MBO Partners and Work Market announced today a partnership signaling significant change in the online staffing segment. The partnership creates MBO Work Market, a new managed contractor cloud solution that combines MBO’s engagement platform with Work Market’s technology platform.

MBO Partners provides business services to independent contractors as well as independent contractor payrolling and compliance services for staffing buyers. Two-year-old Work Market is one of the first online staffing platforms to focus specifically on larger enterprises. It tends to facilitate on-site work arrangements, as opposed to virtual assignments.

The MBO-Work Market partnership signals a crucial shift that has begun to occur in the online staffing space, according to Andrew Karpie, affiliate analyst at Staffing Industry Analysts.

“For some time now, skeptics about the significance of the online staffing model in the existing contingent workforce management space have concluded that online staffing is not much of a factor because it only supported global virtual freelancers (not local onsite professionals) and it was light on compliance management, and, as a consequence, it was not ‘enterprise-strength,’” Karpie said. “But this partnership shows that online staffing models are not so limited and players in the ecosystem can in fact combine forces to deliver new solutions for enterprises. This whole shift that is starting should be one of the big game changers for online staffing.”