The Freelance Boom: Advantage Employer

Photo by Renxx Gmdr from Stock.Xchng

By David Capece, Managing Partner

Unemployment continues to surge, with expectations of surpassing 10% later this year.  While employers are in a great position to identify and lure great talent, the lack of economic visibility makes it difficult for many employers to commit to a long-term talent acquisition binge.

Savvy executives will find ways to take advantage of available talent to push their business forward.  If you don’t want to commit to hiring someone full-time, why not explore alternatives.  Interns, freelancers, and contract-to-hire enable the employer to dip into the talent pool while retaining maximum flexibility.

Interns: Interns are typically thought of as green college students who can handle the grunt work but not much more.  However, with the surge of continued education and higher education, interns now include students getting their MBAs and other masters degrees which can be quite valuable.  With a difficult job market, these students are seeing fewer opportunities and the oversupply works to your advantage.  Plus, if they do a great job, then you can consider them for hire in a year from now when they are graduating, and perhaps the economy is great.  You can recruit interns in your area by posting on Craigslist, or you can target specific schools through their career services department which would gladly accept postings for jobs and internships.

Freelancers: In the past, companies have turned to consultants and agencies to lead projects.  Of course, many of these organizations charge high premiums that are difficult to swallow in today’s economy.  Given all the layoffs, there are many talented leaders available with outstanding experience.  You can hire freelancers for a project, or even on an hourly basis.  You’ll find that they typically charge less than ½ the rate of a comparable consultancy or agency and they can often integrate into your team more quickly.  There are a number of sites to find freelancers including ELance, RFPDB.com, Guru.com, and of course Craigslist.

Contract-to-Hire: If you are thinking about a long-term full-timer, but just aren’t ready to make the commitment, than contract-to-hire is the way to go.  You get all the benefits of a full-time employee with the flexibility to remove the person from your payroll if they don’t live up to expectations or if your business changes.  Better yet, if they do a great job (and they likely will try as hard as possible since they are interviewing for their job everyday), and your business improves, than you can add you can quickly add this full-time person and have them hit the ground running immediately.  While you can try Craigslist for contract-to-hire, we’d suggest using more traditional job sites such as Monster and HotJobs or ones that are more specific to your industry / region.

These are all low-risk, high return opportunities to engage talent to help your business.  Take advantage of the downturn to get an infusion of talent at low cost.

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