Small business owners often operate on a tight budget. As a result, you may try and do everything yourself, stretching thin your time, energy, and resources.
Do you ever find yourself wishing for help with the small things so that you can focus on the core of your business? If the answer is yes, then you should look into hiring freelancers.
For small businesses, freelancers are a great alternative to maintaining a full-time staff, which can be unnecessarily costly. You can hire freelancers on an as-needed basis for various tasks and projects that you don’t want to handle yourself. Utilizing freelance work as a business owner provides you with greater flexibility in hiring workers with the right skill set who are within your budget.
Below are some tips to help you get started finding and hiring freelancers.
Determine a specific goal
It’s essential to know what you want to accomplish when hiring a freelancer. Why are you hiring someone in the first place?
Maybe you need help dealing with small repetitive tasks so you can focus on more pressing issues. Perhaps there’s a project that requires a certain set of technical expertise outside of your skillset.
In any case, before making any hiring decisions, have a well-defined goal in mind that a freelancer can achieve. It will likely save you a lot of time and money if you draw up an outline of your ideal freelancer by making a list of the skills and qualities you want them to have.
Screen candidates
If you take pride in the work your small business does, then you’ll want to hire people who do a good job. It’s important to hire a trustworthy freelancer who does quality work, so that you don’t waste your money or end up with results that reflect poorly on your company.
If you’re considering hiring a freelancer, review their work first. If you can, take a look at their professional portfolio and read feedback from their past clients. Research like this will be quick and simple if you use one of the many online platforms that connect businesses with freelancers.
In some cases, you might want to run a background check on a freelancer you’re considering working with. What does a background check show you? It depends on the service you use, but many will verify an individual’s identity, employment history, and education background, in addition to checking for criminal records.
This can be an important tool for when you want to evaluate a freelancer’s character before initiating a long-term professional relationship.
Browse freelancing websites
There are many online marketplaces where employers can post jobs and solicit freelance work. On these websites, freelancers in many industries maintain profiles that display their online resume and work samples.
Most of these websites make it easy for you to create job postings and hire freelancers. You can also typically take a look at reviews past clients have left for freelancers, the number of projects they have completed, and the rates they charge.
Here’s a short list of some of popular websites where you can post jobs and find freelancers:
- Upwork
- Freelancer.com
- Fiverr
- Toptal
Set a realistic budget
Before you even start looking for freelancers, determine how much you can afford to spend on a given project. Then research the going rates for the kind of work you want and adjust your budget if needed.
Be careful about freelancers who charge dirt cheap rates. Have you ever heard the saying, “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur”? Spending pennies on a project will likely get you underwhelming results. You might have to invest more time and money into revising the work, or even toss it out entirely and start over.
This is why you should spend a reasonable amount of money on a freelancer. If you want high quality materials, just remember that you get what you pay for. Even if you’re paying a freelancer a relatively high rate for a project, you’ll still most likely save money in the long term by not paying for the expenses that come with a full time staff, such as regular salaries, insurance policies, and other benefits.
Choosing the right freelancers for your needs can help you increase efficiency and grow your business. You’ll also be able to spend your valuable time on more important projects that strengthen the core of your business. If you look in the right places, do some research, and know what you want, then adopting a strategy based around freelance work can help you build a better business.