From Hiring Job Titles To Accessing Capability – Episode 39 With Bryan Peña

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Bryan Peña is the Founder of Defiant and a workforce strategist with more than 25 years of experience helping companies rethink how they access, manage, and combine internal and external talent.

Key kateaways

1. The biggest barrier to working with freelancers is often not talent supply, but company habit. Many organizations still default to full-time hiring because that is the process they know, even when the need is temporary, urgent, or highly specialized.
2. Companies need to distinguish between skills they should own and skills they can rent. Bryan identifies at least four strong use cases for independent talent: peaks in demand, temporary capacity, missing specialist skills, and defined projects that do not justify permanent headcount.
3. The future of workforce strategy is orchestration, not simply recruitment. Companies will increasingly need to choose between employees, freelancers, consultants, outsourcing, AI, and automation — and combine them based on the outcome they need rather than defaulting to one hiring model.

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Deep Dive: From Hiring People to Orchestrating Work

The way companies think about talent has not changed nearly as fast as the ways people can now work.

For decades, the default solution to a capacity problem has been relatively simple: hire someone. A team has too much work? Open a role. A project requires a skill the company does not have? Open a role. Someone leaves? Replace them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with hiring employees. The problem appears when permanent employment becomes the automatic answer to almost every type of work.

That was one of the strongest themes in our conversation with Bryan Peña, Founder of Defiant. His argument is not that companies should replace employees with freelancers. It is that businesses need to become much better at understanding what kind of work they actually need done — and then choosing the right way to get it done.

“This is just the way we do it”

When Bryan talks about why companies struggle to work with independent professionals, he does not start with a complicated technology problem or a shortage of talent. He starts with habit. He calls it institutional muscle memory.

“We just do this because this is the way we do it.”

A manager needs more capacity, so they request another employee. The process may take months, but it is familiar. There is usually a recruitment team, a job description, an approval process, interviews, onboarding, payroll, and a known path from “we need someone” to “this person now works here.”

Ask the same manager to bring in an independent expert and suddenly the path may become much less obvious.

Who owns the process? HR? Procurement? Recruitment? Legal? The business unit? Who handles the contract? Who checks worker classification? Who sets up payment? Who approves the budget?

When those questions are unclear, companies often retreat to the model they already understand.

That can create a strange situation. A company has a problem that needs solving now. A qualified external expert may already be available. Yet the organization chooses to spend months recruiting a permanent employee because the internal system makes that option feel easier.

The limitation is no longer the talent market. It is the company’s ability to access it.

Do you need to own the skill or rent it?

One of Bryan’s most useful distinctions is between owning a capability and accessing a capability.

Organizations naturally think about workforce planning in terms of the people they need permanently. But many business needs are not permanent.

A manufacturer may need hundreds of extra people during a seasonal peak. A product team may need a specialist for one transformation. A company may need expertise in a specific technology for six months. Another department may simply need additional capacity while the existing team is overloaded.

Bryan describes several common situations where flexible talent can make sense: demand peaks, temporary capacity needs, specialist skills that do not exist internally, and projects requiring expertise that will not be needed indefinitely.

His wording is simple:

“I don’t need it full time. I just need to rent that particular skill for a period of time.”

That changes the workforce conversation.

Instead of immediately asking “Who should we hire?”, companies can first ask “How long do we actually need this capability?”

If the answer is three months, six months, or the duration of one project, permanent employment may still be the right answer. But it should no longer be the automatic one.

Some capabilities are strategic and need to live inside the company. Others can be accessed when needed. The important part is making that distinction deliberately.

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The talent exists. The process often does not.

This brings us to one of the biggest practical problems with independent talent: many organizations are simply not designed to engage it well.

Business leaders often know exactly what happens when they need another employee. Hiring an independent professional can be much less straightforward.

Contracts, classification, insurance, taxation, procurement, payment terms, and local regulations all enter the picture. Those issues are legitimate, but they can also become convenient reasons to avoid the channel entirely.

Bryan argues that this is partly why companies struggle to use freelancers at scale: engaging non-employees is often not an organizational skill they have deliberately built.

Responsibility can also become fragmented. Procurement focuses on contracts and risk. HR focuses on people. Talent acquisition may focus primarily on employees. The business unit has the actual problem and the budget but may not know how to engage someone outside the standard hiring process.

The result is familiar to many organizations: everyone knows the work needs to happen, but nobody quite knows who owns the process of bringing in the person who can do it.

Suddenly, finding talent is not the hard part but getting it through the organisation.

Compliance should be infrastructure, not a panic button

Compliance is probably one of the most frequently mentioned barriers to working with independent professionals.

There are real reasons for caution. Worker classification, contracts, taxes, insurance, payment requirements, and local employment regulations vary between countries and jurisdictions.

But Bryan sees this as a manageable infrastructure problem rather than a reason to avoid independent talent.

He points to AOR and EOR providers as one way companies can manage much of this complexity and make working with non-employees easier.

The bigger lesson is that companies should solve these questions before the urgent talent need appears.

If a critical project starts on Monday and only then does the company begin asking how to contract, classify, approve, onboard, and pay an independent professional, flexible talent will naturally feel slow and complicated.

But if the path already exists, the experience can be very different.

Standard contracts can be ready. Ownership can be clear. Compliance guidance can exist. Payment processes can be established. External partners can already be selected.

Independent talent then stops being an exception that has to be reinvented every time and becomes a normal part of the workforce infrastructure.

The future is not employees versus freelancers

The conversation becomes much more interesting when we stop treating this as a competition between employees and freelancers.

Companies now have an enormous number of ways to get work done.

They can hire an employee. Engage a freelancer. Bring in a fractional expert. Work with a staffing provider. Outsource a function. Use an offshore team. Hire a consultancy. Automate a process. Deploy an AI agent.

And increasingly, several of those things can happen at the same time.

Bryan sees the future of workforce management as the ability to orchestrate those different resources around the business objective.

That means starting with a different question.

Not:

“Who do we need to hire?”

But:

“What outcome are we trying to achieve?”

From there, the company can work backwards. What work needs to be done? Which skills are required? How long will those capabilities be needed? Which parts should stay internally? Where would outside expertise help? What can technology handle? Where is human judgment essential?

Only then does the company decide what kind of workforce solution makes sense.

“The future lies in orchestrating all of those unique tools to create something that is going to achieve your business goal the best.”

That is a much broader role than traditional recruitment. Bryan believes HR could gradually evolve toward managing organizational capacity across many different forms of work, not simply managing the employee population.

AI makes the independent workforce more interesting, not less

AI adds another dimension to this shift.

Bryan explains that as an independent business owner, he can now accomplish dramatically more than he could six years ago. Research, analysis, content, contracts, strategy, operations, and other tasks can increasingly be supported by AI and automation.

That changes the economics of independent expertise.

A highly experienced professional with strong AI tools can increasingly operate with the leverage that once required a small team.

This does not necessarily reduce the value of human expertise. It changes which parts of human expertise are most valuable.

Knowledge itself is becoming easier to access. Almost anyone can ask an AI system a question and receive an answer within seconds.

Bryan argues that what becomes more important is something different: the ability to turn noise into signal, identify patterns, make decisions, understand context, and apply judgment.

“Your judgment as a practitioner is gonna be your most valuable asset, not your experience.”

For companies, that creates an interesting combination. AI can accelerate execution. Independent experts can bring judgment, context, interpretation, and experience. Internal employees bring deep organizational knowledge and continuity.

The opportunity is not choosing one over the others. It is learning how to combine them.

What if some of the best people no longer want a job?

Bryan makes one particularly provocative prediction during the conversation:

“The best people are gonna be working independently.”

It is intentionally bold, but the question behind it is important.

Technology has made it easier than ever for experienced professionals to operate independently. They can build a personal brand, find clients, create products, automate administration, access global markets, and use AI to multiply their output.

At the same time, Bryan sees the number of people intentionally choosing independent work continuing to grow.

That could eventually create a different kind of talent shortage.

Not a shortage of skilled professionals.

A shortage of skilled professionals who want to become employees.

For companies, that means a workforce strategy built only around traditional employment may gradually exclude part of the talent market.

A company capable of working with employees, freelancers, contractors, fractional experts, consultants, and other independent professionals has access to a much larger pool.

That is when flexible talent stops being simply a tactical solution for an urgent project.

It becomes a strategic capability.

Start with the work, not the worker

The good news is that companies do not have to redesign their workforce overnight.

Bryan’s advice starts with something much more practical: understand how work currently enters the organization.

He suggests mapping the full journey from a business need through hiring, procurement, contracting, compliance, onboarding, and payment. Look at the decision points throughout the process and understand where the organization automatically pushes every need toward permanent employment.

Then start adding alternatives.

When a project appears, ask whether the required capability needs to be permanent.

When a team becomes overloaded, ask whether temporary capacity could solve the problem.

When specialist expertise is missing, ask whether you really need to employ it permanently or simply access it.

When work is repetitive, ask whether automation or AI can remove part of the workload before another person is added.

Sometimes the right answer will still be a permanent employee.

Sometimes it will be a freelancer.

Sometimes it will be a consultancy, outsourced provider, AI system, or combination of several options.

The goal is not to use freelancers everywhere.

It is to stop assuming that every business problem requires the same workforce solution.

That may be the simplest way to understand workforce orchestration:

Start with the work. Then decide who or what should do it.

Tips for Success – Run a 30–90 day experiment

1. Choose one real business problem

Find a project that requires expertise you do not currently have and has a clear result that can be delivered within roughly 30–90 days.

2. Engage expertise around the outcome

Define what success looks like rather than creating a long employee-style job description.

3. Compare the economics

Measure time to start, cost, quality, and time to outcome against what permanent recruitment would likely have required.