Nearly 73 million Americans now work independently, according to MBO’s 2025 State of Independence report. And the number of full-time independents has held steady at 27.6 million, even as the traditional job market stayed strong. This isn't a fringe trend. It's a fundamental shift in how work gets done, and enterprises are leaning on this talent more than ever.
But the infrastructure built to manage independent talent hasn't quite kept pace with how fast the workforce itself is changing. Many organizations find it hard to answer basic questions about their own independent talent population. How many independent professionals are currently engaged? How are they being sourced and managed? Are classifications being applied consistently across the business?
If those questions feel harder to answer than they should, you're not alone. Many enterprises are somewhere between "we have real gaps" and "we're not sure what we don't know." Getting clearer visibility is often the first step toward building a stronger, more confident independent talent program.
What's Driving the Gap
Four forces are converging to make this harder, not easier:
Siloed systems. Independent professionals are often onboarded and managed through several disconnected platforms across Talent Acquisition, Procurement, and individual business units.
No single owner. Classification, compliance, payments, and sourcing tend to be spread across HR, Legal, Finance, and Procurement, which makes it tough for any one team to see the whole picture.
AI is accelerating demand. The shift toward project-based, specialized work is moving faster than the legacy systems most enterprises built for full-time employment.
Risk builds gradually. Misclassification, regulatory exposure, and untracked spend will grow the longer they go unaddressed, even when no one intends for that to happen.
The talent itself has changed too. These aren't gig workers picking up odd jobs. They're experienced consultants, technologists, strategists, and domain experts who command premium rates because they deliver premium results. 5.6 million independents now earn over $100K annually, a 19% increase in a single year. Nearly three-quarters use AI tools, saving an average of nine hours a week. And the pipeline is also getting younger, with Gen Z now making up 28% of independents, up from 19% just two years ago.
Talent Acquisition and Procurement are both working through this from different angles, and it's worth recognizing that. TA wants to deliver specialized talent faster, in a market where the best professionals work for themselves. Procurement wants to manage cost, mitigate risk, and maintain compliance across an increasingly complex global workforce. In many ways, both teams are solving the same underlying challenge: getting better visibility into who's doing the work.
Seven Challenges Standing in the Way
1. The Workforce Visibility Gap
Independent talent enters organizations through multiple pathways that often bypass formal systems entirely: accounts payable, SOW engagements buried inside consulting contracts, direct hiring by business unit leaders, or subcontracted labor through staffing agencies. The result is fragmented data and fragmented control. You can't negotiate rates, identify redundancies, or re-engage proven talent if you don't have a centralized record of who's actually working for you.
2. Compliance That Can't Keep Pace
Many organizations treat compliance as a one-time checkbox: classify the worker, collect documentation, and move on. But roles evolve, regulations change, and documentation isn't the same as validation. Without ongoing review, misclassification exposure builds quietly. In organizations without structured compliance programs, misclassification rates run close to 50%. At scale, that means tax liabilities, penalties, and retroactive obligations.
3. The Talent Access Gap
69% of global employers report difficulty filling roles, and more than half can't find the right full-time talent. The skills enterprises need most, including AI, cybersecurity, cloud architecture, and regulatory expertise, are exactly the skills concentrated in the independent workforce. Yet most organizations have no strategic approach to reaching it, so every search starts from scratch, and heavy reliance on staffing intermediaries can raise costs by 30-70%.
4. Payment and Engagement Friction
Top independent talent is evaluating your organization just as much as you're evaluating them. 86% of full-time independents say they're happier working on their own, which puts them firmly in the driver's seat when it comes to choosing who they work with. What they're looking for is pretty straightforward: feeling valued, being paid fairly, and getting paid quickly. Slow payment terms, heavy onboarding paperwork, and no plan for staying in touch between projects can all make it harder to hold onto great talent.
5. Policy Without Consistent Enforcement
Nearly every large enterprise has a documented policy for engaging independent talent. Consistent adoption across the business is a different story. Under delivery pressure, hiring managers sometimes engage contractors directly. Smaller contracts may bypass procurement. Invoices get processed outside the standard workflow. When the governed path isn't also the easiest path, teams tend to find another way to get work done, and it's worth noting that 36% of traditional employees now have an independent side gig, which blurs the lines even further.
6. Global Complexity at Scale
The independent workforce doesn't stop at national borders, and 32% of U.S. independents now sell services internationally, up from just 12% in 2012. Classification standards, tax obligations, and data privacy requirements all vary by jurisdiction. Every new country an enterprise operates in multiplies the compliance complexity.
7. Programs That Don't Evolve
This last challenge is a little quieter than the others, but just as important. Enterprises often stand up an independent talent program with real intention, deploy the technology, train the teams, and then let it settle into steady state, while the workforce around it keeps evolving. Independent creators grew 13% in a single year, to 10.1 million. If your program looks the same as it did two years ago, it's worth checking whether it's still keeping pace with the business.
Visibility Before Action
These seven challenges aren't abstract. They're the specific, well-understood problems Talent Acquisition and Procurement leaders are actively working through today. And the starting point for solving them isn't a large-scale transformation. It's getting a clear, structured view of where your program stands right now.
As part of the Beeline extended workforce platform, MBO Partners supports the full independent talent lifecycle, from visibility and risk assessment to compliant engagement at scale, strategic talent access through a marketplace of more than 140,000 pre-vetted professionals, and global compliance expertise across 200+ countries.
Curious what your program might be missing? Start by downloading our eBook, The Hidden Workforce Problem, for a deeper look at the seven challenges shaping today’s independent workforce. If you’re ready to move beyond the theory, MBO's Workforce Risk Assessment is a structured, no-obligation evaluation of your independent workforce program. With minimal data required and no disruption to your operations, you'll come away with a clearer picture of your visibility gaps, compliance and classification risk, and actionable recommendations built for your organization.
Download the eBook to learn more, or schedule your your free Risk Assessment to see where your greatest opportunities, and risks, may be hiding.
