Extended workforce platform Beeline announced this week that it has acquired MBO Partners, a platform specifically designed for recruiting and managing high-end professional independent contractors. The acquisition follows up on a 2023 partnership in which both companies integrated their services into a single platform.

Both companies have been around for almost the same amount of time - Beeline was founded in 1993 and MBO Partners in 1996 - and have been ranked highly for market effectiveness in recent years by industry analysts.

Beeline, which originates in the US and has an office in Canberra, scored at the top of a 2024 evaluation by Everest Group, while MBO Partners, which has offices in the US, the UK, Ireland, and India, was ranked one of the largest global platforms in its particular field by market share in 2021, according to a report by research firm Staffing Industry Analysts.

The value of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Despite concerns about whether employers have been leaning on independent contractors and labour hire rather than taking on full-time employees, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that the proportion of independent contractors in the workforce has remained mostly stable at 7-9% for the last few decades, while the number of labour hire employees fluctuates with economic conditions.