00:00 Speaker A
Joining us now for today’s power player segment is Hayden Brown, Upwork CEO. Uh Hayden is has her pulse on all things jobs. Good to see you.
00:08 Hayden Brown
Thanks for having me.
00:09 Speaker A
Couple of weeks removed from your investor day. I know a lot of goes in that stuff. So we are tomorrow bring a closely watched jobs report. Uh the market isn’t expecting much. People are concerned about the pace of jobs in this country. Where do you see it based on your platform which connects jobs to freelancers?
00:26 Hayden Brown
You know, what’s I think a silver lining right now. This is a tough market in terms of jobs. And we’re seeing that it’s been sluggish for many quarters now. We focus on the contingent and flexible part of the economy, which is a $1.3 trillion market in the US. We put out a monthly hiring report and what we’re actually seeing is signs that with AI, more jobs are being created in the contingent side of the equation, which is great news for workers. So it’s not all lost. There are new opportunities, especially for people with the skills to work with AI tools and technologies and help companies implement this technology.
01:03 Speaker A
The cool thing about your platform is you track a lot of data. You got a lot of things coming into your platform. What do job openings look like week to week? How what what trends have you seen there?
01:11 Hayden Brown
Yeah, I mean we see 60,000 jobs posted a week, 3 million a year, and actually the demand has been growing specifically in AI. This is a powerhouse category for us. $300 million of spend this year alone on an annualized basis. So, the there are places where AI is deve is creating new opportunities and we’re also seeing categories of work that people have said are going to be decimated, like admin assistants or lawyers. Those are also growing on our on our platform. And so I think the headlines are bleak around AI destroying jobs or around just the market overall being tough, but in the contingent economy, we’re seeing a lot of strength. And I think companies are really moving from a more fixed and full-time employment model to something that taps into the flexibility and skills of contract workers.
01:47 Speaker A
Compare today’s job market compared to six months ago. How would you compare it strength strength wise?
01:52 Hayden Brown
You know, I think it’s stabilized. I think we were seeing a lot of declines over the last um eight quarters. and then the last two quarters, it’s kind of flat lined and I it has not improved, to be clear, it’s still sluggish. But I think this past quarter we didn’t see it deteriorating further in the part of the economy that we look at, which is contingent and freelance work.
02:08 Speaker B
What what do you think causes that? Or is causing that?
02:10 Hayden Brown
I think there was a lot of uncertainty kind of in the last in the prior quarters where companies were not sure about how um tariff policies and other things would affect their hiring. They weren’t sure about interest rates and the direction there. So they were holding back and holding back even more cautiously because of the uncertain environment. I think some of that uncertainty has diminished and so they’re being a little bit more comfortable moving forward with certain plans. But again, it’s not an improvement, it’s more that the slope of kind of caution has flattened out and people I think now are moving forward with certain things with more confidence.