Platform employment is a flexible form of employment in which professionals use online platforms to find clients, communicate with them and complete tasks or sell products. This is how, for example, taxi drivers, couriers, psychologists, tutors, copywriters, and designers work.
Online platforms are where supply and demand converge. Professionals use them to find work; customers – to quickly find performers. Online platforms, in turn, provide the infrastructure for this: a system for searching orders and specialists, payment and feedback mechanisms. For this, they usually take a commission from each order.
An example of a platform used to hire specialists is YouDo. The platform is used by 3.5 million professionals. As Skillbox Media was told by the company’s press service, the most in-demand specialists in 2023 were builders, couriers and virtual assistants.
Here’s how hiring through the YouDo platform works. The customer views the profiles of performers, selects the one he likes, negotiates a price with him and transfers money to the platform. The customer can also post a task and select a performer from among those who responded to it. In any case, the money first goes to the platform; they are received by the contractor only after he has provided the service and the customer confirms this.
There are different online platforms in Russia: highly specialized ones like the online psychotherapy service “Yasno” and those where you can find specialists from different fields, like “Profi.ru”. The largest Russian companies involved in the platform economy include Yandex, Avito, Ozon, Wildberries.
Over the past ten years, platform employment has become several times more popular. According to 2020 data from the International Labor Organization, there were over 611 digital platforms in the Group of Twenty (G20) countries – five times more than a decade earlier.
According to experts from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research of Human Potential at the Higher School of Economics, in Russia the number of people employed in the platform economy is at the level of 15.5 million people. This is almost 20% of the total number of people of working age, based on Rosstat data. At the same time, this is the main type of employment for only 1.7 million people; the rest resort to it sporadically or to earn additional income.
