5 Tips to Attract the Best Freelancers

Hiring a freelancer is often only associated with cutting costs. However, that's not entirely true. Freelancers bring aboard a number of benefits such as unique expertise, flexibility, and high-quality deliverables, and they require less supervision & fewer responsibilities. Now comes the tricky part: you must fetch the right fit from the freelancer market.

Finding the right freelancer for the role is like finding a needle in the haystack. In today's post, we will talk about how you can attract top freelancers. Before we jump on that, let's explore why freelancing is exponentially rising these days.

Why is freelancing booming these days?

Not far ago, when remote working was an alien term, freelancing as a career might have sounded bizarre to many. But today, as technology continues to connect people across borders, the market has a plethora of best freelancer jobs where people are breaking the 9 to 5 monotony.

According to a market statistics report by Flexiple, as of July 2022, there are over 58 million freelancers in the United States alone. Further induced by the pandemic, the digital nomad workstyle continues to grow exponentially and draw the best freelancers from all spheres of the industry.

How to pick the best freelancers for your job posting?

Now that we've understood why freelancing is unlocking a plethora of opportunities around the world. Let's move ahead & learn how you can boost your freelancer search and find the best possible talent across borders.

Consider Browsing the Best Freelancers' Websites

Leverage the best freelancers' websites to find great freelancers for the task. Professionals around the world use these websites to bid on projects. Since there is no talent pool shortage, you can access a diverse set of freelancers and empower your business goals.

A popular website example is goLance.com, amongst others. These websites offer state-of-the-art freelancing services and allow you to connect with the right freelancing professionals. Wondering about what is the best site for freelancers? You can simply sign-up as a client, post your job by providing a clear description of expectations, invite bids from freelancers, connect with like-minded professionals, and get started with development. If done right, you can attract the best freelancers and ensure high-quality work while going easy in your pocket.

Be Specific in Job Descriptions

Another imperative aspect in attracting the best freelancers is being lucid and illustrative in task descriptions. While posting ads or jobs on freelancing platforms, clients often fail to provide a crisp preface, description, and expectations about the assignment. This encourages the best freelancers to look for other jobs and creates disarray in the interaction. For instance, if you want to develop a website in PHP, you must explicitly highlight the tech stack & website specifications in the job post so that only relevant freelancers with the right skill apply for the task.

While posting ads on freelancing platforms, one should be specific. The proper job description serves as a basis for interviewing the right freelancers. You can use the benchmark to evaluate task progress and measure the performance of the freelancers. With an elaborative job description, you can attract exemplary freelancing talent and keep the work streamlined.

Offer Career Development Opportunities

One of the primary reasons best freelancers leave a company or client is a lack of career development opportunities. Regular feedback, a dedicated career development plan and technical & interpersonal training/support from an employer are perks only provided to full-time employees and are absent for freelancers. All growth-oriented professionals seek professional development; therefore, clients must consider providing professional development opportunities and support that helps freelancers work effectively while at the same time up their game.

Clients must ensure that their freelancers can access professional development tools such as workshops, seminars, webinars, specialist literature, conferences, or blogs. You may also consider providing them with a career development plan highlighting the goals, strategies, resources, tasks, and deadlines. This provides a timeframe plus a sense of direction to freelancers where they can comprehend the expectations and what they can learn, irrespective of remuneration.

Using Payment Gateways

While working with freelancers, another significant challenge is tracking the progress and disbursing the payments. Making payments to several freelancers worldwide can be a cumbersome and overwhelming task for clients. Not only you'll have to take care of international & local money transfer regulations, but you also have to ensure payments are sent & received without hassle.

Payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, Skrill, Instarem, and SecurionPay are used by clients and freelancers around the world to send & receive their payments. As a client wondering which payment gateway is best for freelancers, you can consider leveraging the services of any of the above platforms. You may consider evaluating the platforms based on metrics such as Transaction fees, Security, Multiple payment modes, Settlement time, Transaction limit, International payments, and others.

Conduct Quality Interviews

When it comes to getting hands on some of the top performing freelancers in your niche, it's a must to have a comprehensive and out-of-the-box interview process. One should note that hiring an in-house employee differs from hiring a freelancer, especially if it's a remote opportunity. When you need someone with just excellent skills to hit the ground running, your interview and hiring process can make all the difference.

Rather than directly jumping to test their technical expertise, it is often advised to understand why the professional is freelancing in the first place. As freelance contracts are short-term and can be canceled quickly, it is imperative to know whether the freelancer can stay committed to helping you throughout the journey or not! You might consider asking questions such as:

• How long have you been freelancing?
• What motivates you to freelance?
• What kind of projects have you worked on?
• How do you communicate & measure your results?
• How do you adhere to deadlines?
• Has a client ever ended a relationship abruptly?
  

The idea is to explore the interpersonal side of the freelancers in addition to evaluating their technical expertise. You may also consider referring to their ratings, reviews, testimonials, and referrals to boost the efficacy of your freelancer hiring interview.

Wrapping It Up

Gone are the days when talent managers struggled to get the best talent for the job. Today, as we progress in the digital age and with the advent of freelancing around the world, it has become easy to unlock access to the best pool of freelance professionals. The above points can enable you to kickstart your journey of finding the right freelancer(s), foster a healthy relationship, ensure engagement and get the work done.

Author

German Viera is an engineer transformed into an entrepreneur. Currently focusing on business growth, product improvements, design, marketing, and of course support of our valued customers.