Hayley Conick will attend her fist TableCrowd dinner tonight,“Tales from the Trenches” finding the right tech talent for your team. She is working for Elance-oDesk, our new partner. Let’s learn more about Hayley and her role at Elance-oDesk.

What is Elance-oDesk?

Remember when Steve Jobs said the iPod would put 1,000 songs in your pocket? Well we want to put a world of talent in your hands! We have over 2m businesses and 8m freelancers across the globe using our platform to find and collaborate on short and longer term projects. Anything imaginable that can be done online can be done on Elance or oDesk. There is a huge range of tech work but also everything from legal and finance to design, data science and startup consulting! Give it a try here: https://www.elance.com/q/startup-offer (there’s a $50 credit).

What’s your role?

I’m Country Manager for the UK & Ireland, which means I have strategic and operational responsibility for expanding and evolving Elance-oDesk in these markets. Essentially I’m rolling out our global strategy and setting the priorities to grow our presence in this part of the world. This can mean anything from identifying business development opportunities to PR strategy and media relations to developing strategic partnerships (government, corporates, accelerators, co-working spaces, start-up communities…), creating and running awareness campaigns, building our local presence in key cities…etc etc! Suffice to say I’m kept pretty busy.

What were you doing before you joined Elance-oDesk?

I was one of the founding members of Smarta.com, which I started working on back in 2007. I wrote the original business plan when it was just an idea on a bit of paper and spent 5 years growing the team and the business. We raised investment from Michael Birch and Theo Paphitis along the way, which was pretty cool.

What were the biggest developments in 2013?

Aha! Well as our name change suggests at the end of 2013 we announced our intention to merge with oDesk which was pretty huge!

What will 2014 bring?

Well our (now combined) Elance-oDesk forces will be working together to create more freedom and opportunity for businesses and skilled freelancers. We know the market opportunity is huge. Can’t say much more at the moment but in short – watch this space!

Convince someone to use your product/service in under 50 words.

Smart businesses know they need to stay as lean and flexible as possible for as long as possible. Smart founders know they can’t do it all themselves. The very smartest use teams of online freelancers to save time, scale quickly and get to market. With Elance-oDesk, you can get ahead.

What’s your favourite London restaurant?

OK slight cheat as I can’t pick a favourite but the restaurant I most want to try next is Marianne. Run by a friend of mine and getting rave reviews.

We can’t wait to see you at the dinner table tonight Hayley.

If you want to find out more about our upcoming tables, have a look here.