Post-pandemic staffing shortages continue to be a challenge for meeting planning professionals, affecting the suppliers they work with and their own teams. Cadre, a platform for hiring temporary event staff, has just added an enterprise-level product with new tools that allow companies to more easily hire freelancers, and track and control that spending.
Cadre launched in 2019 as an online marketplace for matching organizations with experienced, insured event freelancers. The system allows organizations to browse freelancer profiles by skills, languages spoken, certifications, and other factors; field questions and set up interviews; and contract and pay for services.
Clients post their staffing needs as well as their budget for each position. They can either post a fixed daily rate or a budget range. Freelancers can accept the daily rate or submit an offer within the stated range. Organizers pay 20 percent of the contract fee to Cadre.
The new enterprise product has several improvements for organizations using Cadre on a regular basis, including the ability to set company-wide freelancer rates and upload custom policies such as those covering expense reporting, non-disclosure, and social media. Cadre sends the enterprise client’s policies to any contracted freelancer for electronic signature to assist with compliance.
Enterprise customers, who will pay $9,500 annually, also have access to data on their freelance use and can compare their metrics against others contracting through Cadre. They can produce reports on spend across their entire company over any date range and break down their freelancer hiring data by business unit, skills needed, or other specifics.
Users can also compare their freelance rates and other metrics with other Cadre customers. “Since Cadre is a marketplace, we are a good proxy for current market rates,” says Todd Taranto, president of Cadre. “We always get asked, ‘What are other companies paying their freelancers per day…what are other companies paying for domestic per diem?”
