Australia’s largest community of creative professionals, TheLoop.com.au, has announced ‘Gigs’ which is a new service that will help brands post short term employment opportunities for its freelance creatives.

This new service is a natural progression for The Loop, which has been designed in response to the way creatives and brands are already starting to engage on the platform, fuelled by the way people now want to work.

Gigs enables freelance creatives with specific skill sets to respond to short term gigs – such as logo or website design, photography, film editing or the creation of business cards. Brands simply post the Gig to the community, which allows small and medium sized businesses to get high end professional creative skills fast.

Over the past year there has been an explosion of short-term employment opportunities, which has organically flourished on the creative network, where more than 25 per cent of professionals on The Loop identify as freelancers.

“The gig economy is not coming, it’s already here,” said Matt Fayle CEO and founder of TheLoop.com.au.

“Many of our freelancers are adapting and making a career out of this short term work and ‘Gigs’ is all about making it easier for brands to connect with them, based on their existing portfolio and have them working on their project the same day.”

Digital continues to disrupt traditional ways of working, with more than 3.7 million Australians now opting for project based freelance work over full-time employment. For the past six years, The Loop has established itself as the leading platform to unite creative professionals with brands like Foxtel, MTV, Universal, Apple, Aesop and Kikki K for prospects and job openings.

Gigs aims to completely reshape and streamline the hiring process for brands and the large creative community, by enabling both sides to interact on short term employment opportunities. What makes The Loop unique is the 100,000 credible creatives and designers who are active on the site and the way it enables brands to easily source them across a range of disciplines.

As a brand, being able to access and review past work ensures alignment with the creatives and provides credibility compared to other platforms and services. Also, unlike the bidding wars of offshore style services, The Loop is comprised of a local, well-regarded pool of talent and the ability to review a candidate’s portfolio, which makes it easier to process applications immediately.

“We’re the industry leader for anyone hiring creative talent and we’ve already got thousands of brilliant individuals active and enabled on the site. We’ve seen more and more that people are posting product specific jobs on the site, such as building a website or creating a logo,” added Fayle.

“By launching Gigs we’ve met this new demand and responded to the community, which is making it easier for brands and creatives to collaborate. A Gig is not a commitment to a full-time freelancer; rather, it’s about removing the anxiety for brands and providing easier access to specific expertise of The Loop’s community for a broad range of high quality design needs.”