Freelance Marketplace platform Fiverr has extended its Fiverr business proposition with a new service, Fiverr Certified. The new site enables businesses to certify freelancers on their platform. It enables their ecosystem of partners and customers to have access to certified experts in a single place.
Each tech customer has its own freelance marketplace. They can apply their own certification process or one provided but Fiverr to certify the freelancers. Early adopters of this new service include Amazonads, Podia, TikTok, WooCommerce, Stripe, LuckyOrange, Builderall and monday.com.
Fiverr believes this new platform can help customers and partners find the freelancers they need to deliver projects in the growing gig economy. With access to talent, organisations are more likely to select a solution because the main issue for delivering projects is addressed. The monday.com marketplace identifies five types of experts and already has up to a hundred experts to call from. The subject areas include:
- Workflow Implementation
- Onboarding and Training
- Sales CRM implementation
- Platform integrations
- Data migration
Customers can select an expert from a list, understand the cost. Then pay the freelancer securely through the platform. This also reduces the administration for the potential onboarding of freelancers.
Ophir Penso, a monday.com VP of Channel Partnerships & Indirect Sales, commented, “Partnering with Fiverr Certified has helped us serve a completely new client segment. We can now deliver professional services and solutions to our customers from vetted, certified professionals. We appreciate the opportunity to serve existing customers who, before Fiverr Certified, didn’t have an end-to-end dedicated marketplace where they can service or customize their experience with our product.”
Solving the small business challenge
For small businesses, access to expert talent is difficult. They either need to engage with services firms that want longer engagements or contracts and cannot afford the time to find and hire what can be expensive experts. The option of training experts internally only works until they leave.
For vendors setting up a Fiverr marketplace, it helps resolve this key issue for these smaller businesses. It delivers access to talent for small projects they do not want or cannot fulfil because of larger projects. The small businesses also have surety that the person they are hiring has received some level of certification about the vendor solution.
Another customer, Podia, a website creation platform, whose customers are often MSMEs or SMEs, sees their marketplace as a huge benefit. Mandi Ehman, Director of Marketing for Podia, commented, “Fiverr Certified is exactly what we were looking for – a way to identify, certify, and promote Podia experts so that our users can find the right service provider for their specific needs. It’s truly a win-win-win for Podia users, the certified experts, and Podia!”
Helping freelancers
The Fiverr platform assists freelancers with their chosen lifestyle of gig working. This new initiative also benefits them. Certified freelancers can better advertise their skills, and more importantly, the companies that need their skills can better find them. It allows freelancers to be certified in what they enjoy doing and delivers a focus for their efforts.
The certification process also delivers a form of career development, enabling them to identify potential talent shortages and focus their training in that area, boosting revenue.
Micha Kaufman, Fiverr Founder and CEO, commented, “Fiverr exists to connect every business to exceptional talent in the simplest way possible. Fiverr Certified is a natural progression towards that goal – producing beautifully simple product solutions to tedious business problems.
“Now businesses can be matched instantaneously with experts certified by our partners to get results they can trust.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This service seems obvious in hindsight for tech vendors, especially if they have a larger ecosystem. Vendors have often developed certification programs, which are frequently only used by partners. Fiverr offers a way to extend the ecosystem and enable the vendor to address a common need for more access to talent.
An added advantage is that it also enables the vendors to keep a better eye on the available talent in the market and can better review the existing skills. If a vendor opts to launch a new feature it could become another conduit for communication to their ecosystem for those experts that partners or customers no longer employ.
