At the Marketplace Connect conference, Charles Nouet, Business Unit Leader for Retail & Luxury at LittleBig Connection, addressed an audience of marketplace professionals with a question that challenges the prevailing narrative: what if the talent shortage debate has been built on the wrong diagnosis?
A market that has transformed, while access models have not kept pace
The skills market has never been larger. In France alone, there are now over one million freelancers and nearly 15,000 consulting firms, almost as many as pharmacies across the country. Both figures have doubled in ten years, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. According to Mordor Intelligence, the global freelance platform market will reach $21.97 billion by 2031 (up from $8.9 billion today), representing annual growth of +16%.
Yet the models through which organizations access this supply have not evolved at the same pace. Most large companies still operate with a restricted panel of approved vendors, built up over time and rarely challenged. Opening that panel to the full market comes with an organizational cost that few companies are willing to absorb. The result: large organizations actually access fewer than 1% of the skills available on the market.
That figure deserves careful reading. It does not describe a skills problem. It describes a structural one.
We talk a lot about a talent shortage. We talk very little about an access shortage. The skills exist. They're everywhere. The real issue isn't supply. It's the infrastructure that enables access to it.
Reframing the diagnosis: it's not the supply that's missing
The dominant narrative around the talent shortage is real in its effects: unfilled roles, delayed projects, organizations struggling to find the profiles they need. But this observation masks a critical distinction.
What's lacking, in the vast majority of cases, is not the expertise itself. It's the infrastructure that would enable rapid, trusted, scalable access to it. The talent exists. Professionals are available, numerous, and increasingly specialized. What's missing is the mechanism that makes this availability genuinely accessible to organizations.
In the retail and luxury sectors in particular, where transformation cycles are accelerating and business needs are often expressed in days rather than weeks, this mismatch takes a very concrete form. A rebranding project that requires specialized profiles quickly is regularly blocked not by the absence of those profiles on the market, but by the inability to contract them within the required timeframe through rigid, pre-approved panels. When a perfectly suited provider isn't listed in the vendor panel, the onboarding process can stretch over several weeks. The talent exists. It's the access that's missing.
This distinction radically changes the nature of the problem to be solved. Investing in more training, better retention, or faster hiring only makes sense if the access channel to the market is itself fit for purpose. Without an efficient market infrastructure, an abundance of supply does not translate into organizational performance.
When a market changes scale, a new form of organization becomes necessary
There is a recurring pattern in market history: when supply becomes too vast, too fragmented, and too fast-moving to be managed by existing models, a new form of organization emerges to structure access to it.
This is what happened in travel with Booking.com, which now centralizes more than 28 million accommodations worldwide; in short-term rentals with Airbnb, which went from three air mattresses in San Francisco in 2008 to over 8 million listings across 220 countries; and in peer-to-peer sales with LeBonCoin, which became France's leading classifieds platform with over 30 million monthly visitors. In each case, a marketplace brought order to a market that no one could coordinate otherwise.
The skills market is following the same trajectory. As the volume of available professionals grows and the nature of expertise becomes increasingly fragmented, traditional access models are reaching their structural limits. A skills marketplace is not just another matching tool. It is market infrastructure: it structures supply, creates the conditions for trust, secures transactions, and makes manageable a volume of relationships that no organization could handle manually.
What this infrastructure changes concretely
What LittleBig Connection changes concretely is the way organizations solve two very different types of problems: absorbing a workload surge without adding to their permanent structure, or contracting a provider they've already identified but their internal processes cannot activate.
Céline is a marketplace manager at Cdiscount. A major rebranding is approaching, bringing a significant but time-limited spike in activity. She needs three freelance profiles for eighteen months. Hiring on a permanent contract makes no sense for this kind of temporary need. Mobilizing internal teams doesn't either: her goal is clear, absorb the workload without complicating the organization. She contacts LittleBig Connection, describes the context, the profiles needed, and the associated budget. Within forty-eight hours, a shortlist of qualified profiles is delivered, sourced from a community of 500,000 experts across 50 countries. Once the profiles are validated, contracting is finalized within twenty-four hours. The organization absorbs the activity spike without creating a permanent budget line.
Laurent is an e-commerce manager at Decathlon. His starting point is the opposite: he's not looking for a profile, he's already found the agency he needs, a small firm based in Lille, perfectly suited to his project. The problem lies elsewhere. That agency is not listed in Decathlon's approved vendor panel. Without approval, no contracting is possible at the group level. LittleBig Connection steps in as the contractual intermediary: a master agreement with Decathlon, a direct contract with the agency, and contracting finalized within twenty-four hours, secured by design, with no additional friction for the procurement teams. Laurent works with the provider he chose, in full compliance with the group's procurement processes. And the same model works identically across the other markets where Decathlon operates.
These two situations don't share the same starting point, but they share the same constraint: without the right infrastructure, one would have waited weeks, and the other would simply never have happened.
The real question is no longer: 'Will I work with external experts?' The real question today is: how do I find them fast, everywhere, securely, and how do I stay in control when I scale?
The challenge is no longer accessing one talent. It's governing a skills market.
A community of 500,000 experts across 50 countries, contracting that is secured by design, strategic support for panel management: what LittleBig Connection is building is precisely this infrastructure, designed for organizations that need to scale without sacrificing control.
The challenge is no longer accessing one talent. It's the ability to govern a skills market.
Organizations that understand this first are no longer asking how to find the right profiles. They are asking how to build the infrastructure that makes this capability permanent, repeatable, and scalable.
It's a shift in posture as much as in tooling. And like all structural transformations, it begins with an accurate diagnosis: it's not the skills market that's in short supply. It's our capacity to access it.
