The Freelance Boom: Advantage Employer
David Capece | May 28, 2009 | Comments 8
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.
Related posts:
- The Virtual Internship: Education in a Digital Age Remember your college days? You had at least five hours...
- Startup Business Model: Internet Publishing Internet businesses are finally profitable. In some cases, Internet companies...
- Who Will Capture the Flag? The Convergence of Digital, Traditional, Media & PR Agencies A recent "AdWeek" article observed that, "digitally centric agencies like...
- Gen Y in the Workplace Staying competitive in today’s marketplace means attracting Gen-Y’s top candidates,...
- Clients Seek Winning Digital Marketing Agency Digital marketing was the number one (69 percent) ranked marketing...
Filed Under: Social Impact
I don’t know how much I really like Craigslist. You’ve got the typical scammers that attempts to harm things for the user base. Don’t misunderstand me there are benefits to craigslist, but do the goods really outweigh the bad?
[...] 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 [...]
Thanks for mentioning Guru.com – If you are new to hiring a Freelancer, you may be worried about the risks of finding qualified talent you can trust; if you take a chance on a Freelancer, how can you be sure you won’t lose your investment?
Guru.com provides a unique Quality Score based Rank System that objectively assesses freelancer service quality to help guide your hiring decisions. Our Rank is based on customer acquisition, retention and unitized earnings – every freelancer is assigned a Quality Score percentile that shows where they stand in relation to other freelancers of similar skill sets. Feedback ratings, skills tests and other member statistics are also helpful in choosing the right fit for your need. For added protection and guaranteed satisfaction, use SafePay Escrow – Mediation and arbitration services are included with it – (though the need for these services has significantly dropped off since the January 2009 introduction of our new Rank System.) Guru.com also provides a 2% money back Loyalty Dollars program that allows you to earn money towards your next project.
[...] The freelance boom. [...]
I don’t post lots, but this was worth the read. Craigslist always has something new in stock. Some site I read had a post about a guy who was going to buy a car for his gf, and stumbled upon some ad with something about Hitler… Very odd. That is Craigslist…
This is definitely a great opportunity for employers to pick up top notch talent at a minimum of cost. Another freelancer option for buyers looking for programming work is is http://www.RentACoder.com, which offers the option of requiring the freelancer to place a deposit to guarantee delivery (which the other sites mentioned do not).
I think this is a great opportunity for both the company hiring as well as the the person being hired. It allows people to explore new careers with less commitment and oftentimes allows them a more flexible work schedule. Not to mention that short term contracts can benefit the employee by simply exposing them to a larger network of contacts which may help them find a permanent job should they choose to pursue one in the future. This scenario may be the way of the future.
You know, I have to tell you, I really enjoy this blog and the insight from everyone who participates. I find it to be refreshing and very informative. I wish there were more blogs like it. Anyway, I felt it was about time I posted, I