Hiring freelancers in Startups
Sebastian Varga
13 replies
I would be interested if some of you have hired external freelancers for your startup, and if yes in what capacity?
Where you happy with their performance? Did they boost your growth or were they a drain to your company's budget?
I would love to hear about your experiences.
Replies
Emilia Vicini@emilia_vicini
Hi @arviaja, my advice to ensure that freelancers won't drain your budget would be to set clear performance goals for the first 3 months, for instance. This way, you establish indicators in advance that will help you measure their work and take action when needed.
If you're not interested in conducting a full recruiting process to bring someone in-house, there are several platforms that offer reviews of freelancers based on their previous jobs, giving you more insight into what to expect. I remember Workana.com, for example.
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@emilia_vicini Thanks for the feedback. That's indeed the concern I hear, and you are absolutely right. The scaling will be tricky, but I do have a network of experienced IT-Architects. The "secret" is to cut out the overhead. There are many, many projects which have settled in this slow paced corporate slug mode, which ends up with me attending endless meetings or simply waiting for others. With my approach, I think I would successfully remove all of that. I've tried with some clients to change my workflow to what I envision here and sure enough, much more got done in a much shorter time frame.
I'm sure I will need to adjust and change a lot if this is taking off, but that's part of the start-up experience
@emilia_vicini could you imagine to set clear deliverables, maybe in a ticket system to prevent them draining the budget by extending their time spent on work? Most freelancers are paid by the hour, so naturally there's an incentive to drag out work as much as possible.
What you think of fixed price or flatrate contracts?
@arviaja if your team is already using a ticket system, like Jira, that would be great! If not, you can use any tracking management tool, like Asana, to set tasks with due dates and gain visibility into the work being done.
I'm used to working with hourly rates alongside a fixed price, especially for medium to long-term projects. We aim to define the anticipated number of hours in advance – let's say a minimum of 30 and a maximum of 40 hours. Having a maximum helps us address unexpected tasks that might arise during project delivery. The freelancer is aware that they won't be able to exceed that predefined amount, and they will also be required to 'justify' the time spend.
However, the choice will always depend on the project, right? If you only need to work on a specific feature for a short period, it's often better to proceed with a flat-rate contract.
@emilia_vicini I'm actually on the other side of this. I have been working in IT-Infrastructure for 20 years and 11 of those as a freelance consultant. Now I'm trying to move away from hourly or daily rates to a flatrate. So the flatrate is much lower per month than if you would hire me 40 hours a week and I removed everything that causes friction and inefficiencies. I don't go into meetings, I don't do onboarding etc. Customers would only submit clear requests for tangible results (like architecture designs, configurations, script, code etc). and I deliver just that. In some instances that cust down a job that takes 4 weeks to half a day (I kid you not, that's how bad the overhead often is)
From your experience, do you think that could be a viable business model?
@arviaja that sounds like a fantastic opportunity to reduce costs and time for your clients. As a business pitch, it is quite appealing. My only concern, considering my HR mindset, is that YOU are able to complete a task in half a day instead of 4 weeks due to your experience and seniority. However, can you envision accomplishing this task on your own or with a team? Let's assume you receive numerous requests and require additional assistance. How can you continue to deliver the same quality of service?
Launching soon!
I wouldn't go with anyone below a 95% (ideally 99%) job success on UpWork. Just from past experience and horror stores - I'd pay a bit of a premium to be sure you're getting a solid candidate.
I've used them more so for project work (always a little hard to forecast budget) but the risk profile is lower.
A smart process is to hire someone on a project basis - If they kill it - bring them on for a longer term contract. (3 months longest at the front end) and go from there.
@dzaitzow have you worked with consultants/freelancers directly? It would be interesting to hear if on avarage they perform better or worse than full time employees. What I'm particularly interested in are IT-freelancers. In Europe, the market is very extensive since it's hard to find talent for companies, especially in coding and IT-Infrastructure (cloud especially)
Launching soon!
@arviaja I have worked with consultants/freelancers/contractors directly. In Canada there are some stipulations that make it easier (from a productivity standpoint) to hire employees but legally/economically/contractually its always easier to hire contractors.
For globally sourced dev talent (Salesforce admin to full stack) I found that contractors preformed on par with full time employees. Oftentimes contractors who we were helping get on work permits we're always more responsive.
For IT I've only ever hired local talent in a full time capacity but depending on the scope it is likely something I could start in a contract (full time hours) but do a lot of heavy vetting to see if they WANT to be full time/employees or if they like the freelancer lifestyle.
I think it depends on your need and the scope of the project - If you need someone to set up your servers and be on call to help every few weeks - I'd think about freelance/consulting hires even tho they might cost you a bit of a premium.
If you need someone full time - I'd really think about investing the time in finding the right candidate.
- Not sure if that helps haha
Launching soon!
@arviaja I would say it’s comparable with market norms. I guess it depends on what you mean by IT. If you need a senior systems administrator to set up massive complex infrastructure - yea they command a premium. If you’re looking for IT specialists to handle ticketing and low level inquires - much easier to find.