At the first anniversary of the Club Acheteur Freelance (CAF), Mathieu Dumas, Commercial Director France, and Marion De Bray, Business Unit Leader at LittleBig Connection, shared their observations on a transformation that is quietly reshaping the procurement function at its core.
From crisis resource to organizational choice
Procurement accounts for 60 to 70% of an organization's revenue. A 2% improvement across this scope is equivalent to a 25% increase in turnover. These two figures point to one thing: the performance of the procurement function is a top-priority issue, and the expertise that drives it is a resource whose quality translates directly into bottom-line results.
This is the context in which the rise of freelancing takes on its full significance. In France, 1.5 million people now work as freelancers, a +110% increase over ten years. According to current projections, one in three working adults will be self-employed by 2030. To grasp the scale of demand for expertise in the market, one benchmark is enough: there are now more than 17,000 consulting firms in France, almost as many as pharmacies. Organizations buy expertise. And that expertise has become their most strategic resource.
This shift runs deep through the procurement function. For a long time, calling on a freelance buyer followed a substitution logic: a vacant role, a one-off workload, an isolated project. That framework no longer applies. What major procurement departments are building today is no longer about managing the unexpected. It is an architecture of procurement resources, in which external expertise occupies a planned, defined, and deliberate role. The freelance buyer is no longer an exception to the model. They are structurally part of it.
Major procurement departments now have freelance buyers integrated into their annual roadmap, not as replacements for their teams, but as skills they draw on throughout the year.
What mobility produces that organizational belonging cannot
To understand the value of a freelance buyer solely through the lens of availability is to miss the point entirely.
Belonging to an organization creates an irreplaceable form of expertise when it comes to internal knowledge. It also produces, mechanically, blind spots. A buyer who has spent years in the same group has internalized the compromises, the relational balances, and the implicit red lines of their organization. While these elements facilitate internal coordination, they limit the ability to challenge the supplier panel with genuine neutrality, or to question established practices.
What mission mobility creates, by contrast, is continuous cross-sector calibration. A buyer who moves across organizations, sectors, and scopes accumulates comparative knowledge of practices, price levels, and contractual models that no training program can transmit. When BPCE engaged freelance buyers to manage its vendor listings, the decision was not driven by a shortage of internal buyers. It was based on the value of the cross-sector benchmarks that a mobile profile brings, which the internal market cannot structurally produce.
The freelance buyer creates value in both directions. For the client organization: expertise, objectivity, speed, benchmarks. But also for the broader procurement community: every assignment is a knowledge transfer. A best practice from banking that becomes an innovation in retail. An optimized sourcing process from industry that replicates itself two missions later in the public sector. It's a systemic accelerator for procurement practices.
This logic has concrete operational implications. According to LittleBig Connection's internal data, the time-to-hire for a freelance buyer is under ten days, compared to three to six months for a permanent hire including the probation period. On panel rationalization or supplier renegotiation projects, the same source reports a return of between 8 and 15 euros in savings generated for every 1 euro invested in the assignment.
A major luxury group whose IT department was facing excessive outsourcing costs and an insufficiently responsive panel demonstrated this directly: by opening its sourcing to independent experts, the group achieved an average of 15% in savings compared to its listed providers and received responses on 80% of its tenders where its historical panel had stagnated. (see the case study)
Specialization: the new value marker in procurement
The rise of the freelance buyer accompanies a broader structural shift in the procurement function: the move from a generalist logic to a specialization logic.
Organizations that call on freelance buyers are no longer looking for a versatile profile. They are looking for precise expertise within a defined scope: IT procurement, indirect services procurement, international procurement, procurement practice transformation. Specialization has become the primary determinant of perceived value, both for clients and for the profiles themselves.
When a CEO calls us with an urgent need around transforming their IT procurement, they're not looking for 'a good buyer.' They're looking for someone who has already done this, who knows the suppliers, who understands the specific challenges.
This specialization dynamic has a structuring effect on the market itself. 6 in 10 buyers who have chosen independence report an increase in income after making the switch. This is not a minor data point: it means that the pool of available freelance buyers is consolidating and professionalizing, which guarantees procurement departments a durable, increasingly demanding skills market.
What mission mobility produces in this context is an exposure that no training can replace. A buyer managing tenders simultaneously in France, Spain, and Portugal adapts their negotiation strategies to each local market, benchmarks conditions in real time, and builds comparative insight that salaried counterparts cannot develop by staying within the same organization. It's not a question of skill. It's a question of exposure.
Mission mobility is continuous training that no one can buy.
Rethinking the procurement organization, not just the profile
The real question raised by the rise of the freelance buyer is not about the ideal profile. It's about the design of the procurement function itself.
Procurement departments that get the most out of this model did not approach it as a substitution or an emergency measure. They redefined their resource architecture by distinguishing what requires deep organizational knowledge, continuous presence, and institutional memory from what demands sharp technical expertise, an unbiased perspective, or a speed of mobilization incompatible with the timelines of traditional recruitment.
In this logic, the coexistence of permanent and freelance profiles within the same procurement function is not a compromise. It is a sign of a mature organization, capable of allocating resources according to the nature of the challenges rather than the constraints of the employment model.
The real question is no longer whether the freelance buyer creates value. Field data and the procurement departments that have taken the step have already answered that. The question is one of design: is your procurement organization structured to benefit from this model?
What LittleBig Connection supports on a daily basis is precisely this structuring work: helping organizations move from a defensive, ad hoc approach to a model where external expertise is planned, managed, and performance-driven.