Freelancers are among the best talent options available. They’re consistently learning and evolving their skills; they usually come out cheaper than employees; and they require minimal training to start work. So, with that in mind, why would you choose a freelancer when you could have a dedicated employee instead? The truth is, a degree of loyalty and immersion comes with employees. There’s a reason that uber-wealthy families retain professionals on a solo salary. They’re able to ensure that the individual never needs to worry about money and no longer has any reason to violate the family’s trust.
Benefits of Planning with a Freelancer
Freelancers often prepare a proposal and pitch for a given job. Those proposals commonly cover things like scope of work, price, payment structure, and deliverable expectations. Delivery timelines are also included in many proposals because project managers utilize factors like freelancer availability and bandwidth to decide which freelancer(s) they want to hire.
These differ from working with an employee because an employee undergoes onboarding, usually receives a pre-defined scope of work, and then proceeds to fulfill it.
When you’re not the one who initially scopes a project, you automatically benefit from planning insights that you wouldn’t have otherwise had. That’s one of the reasons companies tend to bring in consultants for hundreds to thousands of dollars per hour, from the world’s top consulting firms. If you’re about to start the process of hiring a freelancer and don’t know where to start, check out Dormzi.com.
Project Management and Budgeting Perks
Budgeting for additional creation and buying time is often easier when you look at acquiring a freelancer’s services. Many sell pre-defined packages for deliverables or sell their time in hourly blocks. If you need something fully-custom, freelancers can also offer you a proposal on a project-to-project basis. Over time, you’ll come to know about what any given tasks would cost when you outsource them to a freelancer.
Once you’ve defined and agreed on a scope of work and you’ve finished budgeting, you’re going to move into the project management stage. Fortunately, you’re likely to be working with a professional who has developed project management skills to the degree that they can work within your existing systems. Some freelancers can even help you build new processes and refine preexisting processes.
Cost Efficiency
A freelancer — when compared to an employee — are generally most cost-efficient. This is true for a number of reasons, despite a higher hourly rate upfront. The hidden costs of employment often amount to 30-50 percent of an employee’s wages. These hidden costs include things like initial training and recurring training each year, employee healthcare, and employee income tax withholdings.
These costs aside, freelancers are often quicker to complete tasks due to the nature of their income streams. Many freelancers book several clients rather than relying on one or two to keep their bills paid. Freelancers diversify their client base for a few reasons:table income, diverse experiences, socialization, to sate curiosities, etc.
Experiential Diversity
It’s also important to consider that the global job market is changing. Over half of Gen-Z freelance by choice. Many could find a traditional career, but they prefer the freedom, control, and wealth of experiences that come from working among many teams at once. Learning new skills is drastically faster.
As time has progressed, acquiring skills has become easier. This has led to a constant information and skills arms-race among consultants and specialists. The trend of niching has become increasingly common.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Freelancers often have a ton of value to bring to the table with their diverse experience and uniquely developed skillsets. If you can truly utilize their skills, they will help you go a long way in your ventures.
- Employees have their own benefits, but they are often more expensive and may provide a narrower scope of use than a consultant or freelancer of a similar role would. That can, however, come with a deeper wealth of subject matter expertise.
- Freelancers normally pay for their own benefits, come to you trained on many aspects of the work you need to have done, and they are often responsible for their own upskilling and reskilling.
Niching simply makes more sense now, considering the massive amount of industry-specific expertise that consultants will aggregate over time and how much more becomes available during that same period. Hiring a freelancer is generally easy since some platforms have emerged that help freelancers showcase their skills.
