I’ve done fractional work long before some idiot came up with the term. That is, I worked part time for 1 or more small businesses at the same time. That wasn’t unexpected back in the day (25 years ago, if you want to know). It didn’t need a fancy name. But someone just had to upscale the term “part-time” and gave us this nonsense.
I’ve tried to get into the fractional racket a number of times in the past 10 years or so, but my sense is that something is wrong here. Yes, everyone says you have to network. But that assumes you’ve have a network that can support a continuous stream of part-time work. And, as we all know, LinkedIn is hardly a network. I’ve plenty of connections, but I’ve never gotten a job from anyone in my network.
So I have an AI agent scanning daily for leads, and I follow these up. That’s already hard enough work. But what’s making me seethe with fractional rage is a new breed of gatekeepers, the likes of which I’ve never seen. Today, for example, I must have created profiles on 8 different sites just for the privilege of being able to reply to a job that looked remotely interesting. Each site requires filling out the usual description, roles, skills, favorite color, names of kids, etc., etc. (Ok, maybe not the last two.) It takes A LOT OF TIME.
Never, ever, in my time have I seen SUCH a plethora of recruiters, aggregators, “talent networks,” paid communities, premium inbox access, paywalled job boards, and now especially, candidate-paid access to contract listings. A freelancer’s life was already hard enough. I don’t think anyone has the right to act as a gatekeeper and stand in another person’s way of getting a job. I think these kind of people are just despicable. I do not accept that they do have a right to make money off of people trying to get jobs and pay bills.