Business owners rely on strong, capable employees to get the job done when they can’t be around. With how busy the life of a business owner is, the amount of things you need to do doesn’t always coincide with the amount of time you have to do it. Hiring people locally might seem like the initial pull since they’re in your area and readily available if you need them.
However, most digital marketing experts turn to something a little easier and a lot more accessible: hiring a freelancer. People who work remotely for a living are people who are always there, day or night, to get the job done and get it done right. However, we know how hard it can be to find the right freelancer and to make sure that once you’ve connected with someone, they’ll get the job done in a timely and effective manner.
That’s where Nathan Hirsch comes in. The founder and CEO of FreeeUp, a marketplace for freelancers where you can get in touch with someone within a matter of minutes to do the best job at the right price, Nathan swears by remote workers and insists that every business owner do the very same.
With people skilled in everything, you could need (like graphic design, copywriting, and Facebook ads to name a few), harnessing this power and finding the best of the best is easier than you think. So without further ado, we’ve got some amazing tips on hiring a freelancer that will make navigating the web for that perfect fit less of a hassle and more of an easy business arrangement.
Hiring a Freelancer and The CLICK Technique: “C” for “Cultivate”
Before we get into the details of hiring a freelancer, however, we have to discuss The CLICK Technique! A five-day crash course of my own invention, The CLICK Technique is designed to help those who find their websites sitting dead in the water with no ideas as to how they should bounce back.
By following the steps that each letter of the word “CLICK” describes, I can guarantee that you’ll start generating the traffic and leads you’ve been looking for. And as if this couldn’t get any better, The CLICK Technique is now a book! That’s right: in addition to all the free goodies you get with the course, you can now get in-depth with how your digital marketing career can improve with The CLICK Technique. Make sure to order your copy today!
When it comes to hiring a freelancer, we’ll be focusing on the second “C” in the word “CLICK”, which stands for cultivate. When you’ve gotten your business off the ground and are starting to generate that successful traffic, that’s when potential clients and customers will start reaching out.
In order to effectively maintain that connection, it’s important to cultivate your relationship with them. By communicating in a positive, effective, and consistent manner, you’re showing them that you care about more than just their business. You want to help them, and you believe you’re the best person who can do it. Cultivating your relationships ensures a strong foundation for you to build upon in the future.
When it comes to hiring a freelancer, the very same principle applies! We know how hard it can be to find the right fit for what you need done as well as someone who will also fit into the group of workers you’ve already generated.
By communicating with these people in a way that tells them what you need from the start and working to cultivate your relationship to your remote workers, you’re ensuring an environment when your workers are happy, and you—as the business owner—are satisfied in knowing that the work required is getting done by someone who’s going to work their hardest to complete for you. That’s what hiring a freelancer is all about.
Hiring a Freelancer: 4 Tips That Will Help You Find the Perfect Fit
Now that we know that communication is key when it comes to hiring a freelancer, the process of finding the best fit for what you’re looking for becomes a little less daunting and little more narrow. I know that freelancers are hard to find. A lot of websites nowadays are total free-for-alls where anyone can create a profile and sign up with little to no experience.
In addition to simplicity in getting on the board, people can often manipulate reviews to make them seem like better workers than they truly are, and getting scammed by someone—while also falling through on important work that needs to be done in the process—isn’t something that should be happening to people as often as it does.
Hiring a freelancer isn’t about finding the best of the best necessarily, but rather the person that’ll get the job done in a way that you and said person can agree on. That’s part of the perk to FreeeUp: they vet all of their applicants in a very intense process that reviews things like attitude, skill, and communication to make sure that they’re as talented, passionate, and caring about what they do as people need them to be.
Additionally, the speed in which you can connect to a reliable freelancer is incredible, and knowing that you can trust someone due to the process they went through to get accepted (on FreeeUp, only 1 in 100 applicants make it to the marketplace) makes hiring a freelancer a much easier and reassuring process.
Keeping track of what you’re looking for and the things you need these people to handle makes the process of hiring a freelancer a little bit easier for you to navigate. With these things in mind and the knowledge that cultivating your relationships with these people through the power of communication is truly key in effectively finding the best business partnership you’re looking for, here are some additional tips on hiring a freelancer and what you should be looking for along the way.
1: Take Advantage of Remote Workers
In this day and age, many people will work remotely, and doing so gives them an amazing chance to help people all over the world with whatever their skills and services can apply to. When you limit yourself to hiring employees from your local area, you’re not only competing with your town for that talent, but you’re also competing with other businesses as well.
Instead, look to hiring a freelancer online! Remote workers are wonderful due to the fact that by choosing them, you get access to talent from all around the world in a variety of different industries. Because of that diversity, you also get a whole price range to work with, making it so you can spend your money wisely where you need it and allowing you, as a business owner, to budget intelligently.
Did you know that over the next 10 years, it’s estimated that 50% of people will be working remotely or hiring remotely? It’s true! You can feel it in the way that digital marketing works that a shift is coming, and if you’re a business owner, you need to be taking advantage of this incredibly large supply of skilled workers who are ready to work for you around the clock!
And trust me—if you’re not taking advantage of remote workers and hiring a freelancer, your competitors most certainly are. Don’t let them get the edge up!
2: Set Communications and Expectations Up Front
When it comes to hiring a freelancer, it’s easy to get lost in a grey area of deadlines, expectations, and what they should be doing when things aren’t discussed up front. Therefore, being forthcoming about these important details will make your entire experience ten times better than it was before.
Bring very clear points to the table, and make things as black and white as possible. This way, people know exactly what you’re expecting from them, when they should have their work done, and how they should get it to you as quickly and accessibly as possible.
This means that time frames should be concrete. Give them a specific date and time to get their work done by, therefore eliminating any confusion about when they should be done. This saves you from wasting your time and energy down the line on people who will misunderstand what you’re trying to say and cost you a deadline due to incomplete work.
Structure helps! In turn, you also want to set expectations of communication. This means that you need to make sure the freelancer you’ve hired knows what to do when you’re not around—who they need to talk to for certain answers and certain services, what time you’re no longer able to answer any questions they might have, and a meeting schedule that you can both follow.
When you’re working in an office building, you want to surround yourself with people who you want to work with. Hiring a freelancer works in the very same vein. Finding someone that’s the best at something doesn’t always mean that they’re the best fit for you or the office setting you’ve started to accumulate. Use your communication skills to make sure that you’re bringing on people who want to share your values and can fit in with your business manager style.
3: Build Your Company Culture
People might argue that, when hiring a freelancer, you aren’t getting the same company feels that you would if you were working together in an office building. And to that, I say, no way! In fact, there’s a large chance that you can build a better company culture with your remote workers than you could with local workers. Office settings can be tricky to handle when trying to maintain the idea of company culture.
On top of hanging out with these people nonstop, you have things like personality clashes, gossip, and people hanging by the water cooler and wasting time when they should be working. A lot of those things don’t happen with remote workers, and—if they do—it’s on a much, much smaller scale, making it easy to manage and easy to resolve!
Overall, company culture is what defines the type of business you want to be running. Are you of a more cutthroat mentality that focuses purely on sales, are you open to ideas and feedback on improvement from your workers, or are you set in your ways as the person in charge and prefer to keep it that way?
There’s truly no right or wrong, and there’s success to be found in business in a lot of different ways. However, it’s important to think about the message you want to be sending. Hiring a freelancer builds directly off of the kind of workers and personalities you want to welcome into the fold of your business.
Regardless of what you choose, you do want to make sure that the people you hire are people who are willing to share their ideas, as well as people who can take feedback without letting it affect them personally, as well as hindering their work in the process. Hiring a freelancer that possesses these traits leads to a very positive and productive company culture.
4: Listen to Feedback to Reduce Turnover Rates
It’s happened to everyone. After surfing through several people to fill the same position for a freelance job, they end up quitting, leaving you with unfulfilled work as well as several questions about what you could be doing that’s making these people leave.
It’s hard to come to terms with, as well as frustrating for you, the business owner, to be wasting your time with people who have no intention of sticking around to help you in the way that they ensured they would.
To fix this turnover issue, I encourage business owners to listen to what these former employees have to say about their time and experience working with the company. Hiring a freelancer is risky for these exact reasons. You’re never quite sure who’s in it for the long haul, but listening to people explain why they left can give you ideas on how you should go about hiring in the future, as well as get you thinking about how you run your business in the first place and the kind of message you could be sending out unintentionally.
For example, if you’re a business that’s based in the United States, the way you talk and explain things in a direct tone of voice might not translate well to people outside of the country who don’t speak English as a first language. Making sure you’re coming across in a way that doesn’t negatively affect people is extremely important when hiring a freelancer since the world is basically your want ads.
Take time to think about things: the attitude you have, your communication with workers (when you get people with better attitudes that are passionate, friendly, and enjoy being in your company, they stay longer when you can surround them with like-minded people), and ensuring that you’re setting expectations with these people right from the beginning.
These issues, though they might seem crushing, are entirely capable of being fixed. Hiring a freelancer isn’t just about finding someone who can do the job; it’s about searching for someone who, as well as having the skills that make them capable of hiring, is also a complementary fit in terms of personality and positivity. In order to find this perfect balance, however, you need to take the feedback you receive seriously and make changes to the way that things are running based on this feedback. The results will speak for themselves!
Hiring a Freelancer: Communication Sets the Precedent
In the end, hiring a freelancer is something that comes down to the willingness you have to cultivate your relationships with the people you hire. As a business owner, you know what kind of person you are when it comes to managing your services, and finding people that fit into the fold you’ve already generated is the most important aspect of finding someone that will stick around, as well as someone that will get the job done in a timely manner.
With the preconceived notions that hiring a freelancer can be a task many people don’t enjoy undertaking, these tips should shed some light on the subject, as well as bring the most important notions you want to take notice of to the forefront.
When people want to know what the atmosphere is like of your company, they don’t go to the boss first; they go to the people working at ground level. Employees will give you the most honest feedback that you’re looking for, and freelancers are the kind of people who will effectively improve the way your business is running, as well as the way you get your work done. So long as you find the best fit, you’ll have a happier, longer lasting, and more efficient staff!
