Vincent Huguet, Co-Founder and CEOMalt bridges that gap. Founded in France in 2013, Malt is a freelance management platform built around a community of one million independent experts across Europe and the Middle East. It combines the reach of an AI-powered talent marketplace with the rigour of an enterprise-grade management system, giving organisations a single place to source, contract, pay and govern their freelance workforce.
The model reflects a simple insight. Access alone is not enough; organisations need structure and governance to support it. Sourcing, compliance, payments and performance data all run through one connected system, so that speed and oversight work together rather than against each other.
“We’ve always seen Malt as a community first. This isn’t a transactional marketplace. We are dealing with people who change everything,” says Vincent Huguet, co-founder and CEO. “Companies need both access to the right talent and the ability to manage it. We bring those together.”
A Search Engine for Talent
Malt functions as a search-driven marketplace, a model that is harder to build. There is no job-posting system and no reverse auction. Instead, hiring managers define what they need and the platform surfaces relevant freelancers within minutes. The client pitches the project to the freelancer, not the other way around. On average, projects go live in six days.
This inversion changes the quality of the relationship from the outset. Freelancers are not assigned to projects. They see the brief, evaluate the client and choose whether to engage. The result is a workforce that arrives with intent, not obligation.
The community behind this model runs deep. The average freelancer on Malt is 37 years old, commands a daily rate of more than €600 and has more than seven years of experience. Enterprise clients frequently describe these professionals as ‘the most internal of the external.’ They choose their projects, embed in teams for an average of six months’ work as true sparring partners for in-house employees, while remaining fully independent.
Direct access reshapes the economics. Removing traditional staffing intermediaries lowers costs by 20 to 50 percent compared with outsourcing or consulting providers. The platform automates contracting, invoicing and payments, cutting administrative workload by up to 80 percent. Freelancers are paid within two to five days of project completion.
Compliance Built into the Workflow
Governance on Malt is not a layer added after the fact. It is embedded in the platform. No project begins unless the freelancer has met all documentation requirements for the relevant client and country. Contracting, payments and compliance are integrated into a single workflow, not spread across separate tools or teams.
This multi-local approach matters. Regulatory requirements vary significantly across European markets. Enterprises working with freelancers on long-term engagements need systems that reflect those differences at the local level. Malt builds its compliance and payment infrastructure country by country, ensuring consistency without introducing delay.
Across more than 700,000 delivered projects, this model has produced zero worker reclassifications and no related litigation. Freelancers maintain open profiles and can be sourced by multiple clients, preserving their independence.
Enterprise teams gain continuous visibility into their freelance workforce. HR and procurement leaders can track spend, rates, engagement duration and headcount across the organisation. Tens of thousands of small and midsize businesses also engage freelancers through the platform and contribute reviews, building a data layer that improves matching quality and reliability for enterprise clients. Structured quarterly business reviews provide deeper performance insight, enabling leadership teams to evaluate and refine their approach.
HR Must Step into the Game
Freelance workforce management has traditionally been handled by procurement. The task was transactional, centred on buying services from outsourcing, consulting and staffing agencies. That model is no longer sustainable.
Across Europe and North America, there are roughly 6.5 million highly skilled freelancers. One out of every two consultants is independent. For HR leaders, the question is no longer whether to engage this workforce, but how to integrate it into a total talent strategy.
The market frames this in terms of a ‘build, buy, borrow’ model. Build means reskilling or upskilling internal teams. Buy means recruiting new people. Borrow means accessing external talent when and where it is needed. Freelancers are the bottom layer. HR plays a role in shaping how they function.
Yet most organisations are not there. The recently published Freelance Maturity Report, conducted by Malt — based on custom research by Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) across more than 140 global enterprises, found that only 11 per cent have reached a meaningful level of maturity in managing their freelance workforce. Without oversight, shadow procurement and unmanaged sourcing go unchecked. With Malt, HR and procurement can govern the entire freelance lifecycle from a single platform and activate a key competitive advantage lever.
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We’ve always seen Malt as a community first. This isn’t a transactional marketplace. We are dealing with people who change everything. Companies need both access to the right talent and the ability to manage it. We bring those together.
Schneider Electric is one example. Its freelance programme is supervised by the CEO and CHRO, with HR fully involved in shaping how external talent is sourced, managed and integrated.
Because Malt is as intuitive to adopt as a consumer platform, internal teams engage directly with freelancers, while procurement and HR maintain full visibility into every contract, compliance document and data point. Adoption happens organically. Governance follows by design.
Intelligence and Human Judgement Working Together
Malt began investing in machine learning early in 2018, well before the arrival of generative AI. That foundation deepened as technology improved. Hiring managers can now express their needs in natural language, with the system refining match quality as it learns from evolving data signals from past engagements.
Technology handles the volume. Human judgment handles the context. Roughly 100 project partners across Europe work closely with enterprise clients, bringing understanding of business needs, team dynamics and project goals. They step in when the situation calls for it, surfacing, as Malt calls it, a ‘top choice’ for each brief.
Malt’s SuperMalters programme recognises nearly 10,000 top-performing freelancers across Europe with consistently high ratings, creating an additional layer of trust for enterprise clients evaluating unfamiliar talent.
“We’ve built a way to recognise the freelancers who consistently deliver at a high level. That creates a much clearer signal for companies when they’re making decisions,” says Huguet.
Freelancers at the Centre of AI Transformation
Freelancers are increasingly central to how organisations pursue AI transformation. Malt has delivered roughly 20,000 AI projects for clients across Europe, drawing on 42,000 specialised AI experts within its community. The expectation is that within the next year, half of all projects on the platform will be AI-related.
Freelance AI experts carry a particular advantage. As independent operators, many adopted AI early to scale their own practices. They bring hands-on experience and the flexibility to support experimentation across multiple departments at once. Enterprise AI transformation does not unfold as a single, top down initiative. It plays out across dozens of teams running parallel tests; freelancers fit that model precisely.
No consulting firm can match this scale of talent already working on AI projects.
