Ever try hiring freelancers for your business needs? Do you find yourself not having enough time just to sustain your business basic survivability yet looking around to find more help for expanding the business? This can be especially true if you are just a startup and growing is one way to par yourself against the larger competitors before being swallow alive by the market. Hiring freelancers can be a pretty tedious task. From the selection of a massive supply of freelancers to meet your business needs to them producing the final piece of work might cause you to lose even more time than to have it done yourself. This article will try to offer advise to startup businesses looking at hiring freelancers to assist in their business needs.
With the internet and the increasing number of freelancing sites such as freelancer.com, upwork and fiverr, freelancing no longer apply to just your local community. These freelancing sites offer businesses an option to hire freelance workers from overseas at a cheaper rates. As such, many businesses flock to these sites in order to secure an employee at a cheap rate in order to maintain their businesses survivability and expansion needs.
Yes, finding hiring cheap freelancers can be easy with the massive supply of workers to choose from at your fingertips nowadays. But there can be many question you ask yourself before the actual hire:
- how’s the quality of work and person behind that profile?
- How do you know that the person will be a right fit for the company?
- How will he perform, is it worth spending the time teaching him only to use him for 1 time?
- How will the final result for that app or SEO work be?
- How many jobs is he taking? Who will be the one handling the job?
When you go for a local company hire, these questions are filled without much doubt simply because you get to see the company, the people and the team, know that you will have a project manager in charge of your job that you can go to. The company will also be able to provide substantial evidence to show you the quality kind of work that they have done for their previous customers. However, when hiring a freelancer, you probably just get testimonials and feedbacks of work that may or may not mean anything. It can be a two sentence testimonial stating a job well done and can be influenced by the freelancer offer some freebies or additional service when the customer puts on a good feedback for them.
The main thing is the responsibility of freelancers, simply because they aren’t tied down to anything. They do not have a company, job, rice bowl to protect and more, they don’t really have nothing much to lose. They can easily backed out from the job anytime they want. A bad feedback will simply mean the joining of another freelancing site or the creation a new account.
Hiring freelancers can be a breeze if you know how to do it. Here are some guidelines to follow:
- Always know what needs to be done!
- Never allow the hired freelancers to decide what needs to be done. Do not say: “I need to create an app that has a storefront for listing items” or “I need SEO done on my website”.
- The general rule is this: “Never hire a freelancer to do what you don’t know”.
- Make sure you can state specifically what needs to be done.
- If its an app you want created, make sure you have minimal coding background on app creation so you know where the problem is or where needs to be changed upon receiving the final creation. Make sure you know what coding steps to take “Step 1: Generating Plan and project workflow, Step 2: Generating class files, .. etc etc”.
- If its SEO work hire, make sure you have sufficient knowledge about SEO before diving into the actual hiring. What are the kinds of articles? What are the plans? Get the freelancer to provide you with the workflow or create one for him to follow. One wrong step can lead to disastrous effect of your site on search engines. So don’t risk it.
- Understand the job scope of the freelancer.
- You need to be on equal consensus with the freelancer so there will never be misunderstanding.
- Make sure you are equally aware of the job scope of the freelancer and what he will be doing for each day you are paying him.
- Set a dateline
- Just like a goal without a dateline is a dream, outsourcing without a date can be disastrous.
- When you haven’t have a deadline, the good thing is you probably wouldn’t have to be paying your freelancer so soon but your business can be delayed.
- Imagine the launch of an app but there you don’t have a due date to launch it. You might already have a app store developer account taking USD 99/month off your business and the longer you delay, the more money you waste.
- Or that you need to clear some stocks and you got some freelancer to do the selling online for you. The longer they take, the longer your stocks stay with you and the heavier your storage rental costs.
- Weekly reports – Unless it is a final product in creation and work done can be check by the final creation of the product.
- If the project is a long running project (1 week and above), you should always ask for an overview report.
- Make sure the freelancer is following the workflow. If he strays away and does something that is different from planned, let him know.
- Weekly report also allow you to keep a record of all the things he have done.
- Some freelancers might find it a hassle to generate a final report of all the work he has done over the 3 month long period. In that case, how are you going to know if he has done a good job and deserve the compensation as promised?
- Most professional freelancers will offer to provide this even if you don’t ask for it. For those that don’t or find excuses, that could be a sign.
- Always go for freelancing sites that acts as your middle person.
- Freelancing sites such as freelancer, upwork and Fiverr act as your mediator and person that protects your funds and prevent you from getting into a vulnerable position with the freelancer.
- Make payments that don’t reach the freelancer first, in the event something turns out that isn’t as expected.
- Freelancing sites can protect your funds in most cases. They are basically your companies that act to protect your interest just as per local company hire.
Simple tips such as this can help make your outsourcing and freelancing tasks easier. Running a business isn’t easy and hiring a freelancer is probably the only best option in getting you back some free time at a low cost. Do not hire a freelancer to plan what needs to be done. It just tells the freelancer you don’t know what you are doing and he probably is going to be the one haemorrhaging the majority of your company’s expenses at the end of the day.
When you first start hiring freelancers, you probably are going to spend some money in educating yourself how to better hire freelancers. Hiring freelancers can be a pretty daunting task especially when you are paying for someone who you might not know whether will be able to get the job done well for you or not. But don’t let that stop you. Prepare yourself using the tips above and always clear all doubts before deciding to hire. If you are not sure a freelancer is the best fit for the job, DON’T HIRE! He probably isn’t.
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