Choosing the right employee for your startup can be a headache. It takes a long time to find a suitable candidate that you are looking for. You have to put a lot of effort into attracting applicants, screening, assessment, and onboarding. Sometimes, you get frustrated when the perfect candidate turns down your offer. The challenges don’t stop there, even after you hire the right employee, the dropout rate of new hires is relatively high. Based on Leadership IQ, 46% of new hires drop out of their job in 18 months. If you experience this, do you know that there are a lot benefits of hiring freelancer?
If you are tired of finding employees, hiring a freelancer can be a good alternative for your startup. In this era, freelancing is a popular career choice. A lot of people choose to avoid 9 to 5 jobs to have a more flexible life. According to Millo, Globally, there are 1.2 billion freelancers, which accounts for one-third of the total global workforce. In Indonesia, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, there were over 33 million freelancers in 2020. The number of freelancers rose significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic era. Recently, a lot of businesses have used freelance services. According to Sribulancer, 5,419 companies used freelancer services in 2019.
Hiring a freelancer can be a great choice to scale up your startup. Here is why you should consider hiring freelancers.
It is hard to find a competent employee to fill an extremely specialized job. If your startup needs the expertise to work on a project, a freelancer can be a great choice. Freelancers are specialized in a certain position and some of them have years of experience in the related fields. Your startup can scale up by the value that they offer. Some of the common services are writing, programming, graphic designing, app development, and many more.
Successful freelancers are determined by their portfolios. Since they move from project to project, freelancers are very result-oriented. Thus, they will deliver their best performance on your project to gain more reputation.
To be frank, every startup wants to cut costs. Hiring full-time employees can cost more money. From their wage, health insurance, paid leave, and many more. Other than that, the new employee needs training to fully understand their job desks.
In comparison, freelancers are already trained since the moment they stepped in. They have relevant experience and can navigate through their job desks quickly. They also don’t need to be accustomed to your startup’s working culture, since they are only there to finish their tasks. On average, companies can save 20% of their cost from hiring freelancers. Thus, hiring freelancers can help you cut costs and scale up your startup.
Freelancers are very flexible in choosing their working hours independently. While full-time employees follow a strict working schedule, freelancers can have their own schedule according to your startup needs.
Since freelancers can work anytime and anywhere, some might question their commitment to their clients. However, a freelancer’s flexibility in their work can be an advantage for your startup. They can adjust their working pace according to their schedule and a flow that works best for them. Since they are in their optimal state of mind, freelancers can deliver good results for your startup.
The process of hiring full-time workers can take a long time. Especially when you need a specialized talent to work on your project. This can be a problem considering the competitive nature of the startup industry that demands you to scale up quickly. Compared to full-time employees, freelancers are always available on the freelance marketplace when you need them. When you have an emergency problem, you can easily hire them from various platforms. Usually, the process of hiring a freelancer only takes a few days.
Rather than trying to solve emergency problems internally, you can quickly hire a freelancer for a temporary task. With their specialized talent, they can solve the specific problem quicker than your employees. Hence, hiring a freelancer can help your startup to scale up quickly.
Working in a company for a long time can cause biases and subjectivity. This is why sometimes, startups have difficulty in identifying their underlying problems. As third-party actors, freelancers can offer an objective perspective and troubleshoot the existing problem in your startup. Beyond that, freelancers are trained to jump from one job to the other. Hence, they tend to update their skills and adjust to current trends. With their years of experience, they can bring innovative solutions that help you accelerate your startup.
The number of freelancers is constantly rising. As a result, the freelance marketplace industry is also growing significantly. There are a lot of startups that provide platforms to find freelancers. Globally, you can find freelancers in Fiverr and UpWork.
In Indonesia, you can hire freelancers from local startups as well. For example, Sribulancer currently has around 262 thousand freelancers and has over 89 thousand jobs offered on their website. Other than that, there are projects.co.id which currently offers 12,287 services posted by freelancers on the website. Whichever platform that you choose, you must be wise and hire those with quality and who have a lot of experience.
Those are some of the benefits of hiring a freelancer to scale up your startup. Building a startup is a tough process, from choosing the correct business model, funding, improving your internal organization, pivoting, launching your product, and scaling up your startup. Are you struggling to scale up your startup? We are here to help you navigate the never-ending challenges in building a startup. Gear Up is a startup brainstorming partner in Indonesia that provides one-on-one and catered support for the chosen startups in our network. Join us to begin your startup journey.
