Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you’d like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
This Week’s Question: More and more people are becoming freelancers every day. We want to know how this trend is impacting businesses. Do you work with freelancers? If so, why? What needs or niches do they fill that traditional employees can’t?
Note: Be sure to check out our supplementary Q&A, where we flip this question on its head and ask, “What are some reasons not to work with freelancers?”
1. They’ll Save You Money
It costs 20-40 percent less for us to hire contractors instead of employees, and foreign freelancers can often provide the same quality of work for a much lower hourly rate (and still enjoy a great standard of living in their home countries when paid fairly).
A freelancer is seen as a ‘partner’ in your business and has a higher level of accountability. They get paid for performance, where an employee is compensated based on dollars for hours.
For us, freelancers fill gaps in our services that we deem too important not to offer when the need arises but also to little in demand to warrant a full-time employee. For example, we receive about five requests per year for database work. Instead of having our clients seek out another firm for this work, we hire a freelancer to fill this gap, and we have a pool of freelancers we know and trust. Using freelancers like this strengthens our product offerings without hindering our bottom line. It’s a total win.
We operate in a small town, so the talent pool locally is limited. That means we tap into remote freelancers who work all over the world. This provides us with greater flexibility, reduced costs, less overhead, and — sometimes — faster communication.
Hiring a freelancer online gives you the most options, in terms of quality, cost, and speed. You can see their work history, ratings, and reviews, and you can ask for work samples. The ease and convenience makes it a no brainer.
My firm, Pace Public Relations, loves hiring freelancers. For me, it’s a great way to feel out a potential new employee without the level of commitment that comes along with a full-time employee.
I hate to use this term, but we mostly hire freelancers for busywork. That isn’t to say it isn’t important work, though. We hire freelancers for tasks that would take them as long to complete as it would take us to explain to our existing staff.
For example, I’ve hired clerks with backgrounds in Web development to mine for potential leads. It’s easier to hire another developer or at least someone familiar with development than it is to instruct my existing staff on what the perfect lead is.
As a software development company, we are constantly at different stages of product development on different projects. We’ve found that freelancers offer the best flexibility for our workforce. It has also proved to be a great business decision, because many freelancers are experts in their fields, so we can hire experts for each part of the development. This helps us achieve a higher quality final product.
