Roleshare introduces a job-sharing platform to connect professionals and secures a pre-Seed round of funding.

There is a growing gap between traditional full-time work and freelance work, partly due to current employment trends and partly due to the pandemic's influence on working life. A so-called "job pairing" divides a full-time role between two employees in order to shorten working hours without jeopardizing the career continuity of those involved.

Roleshare is a talent market that connects professionals so that they can both apply for and share a full-time job. The company has already raised over $ 550,000 in pre-seed investments from mainly UK-based super angels to develop a worldwide "role-sharing" market and has now committed to starting with "large multi-sector companies", according to the company.

The idea here is that organizations should be able to retain their top employees at the same time as they bring in new talent.

"Job sharing has been around for a while," Sophie Setareh Smallwood, co-founder and co-CEO of Roleshare, told me by phone. It became popular in the 1970s, as women became more involved in working life. In the private sector, something has happened at the moment, whether it is due to balancing family responsibilities or something else. "

She informed me that since the main strategic responsibilities are not really "part-time employees", job sharing becomes an attractive alternative.

"But there's nothing easy to solve, is it?" There is an interpersonal component in bringing two people together to share the responsibilities of a work.

Roleshare claims to make it easier for companies to determine if any of their positions may be "job-sharing", and then matches potential applicants. Individuals can post their employment for free (apparently introducing a "Trojan horse" into the company), or companies can do so for a fee. This means that it provides talent liquidity for companies that want to share certain positions.

According to Roleshare, a British study found that workers who share jobs are 30% more productive than those who do not, as it helps with work-life balance and reduces work-related stress. According to the startup, it can help promote diversity, talent and business continuity within organizations.

"The MIT Sloan Management Review recognized our idea as a 'third way,'" Smallwood informed me via email.

She went on to say that although "the competitive environment is huge", there are "not too many direct competitors." According to TechCrunch, examples could be Tandemploy (DE), duome (UK) and job pairing (USA), while Roleshare seems to have a slightly different perspective on the industry.

According to the World Economic Forum, half of the workforce will be self  -employed by 2027. According to a MIT Sloan Management Review / Deloitte survey, about 90% of managers believe that external employees are part of their staff.

"What sets us apart is our team (ex-PayPalm, Facebook, eBay) and our story," added Setareh Smallwood. When I needed role sharing, it did not exist, so I abandoned Facebook to create it. Our technology links talent from both sides to search for and share jobs, making us the first talent marketplace to enable companies to find talent pairs for specific roles both internally and externally. In addition, as a type of direct purchase, we allow talent to market their current work as divisible. "

Ian Hogarth, Azeem Azhar, Gabbi Cahane, Brendan Gill and Thish Nadessan are among the European angels who have invested in Roleshare.