Online work platform Elance has released its Global Online Employment Report, which revealed that hiring by businesses on its platform has grown 51 percent since last year with more than 800,000 businesses spending over $830 million on the platform to date.
This growth, the company said, demonstrates the increased adoption of hiring high-skilled freelance talent online, a market estimated to reach $5 billion by 2015.
In June 2013, there were 96 percent more Filipino freelancers making a living out of working online on Elance compared to the same month last year.
The growth in earning freelancers comes as a result of a 90 percent increase in the number of jobs awarded to Filipino freelancers on Elance in Q2 2013 compared to the same quarter last year.
Following Elance?s announcement of launching local presence in the Philippines in April this year, the company has seen a large number of new Filipino talents coming to its platform. More than 31,000 Filipinos signed up to work as freelancers on Elance in Q2 2013.
?In a country with an unemployment rate of about 7.5 percent, Elance is offering tremendous job opportunities for Filipinos. Philippines remains one of the biggest markets for freelancers with businesses all over the world now hiring talented Filipino freelancers,? said Ronald Cirujano, country manager of Elance Philippines.
Most of the hired freelancers trade their talents in the administrative support and design and multimedia categories, offering skills such as data entry, research, graphic design and web design. The highest growth of new freelancers was seen in the sales and marketing category with 153 percent year-over-year.
Filipino freelancers were mostly hired by businesses in the US and Australia, followed by Canadian, British and Dutch businesses.
In the first half of the year, Elance experienced robust growth globally: 170,000 new businesses joined and the total number of freelancers grew by over half a million, leading to a total of 2.8 million freelancers.
With more than $130 million in earnings made by Elance freelancers already this year, Elance has expanded operations to meet this growth curve.
The company announced in April that it has hired Cirujano as its country manager to handle its expansion activities in Philippines from the company?s office in Manila. In addition, Elance has now announced the hiring of country managers for Nordic countries, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
