Have you hired a freelancer lately? Or done any freelance work? Chances are the answer to at least one of those is yes.With 53 million workers totaling 34% of the labor force, freelancing is here to stay. While the longitudinal data on workforce trends has been inconsistent, anyone with their eyes open in the business world today can see that freelancing is on the rise. And there are a lot of good reasons for VCs, PE firms and companies of all types to celebrate. First, there are the obvious advantages.

• Avoiding overhead costs such as office space, training, health care, or equipment such as computers and phones.
• Being able to scale up or down quickly. In many cases, such as with Graphite, within a few hours you can have highly qualified people working on a time-critical project.
• Avoiding office politics and long queues. In large organizations, allocating talent among different departments can drag on for weeks or months as you fight for your priority.
• Access to a global talent pool and a low-cost distributed work environment.
• Increasing choices from a fast-growing, on-demand workforce.

It suits how people want to work today. Millennials, who already comprise the largest age cohort in today’s workforce, hate the 9-5 work model. Seventy-seven percent of them say that flexible work hours would make them more productive in the workplace. A recent Stanford University study found that people working from home are 13 percent more productive and 50 percent less likely to quit than their in-office colleagues, with a cost savings of $1,900 per employee per year.In the modern “office,” technology gives us the freedom to shape the work environment to fit individual needs and work styles. Being able to work with maximum flexibility is naturally helping both companies and professionals to embrace the workforce of the future.The marketplace is developing solutions to make freelance hiring both more efficient and effective.We’ve written before about the growing field of entrants making Freelance Management Software (FMS), but that’s not the whole of it. Other tools coming online to help get you the right freelancing talent include aggregated data in areas like crowdsourced marketplace ratings and reviews, background checks, and performance metrics.In addition, the aforementioned FMS often includes analytics engines that allow employers to optimize their contract labor strategy and improve decision-making. The competitive advantages of having these insights can become big profit drivers for smart companies ready to jump on the freelancing trend and adopt new technologies to manage them.And yes, that’s cause to celebrate.