“We began by focusing on LinkedIn members with the word ‘freelance’ in their job title, and then we aggregated the most common industries and skill sets found. The top results range from media and communications, to engineering and software development. This range indicates that careers in many fields may not be limited to formal employment and that those looking to hire for these specialized skills may not always need to turn to agencies or staffing companies,” LinkedIn’s Lucy Chen wrote in a blog post about the company’s new LinkedIn ProFinder, a platform now being tested that connects users to freelance workers.

LinkedIn’s move to create a freelancer platform adds to the human cloud space that has already been growing.

“For a platform with hundreds of millions of professionals’ profiles, creating an avenue for some of those folks to find freelance work through that platform seems like a natural extension, and this announcement is a validation of the Human Cloud business model,” said David Francis, research associate at Staffing Industry Analysts. “That said, it will be interesting to see if LinkedIn’s freelance platform can gain traction — and how quickly it can do so — as the company is a relative latecomer to the on-demand work platform party.”

Staffing Industry Analysts published its Human Cloud Landscape report in July.