Hiring freelancers can do wonders for your business.
You can lessen your administrative burden, get expert technical services, and concentrate better on your mission-critical ventures and responsibilities.
However, working with several freelancers can be a total nightmare from a management perspective. You’d need to deal with cultural differences, language barriers, and the differing time zones, among other things.
If you’re struggling with these issues, then this guide is for you.
Below are a list of helpful tips for efficient freelancer management. Check out these five strategies:
1. Tap the right talent for a position.
Getting the best people for the job is among the most critical things to ensure when hiring. Doing so helps you secure the excellent and timely completion of your deliverables. Conversely, hiring mismatched talents can ruin your outputs’ quality, ability to meet deadlines, and, ultimately, your bottomline.
Streamline your evaluation process by listing first all the technical requirements, skills, and qualities you want the talent to possess. Include these details in your job post, so the candidates know what they need to have before submitting their applications.
Let’s say you’re a digital marketing agency looking for a conversion optimization specialist. Mention that the person should have sufficient knowledge and skills in A/B testing, web analytics, inbound marketing, etc.
They should know how to double your conversion rate without creating a new site, build conversion-friendly landing pages, and so on.
Alternatively, if you’re looking for a social media manager or marketer, the person should have excellent copywriting skills to engage your audience effectively.
The freelancer must be social media savvy and well-acquainted with networking platforms’ rules. These include content types to post publicly as a business page, when joining online communities, and more.
A responsible social media manager like that can prevent ruining your business image and your account from getting shadowbanned.
The right freelancer for that position can also bring about your desired revenues, conversions, and other business outcomes.
You can also indicate your desired amount of expertise or work experience for the position in your job post.
Depending on your business requirements, if you’re forming several freelancers into a team, consider diversifying their expertise and experience levels.
Have a good mix of specialists, intermediate-level talents, and beginners. Doing this lets you distribute tasks evenly and keep their focus on their primary responsibilities.
For example, experts can lead and handle the primary technical report writing, idea proposal, and operations management. Beginners can take care of administrative tasks, and intermediate-level talents can assist in both responsibilities.
By determining the best person for the job, you can concentrate on your responsibilities without worrying about tedious essential business aspects.
2. Simplify your remote hiring workflows.
Remote hiring usually has different dynamics from in-person ones, mainly because of the technical requirements involved. You need an appropriate video conferencing platform, a stable Internet connection, etc., to implement a smooth online recruitment process.
One of the things that can simplify your remote hiring workflows is video interviewing tools. These platforms have high-quality video and audio systems, question-and-answer chat boxes, rating guides, and other helpful functionalities.
Video interviewing platforms can also integrate with the standard HR tools you use. These include applicant tracking technologies, talent acquisition solutions, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, and so on. Maximize video interviewing tools to streamline the remote hiring lifecycle holistically.
3. Use an efficient collaboration platform.
Physical distance is often a communication barrier, which is why working remotely with freelancers is challenging. To manage them effectively, you should always coordinate closely and constantly with them.
When doing that, don’t use inefficient online communication tools such as email. If you do, messages from other people can easily drown out your conversations with freelancers. You also have to search high and low for particular details mentioned, attachments, and others.
Instead, leverage collaboration platforms where you can keep freelancer communications and shared resources in one place. These tools can let you categorize your engagements by person, project, and more.
Project management tools are some of the best collaboration platforms to use for this purpose. With these solutions, you can do the following:
- Add and delegate tasks
- Upload and share files
- Comment on to-do’s
- Organize tasks by status (or other classifications)
- View project progress and tasks in calendar, lists, boards, and other viewing methods
- Chat internally
- Receive updates and more.
These functions make freelancer collaboration seamless and interactive, as freelancers can also perform some of those actions according to their set roles and permissions.
4. Define the essential aspects of your engagement.
Clarify at the onset the fundamental parts of your collaboration with freelancers.
Doing so helps set expectations for both parties, define vague terminologies, and identify assignment overlaps. It also minimizes back-and-forth interaction and streamlines your overall coordination.
If you’re working on a project, specify the engagement’s scope, freelancer’s role, activity terminologies, contract provisions, and others.
For instance, let’s say you’re a digital marketing agency and you tapped a graphic designer for a virtual summit you’re organizing for your client.
To design the e-invitations, thank-you messages, and other content materials appropriately, the freelancer should know the difference between a summit and, say, a conference (or any other virtual event).
A summit assembles top organizational leaders to discuss solutions to a prevalent issue. A conference gathers more generic sectors (e.g., veterinarians, psychologists, etc.) to exchange industry updates and ideas. Conventions call together fanatics, and so on.
Your freelancer can apply more formal designs in the content materials by knowing what a summit is and how it differs from other events.
Otherwise, they will implement random designs that don’t match the summit’s theme and audience type. This repels and confuses industry leaders and makes your agency look unversed and unreliable.
5. Leverage time and productivity trackers.
Tracking your freelancers’ hours and productivity is crucial in determining your payments and monitoring their outputs’ progress. However, doing so with inefficient methods can eat up your attention from other business aspects.
Leverage online time trackers to do the monitoring for you.
These tools can automatically compute their work hours and equivalent salaries according to your company policies and applicable regulations.
They can also take random screenshots of your freelancers’ work, generate productivity reports, and more.
Examples of time trackers you can use are Time Doctor, Clockify, Harvest, Hubstaff, TMEtric, Toggl, RescueTime, and Everhour.
Make your freelancer management a whole lot smoother.
Manage your freelancers more smoothly with these and other tips and tools. Explore the best ones that match your company’s dynamics or adjust them to meet your needs. The result should be more seamless freelancer coordination simplifying your management tasks, boosting your profitability, and helping you reach other goals.
Marc lives and breathes writing. He writes just about anything and everything under the sun from digital marketing, web development, and cryptocurrencies among other things.