The USA Herald reports that following the acquisition of LinkedIn’s Github platform and professional social network, Microsoft is now seeking a major new acquisition by acquiring UpWork, the Mountain View-based platform for recruiting freelance Internet workers that connects freelancers to customers in more than 180 countries.
Upwork, formerly known as Elance-oDesk, has approximately 12 million freelancers and 5 million registered customers. CEO is the Frenchman Stephane Kasriel. This platform has already partnered with the Redmond company for their Microsoft 365 Freelance Toolkit solution, which is aimed at businesses and helps them launch, run and manage large or small programs with a team of freelancers via Microsoft 365.
In particular, the Microsoft 365 Freelancer Toolkit is designed to help organizations manage freelancers who need access to certain Microsoft Office tools for a limited period of time.
According to Herald, the average hiring time over a platform like LinkedIn would be an average of 30 days, while the average hiring time over Upwork would be less than one day, as Upwork allows freelancers to be granularly targeted by their specific skills instead of performing painful (and often inaccurate) reference checks. In addition, the recruiter can get a very accurate overview of the level of skills of freelancers by reviewing the relevant comments from previous customers.
Microsoft 365 Freelance Toolkit completed the Redmond company’s LinkedIn platform offering, which already offers an UpWork-like service called ProFinder. This acquisition, if made, could allow LinkedIn to focus on hiring permanent staff, while the UpWork platform would focus more on recruiting and managing freelancers.
Neither Microsoft nor Upwork have yet commented on the rumor.