Vinod Kartha, VP, Strategic Initiatives at UST

Vinod is the ideal leader and ideal champion for Open Talent. Vinod leads strategic initiatives at UST, a global digital transformation consultancy (UST is like that quiet kid that doesn’t need to insert themselves into every convo yet is the valedictorian, sports star, and just a great human). Vino

Matthew MottolaFebruary 21, 20234 min read

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Vinod Kartha
VP, Strategic Initiatives

Leaders,

Vinod is the ideal leader and ideal champion for Enterprise Freelance Adoption. Vinod leads strategic initiatives at UST , a global digital transformation consultancy.

More than just helping UST hire freelancers, Vinod is building a Center of Excellence to:

Enable UST to compliantly hire freelancers across the organization
Educate UST leaders to strategically adopt freelancers in ways that move their business lines forward rather than just being another talent acquisition vendor
Scale the adoption of freelancers from one single marketplace, to multiple marketplaces so that they can access the full 435 million freelancers globally.

Our favorite quotes:

What is Open Talent?

“Open talent is basically fluid and elastic talent that you can access in a matter of days. You have a problem, you need the expert for short duration, solve the problem and bow out. They’re like a SWAT team for me.”

Why Open Talent?

“what happened in the last three years in the market, it forced us to be in the talent business, to provide the best talent to global 1000 firms for their business and digital transformation journey”
“we realized that more and more people are moving to that workforce [independent workforce]. And then when we looked at the pool there, it’s like, when people talk about talent shortage, open talent was screaming what shortage? So that’s when we realized that there’s really not a talent shortage, but it’s more of a talent shift. More and more people want to be independent.”

What do the next 5 years look like?

“if you look at the positive impacts of globalization, I think we’re gonna see a significant impact with talent mobilization, that the the open talent, and the freelance economy is enabling because now like earlier, you had access to technology and processes and frameworks, now you have access to talent, and we are a human economy. So the fact that you now don’t have any cultural barriers, any technology barriers, any regional barriers, any political barriers, to be able to tap the best talent anywhere at your fingertips, the amount of innovation that that can lead to is profound, right?

What’s in the way?

“I can very confidently say that not one person told me that we should not do this. Everyone said we absolutely need to do this. But how do we address these conditions in which we operate. We are a company based in the US, we have operations in India, we have to respect the laws of the land, and how do you operate within that framework? So what ends up happening most of the time is in any kind of change like this, we expect them to go figure it out. But it’s a collective figuring out that we need to do and if we as the change agents, we take that first step and do our homework. We ask others around because we don’t have to solve it ourselves. I mean, other companies have been using Freelancers for ages, right? If you talk to some of them, you will get insights on how this can be solved. And you take a nearly full baked solution to the stakeholders and say, ‘This is how we can do it’. Then what happens is they see that you have solved for their concerns. So if you can do that, then the solution becomes easy.”
“there is enough technology and process innovation that has happened and companies world over have solved for a lot of these by virtue of insurance, by virtue of employee agreements, etc. But they don’t have to be as restrictive because a lot of the employee agreements that we see are based on, I mean, I’m not saying they are unreal, but I’m saying it’s based on problems with the past.”

fellow experts

Robert Smith, Founder & CEO at Dazzle

Taylor Crane, Founder at Fractional Jobs

Melissa Valentine, Associate Professor at Stanford & Author of Flash Teams

Glenn Laumeister, CEO at AllWork

Emre Ertan, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Cenoa

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Vinod Kartha, VP, Strategic Initiatives at UST