The full-time job is losing its product-market fit

What companies need to do to attract and retain the best talent.

Most organisations aren’t ready for new work models.

Apoorvaa currently works a full-time job at Google in Silicon Valley. She’s also someone with callings and ambitions that extend well beyond a single role. She’s a tech lead, a musician, a researcher, a writer and a mom. She is a PolyPath i.e. an individual pursuing multiple paths for a more fulfilling life. While Google is one of the best places to work at, Apoorvaa is exploring working in a reduced capacity. She wants to do impactful work on AI privacy, but does not want it to take up five days a week.

Iwana deliberately quit her full-time job as Customer Success Lead at a tech start-up to build a portfolio career of multiple projects and income streams. It’s not that she rules out working for a company, but she doesn’t believe a single job can fulfil all the reasons we work: income, meaning, growth, creativity, or impact. A portfolio career makes room for all of it instead of compressing everything into one role. But when she looks at corporate job postings, almost none of them can accommodate her in a fractional, freelance, or project-based setting.

Philip worked seven years as Director of Global Marketing at a company in the automotive industry. He quit to pursue his own path but still values his former employer and wants to contribute his expertise as a freelancer. His former boss supports it. But it’s been in progress for months. Even though all the relevant stakeholders want it to happen, he keeps running into roadblocks in legal, HR, and procurement. The willingness is there, but the infrastructure is not.

Three different people, three different situations, but the same underlying tension. A shared sense that it’s unnatural to “do one thing” or to act as if life begins and ends with a job. We want more time for creative pursuits, for volunteering, for family, for the other meaningful paths that make up a full life. Aspects of a job are appealing but none of us wants to spend 40+ hours on it. And the traditional employment model is simply not ready to accommodate any of us.

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This is happening at scale.

Apoorvaa, Iwana and Philip are no exceptions. The world’s largest staffing firm Randstad’s 2026 Workmonitor, surveying 27,000 workers and 1,200 employers across 35 markets, confirms this at scale. 78% of employers now consider the traditional linear career path outdated. The report names portfolio careers as actively on the rise. Only 29% of workers say a single full-time role is even their preferred way of working anymore. A third have taken on a second job. Work-life balance has overtaken pay as the top reason people stay in a role. 57% of office workers feel more engaged and productive when they can be their authentic selves. 34% have quit a job that didn’t fit their personal life. This is not a fringe phenomenon.

And the structure of work is catching up to this. AI and automation are breaking traditional roles into smaller components. Tasks that used to require a full-time person are being absorbed by AI agents or redistributed across teams. At the same time, the tools and platforms for independent work are making it easier than ever to build something of your own. Rishad Tobaccowala describes where this leads: a company’s workforce is becoming the full set of internal and external contributors - employees, contractors, fractional professionals, gig workers, and AI agents - that produce value together.

The workforce is already reorganising itself. The question is whether employers are keeping up.

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A widening gap that needs to be addressed.

The traditional full-time job is losing its product-market fit for a growing segment of talent. Many of the most capable people are already building alternatives - side hustles, portfolio careers, freelance practices - or are secretly designing their exit. They are the ambitious, entrepreneurial ones in the building who feel they have outgrown the container and have more tools than ever to build their own working lives. The question for employers is whether they want these people inside their organisation or outside of it.

The gap between what talented people are building on one side, and what organisations are structurally able to offer on the other, is widening. The infrastructure to absorb them into fractional or portfolio arrangements is broken. It was built for a binary: you are either an employee, or you are not. Every system such as payroll, benefits, performance reviews, equity, legal contracts, career progression assumes that binary. There’s not enough categories for someone who works two days a week, contributes at a high level, and spends the rest of their time building elsewhere.

The organisations that close that gap first will have a durable advantage in attracting, retaining, and activating the people they most need.

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What can employers do about this?

Employers need to be responsive to talent’s search for autonomy and self-defined ways of working and career paths. They can make portfolio-shaped roles a deliberate talent strategy: a way to attract people who would never join full-time, retain people who’d otherwise leave, and access skills the full-time market doesn’t supply.

Here are a just a few ideas what companies can proactively do, in increasing order of difficulty.

1. Let people build portfolios inside the company. Some employees just want more room to explore within the organisation and the company can benefit from their multidimensional curiosity. Google's 20% time and 3M's older 15% culture are early versions of this - Chrome and the Post-it Note both started as side projects within the company. Let people apply to cross-functional projects, rotate into temporary initiatives, shape their own role over time. Let them have room to follow their curiosity inside the organisation and great things will emerge.

2. Offer more flexibility to employees. Flexibility has become shorthand for “work from home,” but the deeper question is whether an organisation can accommodate different shapes of contribution. Fractional roles at 50 to 80 percent with proportional compensation, benefits, and equity. Part-time, freelance, and contract options.
   The four-day work week trials show what happens when you take this seriously: in the UK’s largest trial, 92% of companies chose to keep the shorter week. Sick days dropped 65%. Staff turnover fell 57%.
   Apart from this, organisations can start to measure outcomes instead of presence or hours. And give people autonomy how to achieve those outcomes. They can offer sabbaticals or career breaks with a return path, alumni programmes that keep the door open. The point is to offer several alternatives and let people choose the arrangement that fits how they actually want to work and live.

3. Embrace and encourage side hustles. Recent surveys show that 57% of Gen Z and 50% of millennials in the U.S. currently maintain a side hustle. The conventional employer reflex to side hustles has been suspicion: divided loyalty, IP risk, fatigue. The evidence says otherwise. Studies show that employees with outside projects are often more engaged, more skilled, and more motivated in their primary jobs. The people doing interesting things outside of work are the same people doing their best work inside it. A company without a side-hustle policy has a policy vacuum. Side hustles are not a retention threat but a retention lever.

4. Hire for the person, not the position. Most companies define a role, then find someone to fill it. There are companies that are bold and innovative in hiring the best people and trusting them to innovate. For example, Stripe’s job posting reads: “We want to find people of exceptional caliber and then shape the role to the person. To find the right remit for your skills.” The shift involves moving from rigid, job-title-based hiring toward roles that flex around talent, not the other way around.

5. Build the missing infrastructure. None of the above works if Legal, HR, and Procurement are still wired for full-time-or-nothing. It's where the gap actually lives. Contracts that accommodate fractional arrangements. Performance systems that measure outcomes instead of hours. Benefits structures that don't require 40-hour weeks to kick in. Clear side-hustle policies in place.

The organisations that get this right gain a structural advantage. They become talent magnets, gain cost efficiency without layoffs and build in adaptability, scaling up and down without redundancy cycles. And they get diversity without an explicit program as they naturally attract people with different life structures: parents, carers, creatives, and people in different life stages.

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The gap is the opportunity.

There’s no doubt the labor market is shifting. The real question is whether your organisation is not only structurally equipped to participate in the emerging talent economy, but proactively innovating to take advantage of it.

The organisations that figure this out creatively, that build the contracts, the HR processes, the fractional roles, the side-hustle policies, the flexible structures that let talented people contribute on their own terms, will have a durable advantage. Not just in hiring but also in the quality of the people who choose to stay.

The organisations that learn to shape work around people’s whole lives will end up with better people in them.

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This article is a collaboration between PolyPaths by Apoorvaa Deshpande and Afterwork by Iwana Johannsen.

About Afterwork: Afterwork helps people navigate the biggest shift of our time as AI disrupts work as we know it. Iwana writes about what comes next: from portfolio careers to deeper questions of identity, purpose, and life after jobs.

About PolyPaths: PolyPaths is on a mission to challenge the myth of the single lane and embrace the power of AND. You can be an engineer and a musician and a mom and an entrepreneur. Most importantly, you can build a life around everything meaningful to you.

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