It is not an uncommon occurrence that companies hire freelancers to help them out with a certain project. Regardless of your niche, you never know what your next project will encompass and what skills it may require at some point. Hiring freelancers for a limited period of time is a sensible solution for these kinds of situations. In recent years, the “freelancing” life is becoming more and more appealing to people and a lot of skilled professionals choose not to be tied down to doing work for a single company. They prefer to go where they call them. All of this was somewhat influenced by the strong development of the online business environment, which is these days, a crossroad between many employers and wannabe part-time or full-time employees.
In the next chapter, we are going to discuss the reasons behind companies hiring people over the web without ever laying their eyes on their new employees.
Online hiring
Hiring, in general, has changed in the online environment. These days, you can get a steady job working for a company that is across the ocean from the town you live in and that pays per hour and doesn’t require you to leave your home. More and more companies are starting to use online staffing platforms to find employees with the right set of skills for the opening they need to fill. The reasons for this are numerous. Freelancers that you can find by using these platforms range from experienced seniors with years of experience to novices just starting out and trying to boost their portfolio for some bigger work. You can check which projects they handled in the past and the reviews given by their previous employers. This means that you have all the relevant information you would want to have when hiring a new employee.
The two most popular online hiring platforms are:
- Elance
- oDesk
In December 2013, these two platforms actually merged and therefore created an online workplace for over 8 million users.
Commonly outsourced work
Some business needs are not there all the time and therefore, it would be costly to hire a team of people that would have nothing to do until the need for their skill set arises. Web design is one of the most commonly outsourced jobs, since there are very few companies that need these services on a monthly basis. Nobody creates a new website each month, therefore it makes more sense to hire a freelancer or freelancing team to do this job for you when you need it, than to pay a full time web designer to sit on his/hers hands. The same goes for computer programming. You are not going to need a new program built from scratch each month. It is a good idea to have a contact with a programmer that is reliable who you can call when you need their services but hiring them full-time would be a waste of money.
Some work is outsourced due to sheer convenience and in order to avoid big, bulky investments into an infrastructure. One of the more commonly outsourced things that falls into this category is customer support, specifically call centers. The overall cost of hiring people, buying the equipment, finding office space and paying for equipment maintenance is very high and let’s be honest, maybe you don’t even need a call center. This is why most companies find that it is a good idea to hire call center companies to handle this work for them. A lot of people will tell you that there are downsides to this since there have been cases when call center companies didn’t handle the work they were supposed to do very well. On the other hand, this can be true for internally set up call centers. It is all about finding the right partners that will keep their end of the bargain, as is the case with any other kind of hiring.
The obvious benefits
Finding partners who are reliable enough to be trusted is always hard. Not all freelancers and outsourcing companies (whatever their field of work may be) are perfect, but in my experience the practice of outsourcing work has gotten a bad reputation thanks to a smaller part of the freelancing community, which lacks professionalism and the skills to do the work they were supposed to do. Outsourcing is pretty much the same as any other form of hiring in the aspect that you need to pay attention to who you hire. Keep this in mind and you will surely be satisfied with what you get from this deal.