The Pros and Cons of Working with Freelancers

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/pros-cons-working-with-freelancers/

When you want to grow your business one of the personnel options you have is to hire freelancers. Of course, it’s not only during growth when you can use the freelance workforce, there are many benefits for companies of all shapes and sizes. In fact, many companies of almost any size use the freelance workforce.

In this article I will brief you on the pros and cons of working with freelancers, as well as tips and tricks how to find them and what to look for. In a later article I will share my tips for effective communication with freelancers and I’ll share it here.

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I like to contribute to your article,Shall I ?And yes,your article is great!!

Freelacing ROCKS!. Now every country is beginning to have its our Freelance marketplace to assist their freelancing who are looking for online work.

Good analysis.
I would like to add in another point of view.
A lot of time, I figure it’s not only the pros and cons of freelancer, but simply a lot of freelancers doesn’t have a well developed strategy on approaching potential customers and presenting themselves.
Unlike company, freelancer often don’t have the resource and time to build a good brand out of themselves. When company or design firm only needs to persuade the customer they can meet the particular need, freelancer often needs to prove they are trust-worthy first before they can even sit down and talk about design.
Fortunately, the growth of online community, podcast, blog, webinar, social media, outsourcing resource is providing freelancer a huge opportunity most company is weak on - the personalize experience of working with a real person.
Utilizing all these new tools, it’s likely the market for freelancer is looking at another big growth in the near future.

You are right, when a freelancer has no marketing/business skills, no matter how good he or she is, his or her chances to find good work are not high. Fortunately, companies know about this and frequently they don’t judge a freelancer by his or her marketing/sales skills. This is especially true about techies, a large number of whom are known for the lack of soft skills of any kind.

Poor article. All cons can be for on-site employees as well.

Confidentiality Issues

While not very common, there are industries and companies in which issues of confidentiality mean that it is difficult to work with freelancers. Of course, you can ask that they sign a non-disclosure agreement, but you’ll still have to weigh up the risks.

How is that much different than with an on-site employee?
Get a patent, if you have anything patentable, otherwise NDA is pretty much nonsense, it’s just more like a formality.

Since freelancers as a rule have multiple projects at the same time, it’s quite possible the freelancer of your choice is unavailable when you need him or her.

Not true.
Freelancing does not imply working on multiple projects at the same time.
Your on-site employee can have some side work as well, this happens a lot in IT. And he\she can become ‘unavailable’ too or perform poorly too.

Less Control
… However, if you plan well, establish milestones, and set clear progress reporting rules, you will be less likely to experience last minute disasters.

Isn’t this the same management you need to do for on-site employees as well?

Also, the article forgets to mention odesk.com, freelancer.com the most popular international freelancing portals.

My random thoughts on freelancing:

  • Not all projects are suitable for remote work, but many software work is.
  • A freelancer can be as good or as bad as on-site one.
  • Depending on the local work legislation, firing an employee can actually be a difficult thing. So freelancing from this perspective can be a better option.
  • The hiring process for a freelancer shouldn’t be different than for on-site.
  • With the right setup and communication tools(there are lots of good ones these days) remote work isn’t a problem.
  • Don’t be greedy. Be realistic about the quote your are looking for to pay.
    If you believe in the magical software engineer for 5$ \ hour, don’t cry if it doesn’t turn out like you hoped.
    Someone with a good command of English and good skills will quickly find something better than the 5$ \ hour you are paying.

How is that much different than with an on-site employee?
Get a patent, if you have anything patentable, otherwise NDA is pretty much nonsense, it’s just more like a formality.

With on-site employees you basically have more control. Of course, you can’t prevent leaks but simply there are more ways to keep your secrets under wraps. There are many things you can’t patent, such as ideas, and it also hurts if these get disclosed to competitors or the general public. I am not a lawyer but I presume you can sue for damages based on an employee/freelancer violating an NDA. Maybe you could sue without NDA, too but presumably a NDA goes into more specifics of what you can share and what you can’t.

Freelancing does not imply working on multiple projects at the same time.
Your on-site employee can have some side work as well, this happens a lot in
IT. And he\she can become ‘unavailable’ too or perform poorly too.

Freelancing frequently implies working on multiple projects at the same time - this is the essence of freelancing to get projects as they come and not be tied to a single project/client. The only exception I can think of is when a freelancer gets a huge project that takes all his time and capacity in all other cases freelancers have let’s say 2 to 5 smaller projects a week - ongoing or one time and they work on all of them.

As for the unavailability of in-house employees, this could happen - not only because they work on their private projects but because they get sick or have other personal issues to attend to but the idea is that you don’t pay them salaries to work on their private projects and do some work for you when they please. If they are systematically unavailable, why keep them on payroll?

Isn’t this the same management you need to do for on-site employees as well?

Correct, basically it’s the same.

Also, the article forgets to mention odesk.com, freelancer.com the most popular international freelancing portals.

These are good, too. My personal preference goes to Elance, Guru, and PPH and this is why I listed them. There are tons of other smaller sites, including local ones, that could prove better than the biggest ones where there are dozens of projects a day and for a new buyer it might be hard to attract any good freelancers, just the automated bids “For $5 we’ll do anything you tell us, sir. We are the best”

The hiring process for a freelancer shouldn’t be different than for on-site.

It depends on the project. If you need a freelancer for a quick 5-10 hour WordPress job, there is no need to perform a background check, for example, and the hiring process as a whole could be much more informal. As for technical skills, you might want more from a freelancer than from in-house employees - after all you are hiring the freelancer to fill in an expertise gap, so you can expect more.

Don’t be greedy. Be realistic about the quote your are looking for to pay.
If you believe in the magical software engineer for 5$ \ hour, don’t cry if it doesn’t turn out like you hoped.
Someone with a good command of English and good skills will quickly find something better than the 5$ \ hour you are paying.

Absolutely. This is true for both in-house and freelance workforce.

I have recently got in touch with a freelancer for my company work . It was my first time with freelancers to get our work done, but I found it pretty good. Its not necessary that if you are hiring a freelancer for the first time than you would face problems. I have done it and it is a nice experience for me.

I think mikeh raises some valid issues but I disagree with his statement that it is a poor article. The points you identify in the article ARE the most common basic pros and cons for using freelancers, although there are always exceptions and neither the pros nor the cons universally apply to every situation.

For example, freelancers are not always less expensive (on a per hour basis, anyway) than an employee. In some cases, it makes sense to hire a highly paid expert as a freelancer rather than having lower cost employees muddle through a task that they lack the skills to handle.

Timely article!

Can anyone tell me where to find a freelancer for a project I’m working on and how much I should expect the project to cost?

I want to create a series of quizzes and tests for my websites. I work with PHP and MySQL, and I’ve already put together a working quiz (10 questions) that uses jQuery and JSON. However, I still have a few bugs to work out. For example, the questions are all multiple choice, but I’d like to be able to include fill-in-the-blank questions, too.

I’d also like to set it up so that visitors can register with my sites, log in, and have their test scores recorded. The database might store their name, username, password, the ID of a particular quiz, the date and their score.

I’ve spent the last week developing the quiz, and it’s probably going to take at least two more weeks to figure out how to do the other stuff. So I just wondered how much a freelancer would charge to do something like this - and where should I got to hire one?

I hired a freelancer for another project a few months ago, but he didn’t have the skills to do it. I paid him a little for his time.

Thanks for any tips.

Hi Chavista,

Check Elance, oDesk, Guru or any other freelancing site for freelancers to contact about your project. Register with the site and post a project in the Web Development category (or a similar one) and see who answers your ad. You might set some price but you could also leave it open and see how much the freelancers who contact you will ask for.

Thanks.

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