As a small business with limited resources, you don’t always have the luxury of hiring a full-time staff for each business function you need fulfilled.
One way meet your role requirements on a shoestring is to consider engaging a freelancer – an option that is not only more cost-effective, but also provides additional flexibility. If you are careful in your selection process, chances are the freelancer could be capable of fulfilling your role requirements just as well, if not better!
While you may think you have your pick with freelancers, successful freelancers also have their pick with clients. So what are freelancers looking for? A portfolio, of course. What’s in it for them? Are you working on an exciting project that delivers impact on the community? Post-completion, will you provide them with a written testimonial? Will they be able to associate themselves with your logo or brand, and claim credit for specific projects?
Once you have shortlisted to about three candidates, test your top candidates to ensure that your freelancer is who they claim to be. The ideal test would be as close as possible to the demands of your job at hand, and take somewhere between 20 minutes to one hour. You should pay the freelancer for the test project, in order to simulate a real working environment and ensure the freelancer puts in his best effort into the test.
Once you have selected your freelancer, ensure that you align expectations with your freelancers with proper documentation. You need to have a properly drafted Consultancy Agreement that regulates the relationship between your company and the freelancer (or independent consultant) who is not an employee of the company.
In particular, it is important for you to define clearly who owns the IP rights of the deliverable or work product that your freelancer produces. Not setting this out clearly could lead to disputes concerning the duration for which the IP rights are assigned from the freelancer to your company or what conditions must be fulfilled for the IP rights to be assigned.
Even though freelancers are temporary additions to your company, it is still necessary for you put your freelancer through a proper on-boarding process. This will help connect freelancers with your company’s culture and enable them to approach their work from an employee’s perspective.
1. Connect them (virtually) into the office. Introduce freelancers to team members via video chat like Skype or Google Hangouts and provide a list of team member names and their contact info.
2. Gather project documents. Help freelancers get up to speed faster and understand expectations by providing project documentation that shows the scope, research, and other relevant information.
3. Prep the tech. Make a checklist of any systems, applications, and programs they may need to access like VPN or a company file sharing system. You may want to give the freelancer a list of programs and applications in the beginning, so they can make time to familiarize themselves.
4. Explain the brand. Provide a brand document/brand guidelines and explain the company’s core values, mission, and expectations of freelancers.
5. Give information in chunks. Freelancers often digest a deluge of project, company, and industry information in a very short time. To prevent overwhelming them and opening the door to possible errors, give information to them in chunks.
6. Encourage questions. Freelancers should feel able to reach out when needed, or projects may veer off course. Creating a culture where asking questions and sound boarding are encouraged can save potential confusion and time spent correcting errors.
Essentially, there is a big pool of flexible talent out there that you can plug in to your company at any moment in order to produce a defined deliverable or fulfil a business function. Leveraging this pool of talent can help your business to save costs while still getting the job done.