps top enterprises access vetted Talent in a short time period, allowing their budgets to go further — as 150-year-old insurance company Pacific Life did, tripling its output while adding 13 freelancers to accelerate innovation.
That’s why 100 of the Fortune 1000 enterprises now use Braintrust, from Porsche and Intel to IBM and Black + Decker.
How to get involved
Every company is a tech company now, and that means competition is fierce for highly talented knowledge workers — the software engineers, product designers, mobile developers and other individuals driving innovation.
Braintrust makes it cheaper and easier to access that Talent, while offering a truly decentralized model that is controlled by those who build the network.
Get started by hiring Talent on Braintrust today.
