Why are a growing number of businesses incorporating freelancers into their operations?
Companies with the intention of remaining competitive this year, and beyond, are modernizing the way they hire employees. One of the ways they’re doing it is by utilizing freelancers and fractional experts. Forward-thinking companies are evaluating the current environment and taking a big-picture view of their current and future labor requirements.
Increased demand for your services often leads to a short-term need to hire new staff. However, there’s a lot of time and money associated with hiring new employees, so hiring freelancers or fractional employees to fill these positions reduces many costs and risks, especially if demand decreases quickly or at short notice.
If your business is in the process of modernizing its employment strategy, be sure to check out The Benefits of A Fractional Marketing Team to learn more about how a fractional marketing team could be the perfect solution for your business.
Why Are Companies Choosing to Hire More Freelancers and Fractionals?
Companies worldwide are choosing to hire freelancers and fractionals to quickly fill the gaps in their skill requirements. Ever-changing digital landscapes, customer demand, and leveraging AI advancements put a lot of strain on the company’s resources.
But why are companies suddenly facing critical shortfalls in their teams? For many years now, companies have been downsizing staff while cutting down their training and development budgets to increase profits, and with things evolving faster than any one person can manage, they’re now having to look outside their organization to secure the skills they need to remain competitive.
However, keeping teams small isn’t necessarily always a bad thing. You just need to be ready to pivot to meet new demands and one of the ways that a company can do that more efficiently and effectively is by working with freelancers and fractional employees.
10 Reasons Why Companies Are Hiring More Freelancers
1. Saving Money
Hiring a full-time employee for a specific project, especially short-term projects, can be extremely expensive. Interviewing, training, integration, benefits, and everything else associated with full-time employees quickly add up, not to mention the taxes, especially if you don’t need them for long. Hiring a freelancer for task-oriented jobs and a fractional expert for more strategy-related roles, can be much cheaper, especially if they’re experienced and can quickly hit the ground running.
2. Access to Specialized Talent
Training existing employees for new tasks, especially one-off or short-term projects, can be expensive, and the last thing you want to do is hire full-time employees and then have them sit around after the project is done, or worse, have to pay severance pay when you let them go.
When you hire freelancers or fractional workers, you have access to some of the most talented workers in their individual fields of expertise. Not only that, but they’re used to quickly slotting into existing teams, hitting the ground running, and getting things done as quickly as possible.
3. Provide High-Quality Work
Experienced freelancers and fractioanls specialize in specific areas of expertise, which means they deliver high-quality work. After all, they rely on positive reviews and connections made through contracts, so it’s in their best interest to go above and beyond for their clients. That doesn’t mean that they’re all perfect, but if they’ve been working in their industry for a while, there’s a good chance they know what they’re doing.
4. Faster Project Delivery
In most cases, it’s in their best interest to finish projects as quickly as possible. Not only to deliver a great experience to their clients but also to enable them to move on to other projects they have lined up.
Not only that, but freelancers and fractional workers often work from home, making their own hours and working uninterrupted by other employees, office distractions, and meetings, which means their work time is often more valuable.
5. More Global Opportunities
Instead of hiring employees within driving distance of your office, hiring a freelancer or fractional expert enables you to effectively hire from anywhere in the world, giving you a much larger pool of potential employees.
6. Less Financial Investment and Risk
There’s nothing worse than hiring a new employee, training them, and integrating them into the company lifestyle and culture, only to have them leave shortly after. It’s a massive financial and time investment, and according to SHRM, the average cost of just hiring a new employee is almost $5,000 per employee, and that’s just to find and hire them and doesn’t consider the time and money spent on training them.
Freelancers are much cheaper to hire, and by using 3rd party freelancer sites such as Upwork or Fiverr, you can reduce that risk even more. They act as intermediaries between you and freelancers. Fractional experts can be found on LinkedIn, in your personal network or through fractional groups like Fractional’s United.
7. You’re Not Locked In
When you work with freelancers and fractional experts, you’re not locked into long contracts or full-time employment conditions. You can hire them for a week, month, or project if that’s what you need. It makes it much easier to complete niche or specialized projects your company doesn’t run into very often.
8. Easier to Source, Hire, and Secure Talent
Working with experienced freelancers and fractional employees who are used to quickly integrating themselves into new organizations makes hiring the talent you need much easier than interviewing and hiring full-time employees. They will also come with their own equipment, so they can hit the ground running immediately.
9. More Diversity
Because you’re potentially hiring from a global pool of candidates, it means that the diversity of your company will be much greater. Building diversity in your organization allows you to access different ways of thinking, tackling problems, and how you overcome challenges.
10. Flexible Schedules
When you’re working with freelancers and fractional workers from around the world, it means you have employees working in different time zones. If you have a project on a tight timeline, essentially, this means that you can have teams working on the same project 24/7. Bringing freelancers or fractionals on board to deal with time-sensitive projects also makes meeting tight deadlines much easier and makes the impact on full-time employees with less flexible schedules and higher costs less of an issue.
Freelancers and Fractional Workers Open New Opportunities
The world is changing quickly, and how we operate, including how we manage employees, is evolving quickly. If your company wants to remain competitive, you need to be flexible enough to change with it.
If you need help with your brand, business marketing, or social media, including blogs and articles, to improve your search rankings and website conversion rate, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 6° Media & Marketing. Our experienced and professional team not only understands the importance of online marketing, but we can help you grow your business organically.
You can contact us directly using the contact form, email us at info@6degrees.media, or even book a complimentary 30-minute phone consultation to discuss your needs.
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