Top Tips for Sourcing Freelance Workers via an Online Marketplace
Every day, new freelance talent enters the on-demand workforce. In fact, over the next four years, the number of freelancers is expected to grow at a staggering rate of 35 percent. Very plainly, the talent exists; the challenge for businesses is finding — and leveraging — the right talent.
Recognizing this trend and the advantages it affords them, many companies are achieving growth while cutting costs by extending their workforce beyond the traditional W2 staff model and leveraging the flexibility of skilled, on-demand freelancers. The freelance model provides increased capacity, a broad talent pool, and lower overhead.
Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Flexible, Freelance Workforce
Whether you are seeking to supplement your existing W2 staff with an on-demand, peak-season workforce, or you are considering filling once-internal positions with freelance talent, many questions come to the forefront.
How and where do you source freelancers?
How can you properly verify a freelancer’s skill set?
How can you make sure you are engaging freelancers in a compliant manner?
How might you be able to leverage technology to help manage your freelance workforce strategically, and not on a piecemeal basis?
One popular way to source talent is through an online marketplace. It’s no secret there are countless online employment marketplaces, but how do you know which one best meets your company’s needs?
What to Look for in a Freelancer Marketplace
Choosing the right freelancer management platform is about both finding the right place to host your community and selecting the tools you need to manage your projects.
1. Hire Already-Skilled Freelancers
Skill verification and ongoing education is a core component of any workforce — it’s expected by employees and mandated by executives. Ideally, you want to work with the most-skilled freelancers that will enable your team to hit the ground running competently and without the administrative burden normally associated with ramping up a full-time employee.
One way to do this is by ensuring that your platform allows for skill verification through transparency into the type of work the freelancer has done in the past. Moreover, more sophisticated solutions embed Learning Management Systems into their software. Learning Management Systems allow businesses to test freelancers on their knowledge of whatever services or skills need to be delivered.
2. Utilize Freelancer Checks, Ratings & Verification Tools
Sure, you can post a job opening on Craigslist and receive hundreds of responses. But for those that (at least on paper) appear to meet your qualifications, how do you ensure they are who they say they are? The time and expense of verifying your contractors manually is too great a task for most organizations to perform effectively.
You can ensure successful hiring by leveraging a software solution that allows you to tap talent in a marketplace setting that embeds built-in qualitative (did this freelancer do a good job on the assignment performed) and quantitative (did the person show up on time, did they provide deliverables in timely fashion) ratings and verification tools. This is especially helpful when directing current and interested talent as it unifies practices into one ecosystem.
Compliance comes in two forms: internal within your company’s regulations, and external within the state and government’s regulations. When shopping for a system, make sure it allows you to track your unique company’s requirements (insurance, background checks, etc.) as well as the tools necessary to engage freelancers while abiding by federal and state laws.
4. Communicate the Freelance Project Details Clearly (and Frequently)
A crystal clear understanding of a project is critical to its overall success. Historically, piecemeal emails, text messages, and quick phone calls constituted job management. This lack of organization undoubtedly leads to confusion, misinterpretation, and mistakes. A freelancer management platform that lets you control the entire lifecycle of your engagements from one system (from assignment creation to status of the job through completion and closeout) especially one that lets you scale as your business grows, will aid your review of each project’s progress and details, thus, helping you clearly communicate each project’s complexities to your freelance contractor.
The ability to provide these capabilities is the Work Market difference — the Work Market platform inherently offers and guides its customers through these tips for sourcing a freelance workforce.
How Work Market Helps You Build Your Flexible Freelance Workforce
Work Market helps you recognize and secure the most skilled freelancers in the talent pool.
And through its public ratings and verification tools, you can view each freelancer’s profile, past job ratings, cancellation rates, and overall satisfaction scores.
Then, once you’ve built your freelance workforce, Work Market’s Assignments feature curates the project overview, project notes, project checklists, contact information, any critical deliverable milestone dates, as well as payment status all in one location.
It’s a one-stop-shop for everything administrative, keeping all tasks under one pseudo-umbrella to enhance both your personal — and your freelancer’s — productivity.
