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.