The biggest headache that global businesses confront today-not to mention their most considerable cost-is figuring out how to secure talent. To address this problem, many individual managers are quietly circumventing their organizations' standard hiring processes and are turning to digital talent platforms to find skilled help on an as-needed basis. There are now more than 800 digital talent platforms, offering companies the services of millions of highly skilled freelance professionals from around the world. And those freelancers often can get jobs done more quickly and cheaply than full-time workers. The problem is, most of the managers making this move are doing it privately, simply as a tactical expedient for solving discrete problems or getting through a crunch. That's a mistake, say the authors. Companies themselves need to develop an open-talent strategy-a fundamentally new approach to hiring that involves thinking of all talent as part of a global network that they can rely on to meet their needs. In this article, the authors describe the new open-talent landscape and explain how companies can take advantage of it by creating an external talent cloud.

Deloitte Consulting's General Manager Balaji Bondili, head of Pixel, considers how best to grow Deloitte Consulting's use of open (on-demand) talent, as consulting companies and their clients face transformative change in the way client engagements and projects get done. Pixel, started in 2014, helps facilitate open (or on-demand) talent and crowdsourcing for Deloitte Consulting client engagements, to access specific, difficult-to-find expertise, collaborate to develop new products and/or insights, and to design, build, and test new digital assets. Bondili has found some avid users-and evangelists-of Pixel's services among Deloitte Consulting's principals, however uptake across the broader organization has been slow, and in some pockets has met with deep resistance.