Hassan Mansoor — March 3, 2018 As a startup owner, you’re probably bothered.
Firstly, it’s a challenge to get the funds to make your idea become a reality.
Secondly, after getting the funds to get started it’s difficult to assemble the right team with your lean budget.
Finally, becoming known and remaining in business for long despite the stiff competition is also a herculean task.
Of all these challenges, finding the perfect team that’ll work for your business seems to be the most critical.
This is because, only the right team can understand your business goals, mission, and vision, etc., to ensure that your startup stands the test of time.
Not only that, your team can make your startup become an imminent success or an eventual failure.
While many startups understand the importance of having a great team, most still find it difficult.
Since setting up a team is usually costly, time-consuming, and risky.
At times, you might have the perfect candidates but don’t have enough money to hire them.
Similarly, you’ll likely conduct tests, interviews and so on (which usually takes time), before getting any.
In this post, I’ll show you why you should consider hiring freelancers for your startup, and how to get the best that’ll make your startup successful.
Why You Need Freelancers For Your Startup
As a startup, having freelancers can help your business in a number of ways.
Below are five (5) solid reasons why you should consider hiring freelancers for your team.
- It’s cost-effective: Hiring freelancers is one of the best ways to cut costs as a startup. After all, freelancers don’t require packages and bonuses requested by full-time workers. All you need to do is to pay them for the hours worked, or on the projects successfully completed.
- It saves time: With the click of a button, you can hire freelancers on your team. It’s not rocket science since most of them work online. Hence, they’re readily available for new projects.
- It gives you a lot of options: With freelancers on your team, you’ll be presented with a wide range of great options that your startup can explore immediately. This is because most freelancers are skilled in many areas. For example, you can get a freelance writer, who’s also good in graphic designing.
- Your employees’ base knows no boundary: Most freelancers telecommute, so you can easily have a lot of them from different countries on your team. Hence, your business can be domiciled in the UK, whereas you have freelancers from America, Africa, and Asia on your team.
- It aids bootstrapping: Most startups have resorted to bootstrapping to keep their business running and getting great results too. Freelancers are useful in this regard. In most cases, you pay when a project has successfully been completed. In fact, you can negotiate with those who can be paid when your business can afford to.
How to Get the Best Freelancers That’ll Make Your Startup Successful
Identifying the need for freelancers in your startup isn’t enough. Getting the best hands who want to make a successful career in freelancing and work tirelessly for your startup’s success is the way to go.
Here are the ways you can get the best freelancers to work on your team.
Explore freelance job bidding websites
Freelance job bidding websites provide opportunities for businesses looking for freelancers. On these websites, you specify the kind of jobs you have, post it, and wait for interested freelancers to bid for them. As a startup, you should be concerned about the charges, quality of reviews, projects completed, profile and so on of the freelancer before hiring one.
Target freelance job posting websites
With freelance job posting websites, you can put up freelance job opportunities. This helps you a lot because you’re able to get a lot of prospects easily. Some of these websites include Pro Blogger Job board, Craigslist and so on. Your concern, however, is to get the job description right, and making sure you can separate the wheat from the chaff in the pool of applications.
Utilise your website
As a startup with an online presence, you should have a website. Apart from being a great way to get clients to know about your business, it’s also useful when hiring freelancers. All you need to do is create a page or post with titles such as “We are hiring” or “Work with us” and so on. In most cases, freelancers will locate this through a google search, and get in touch with you afterward.
Peruse LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the social media platform meant for professionals. There, you’ll find job seekers looking for companies and businesses to hire them. All you need to do is to search for freelancers with keywords related to your job specifications on their profiles. After doing this, you’ll send a subtle message to them introducing your startup, and urging them to connect with you if interested in your startup. In most cases, you’ll get a handful of enthusiastic freelancers to join your team. If you want to leverage this very well, make use of the LinkedIn premium.
Request for referrals
If you’re a startup, chances are that you’ve never employed freelancers on your team. Hence, you might be scared of getting into the wrong hands. What you can do in this case, is to ask colleagues and friends to refer freelancers who can work on your team. If they’ve ever used freelancers, this’s a great way for you to get quality hands to help you achieve success with your startup.
Final Thoughts
A great team is a potent tool for any startup that wishes to achieve success fast.
With freelancers, you won’t labor so much to get the right hands.
The tips shared in this post will help you to focus more on the things that’ll make it easier for you to select the right freelancers for your startup.
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