"Freelancer Management Systems (FMS)" is a term used to describe cloud-based systems that allow businesses to better engage and manage independent workers, freelancers and other contingent workers.

These systems allow users to search for contingent talent and then activate, manage and pay the independent workers they hire.  These systems also allow the creation of private talent pools that provide access to profiles of approved contingent workers. 

Freelancer management systems are different from online staffing platforms such as Elance, Odesk and Freelancer.com in that they go beyond just facilitating one-to-one engagements between indidviaul buyers and sellers of freelance talent. 

Instead, an FMS facilitates firm wide engagement and deployment model. They also provide tools and reporting functions that provide contingent talent buyers visibility and analytics related to an organizations contingent workforce scope and spend.  

Several organizations currently provide freelancer management systems including MBO Partners, Work Market, Elance-oDesk and On Force.  They use names like "private talent cloud" and "private talent network" to describe their offerings.  

Freelancer management systems are targeted at large firms and provide 3 key benefits:

• access to curated and approved contingent talent.
• compliance services to guard against worker misclassification
• Contingent workforce program visibility, insight and control

We expect larger firms to quickly adopt freelancer management systems. This, in turn, will lead to greater usage of independent workers as larger firms become more confident in their ability to hire and management contingent workers in a legally compliant manner.

This is another example of technology leading to increasing demand for independent workers.