It’s a job, and someone’s got to do it. So why not make it a freelancer? There are many advantages when you get a freelancer to do a job than getting a regular employee. They are pretty much the same with regular employees, minus all the administrative work and cost that comes with it.
- Overhead cost – Starting from recruitment, you need to pay an ad agency or a manpower agency to find an employee for you. With freelancers, you can find hundreds with just a simple click on the worldwide web. Add to that hefty service fees agencies charge you, you will be shelling out money even before the employee gets to work. For the application process, agencies again will ask you to pay fees for interviews and tests. With freelancers, they are the ones who will send their samples or comply with your interview and other assessment requirements.
- There is also no need to pay overtime, give vacation leaves or sickness pay – Literally, you only pay for completed work. If there is work, if there is output, that’s the only thing you pay.
- Employee terms are flexible – For regular employees, you might even get sued if you terminate an employee’s services without due process. With freelance, most employment terms would only require a 30-day notice before the end of employer-employee relationship.
- No need to pay benefits such as health insurance or a car plan – For most freelancers, benefits are limited to bonuses that employers give.
- Freelancers will indeed work on time – While it may be possible for a regular employee to have ‘free time’ within a day, a week or a month where workload is a bit light, he still gets a regular paycheck; however with freelancers, it is literally a no work, no pay scheme.
- Freelancers will provide for their own hardware and software – When you have a new or additional employee, you have to provide the computer, workspace, PC software and even office supplies that he would need. For freelancers, you save up on all these expenses as they are the ones who would be providing themselves with it.
- You can also save on administrative cost as you would not need other forms of monitoring aside from that of output and quality – No need to spend time and salary of staff or buying a software to monitor attendance, for example. Performance appraisal and coaching are almost instantaneous as well.
- Tax benefits – There are tax benefits that your company will enjoy when you refer your services to a freelancer.
Generally, it seems freelancers make it good for business. And there are a lot of freelancers around the world ready to do the job for you. See which activities you can easily give to freelancers – you simply have to communicate and coordinate with them, and let them bring you the output. Now that’s simple, effective, and efficient. There is not much difference, in fact, these benefits are ones you can instantly enjoy if you refer your work to quality freelancers.
Hi Badger Brock
Like your post, interesting and clear. Can I put in a shout for the free-lancer? - they still have to be "managed" well. Nothing less than a sloppy manager who doesn't brief properly then blames all problems on the free-lancer. I never go back to a bad manager, and there are costs to constantly searching for new freelancers. It would be interesting to hear a bit on how to manage free-lancers effectively. :-)
Hi Sarah,
Now that you've mentioned it, freelancer-client management has this constant problem that's really not being addressed to properly. It gets messy due to irregularities that is all part of the working relationship between the client and the freelancer. Wow, thank you so much for bringing this up, will certainly research more on that and make an effective article about it. :)