Meet the Indian startup offering freelancing with a surprise twist

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If you wanted to hire someone for a permanent position, you could post on LinkedIn or another job searching platform. If your aim is to build a team for a short-term project, though, it might make more sense to look for people with specific skills. Flexing It takes that concept and runs with it. It’s an online marketplace that concentrates on getting freelancers and consultants hired based on their skills – like FindYahan but with more of a long-term project focus.

According to Flexing It founder, CEO, and consultant Chandrika Pasricha, the startup came from a change in mindset. “When we started, freelancing was associated with tech or creative roles,” she tells Tech in Asia. The model she had in mind for the website, though, expanded that thinking to include candidates for fields like analytics, management, or finance – fields she didn’t see covered in depth on existing freelance websites like Freelance or Elance.

The idea came to her as she was working as a consultant for organizations including McKinsey & Co. With 15 years of consulting between the US and India behind her, she quit to become a freelancer.

“I quit because after a decade of flying around the world, I was tired,” she says, laughing. She enjoyed being able to pick her own clients, topics, and hours, and thought others might as well. So, in October 2012, she piloted Flexing It to see if she could get freelancers with experience to sign up for the platform and succeed.

Freelancing is growing in popularity.

When that proved successful, she and her staff continued to build the expand the site. Today, she says, the average project-seeker on her site has an average of seven or eight years experience in his or her respective industry.

She wasn’t the only one to think so – freelancing is growing in popularity. A 2015 research study by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) report found that 34 percent of the US workforce is freelance, working independently, moonlighting, or working in another temporary setting. Meanwhile, on the freelancing website Upwork, 80 percent of the site’s users are willing to work outside their primary job for additional income, and 60 percent of the sites’ freelancers provide at least half their household income.

Reports like those, she says, might be the reason business picked up over the past six months to a year. Flexing It was bootstrapped until late last year, when it raised about half a million in angel funding. Chandrika says the round, in turn, helped the startup expand further in India and into Singapore and grow their staff from five people to around 20.

Flex it real good

Chandrika Pasricha, founder and CEO of Flexing It

Job seekers can currently access Flexing It for free. Their profiles are curated and verified (running information through past employers, etc.) to make sure that their skills and work experience is accurate. Based on the information, Flexing It recommends positions open in the applicant’s preferred location that fit his or her profile.

Companies using the portal to gain employees are also verified. They may choose to pay for one of two plans. The MyFlex Prepaid plan costs US$100 per post, with packages in the range of US$250-750. The MyFlex Postpaid plan costs US$300 per post, with packages in the range of US$250-2,250. The SuperFlex plan includes an account manager who can help facilitate interaction between consultants and clients.

For an extra fee, companies may run additional background verification on employees, as resume and CV fraud is a common problem in India.

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