Hiring an independent contractor when you need people to help in your small business or startup, for whatever reason, can help your business grow.
Independent contractors or freelancers are an interesting choice for business owners to fill their workforce needs but there are many ways to hire them. So before hiring an independent professional, you need to pay attention to these key aspects.
You don’t always have to hire a permanent employee for every role. If your small business needs someone with specific skills, people for a short-term project, per hours or just during a set period of time it could make sense to hire a contractor instead and save time and money.
An independent professional is a specialist whose help your small business to grow in a more flexible way and with the flexibility to adapt to the specific needs of your company or project.
Do you need a skilled, experienced worker to assist with your company digital transformation? Is it still early to hire full-time staff for your early-stage startup? Or you are just in need of someone to handle for a specific job or project?
Today, the new technological scenarios and the digital transformation make it relatively easy to work with independent professionals that make a real difference to your business, in a flexible way and without having to work from the same office as you do.
In any case, the project characteristics and company needs will define whether this work collaboration can be done remotely or on the contrary, you need to work face-to-face with the freelancer.
Probably you are now trying to attract the right flexible talent to work on a project basis or per hours. But you have no idea of how to start a hiring process to find the best independent professional or freelance for your company.
You are in the right place because here we highlight the four key aspects you need to know before hiring an independent contractor.
1) Write a concise Job Description
There are certain things you should do at the start of a hiring process like concise and detailed jobs descriptions if you want to start on the right foot.
If you don’t have a good job description, you’ll likely attract the wrong people and miss out on qualified candidates.
Providing a clear and accurate job description will be helpful to find the right people.
So follow these tips to write a job description that works:
- Use a clear job title and optimize it with the keywords that candidate is using to attract the right professional
- Speak clearly and directly to the candidates and make sure the concepts are understood. Try to use a gender-neutral language.
- Provide a precise account of a job’s requirements, duties and goals.
- Describe the knowledge and skills required to successfully perform the job.
- Ensure that the timings and schedule of the project are clearly defined. If you don’t have defined them yet, you can outline how the collaboration will be in terms of the company-employee relationship and the methods for the goals review.
Make sure you’ve given the employer all the information needed and try to be as concise as possible. It could be your opportunity to communicate what makes your company special and a great place to work.
Don’t miss to supply a salary range. When you hire an independent professional you can agree with the expert about the fee, or accept their rates. However, it is advisable to indicate salary ranges to prevent unpleasant surprises.
2) Develop an effective hiring process or trust in professionals to make the hiring process for you.
The next step to hire your external professional is to start a selection process to find, and successfully hire the best candidate.
It is advisable, before starting your hiring plan, to create a schedule. From the publication date of the job advertisement to the deadline to find the right candidate should be included in this calendar.
Then, follow the steps below:
- Choose the best ways and channels to post your job vacancy. And try to calculate costs.
- If possible, rely on a hiring committee to review all job applicants before deciding on who the company will hire. Ensure the hiring committee is as diverse as possible and they know well the company and Job Position.
- Post the job and monetize your ad results. Remember to ensure you’re reaching the right people so make sure you are connecting with them.
- Identify the candidates from your applicant pool who best meet the required and desired criteria, and create a list of candidates you want to talk to.
- Once you have reviewed CVs and made your selection, it’s time to start with the interviews. It’s a key point in the process because interviews will determine if applicants have the qualifications needed to do the job. There are several types of interviews. From video interviews to face-to-face interviews you can choose the one suits you best. Develop the list of the appropriate questions to determine if a candidate can perform successfully in the position. You could give the applicants a Wonderlic or enneagram test, there are different enneagram types that you can use to get an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and determine if the person will work well with some of the other personality types in the office.
- From now on, based on the interviews, job experience, skills, and all other relevant information it’s the time to make a decision and select a candidate for the position.
Try to make the hiring process as simple as you can. Remember that: A simple hiring process is a better hiring process. Your candidate time during the hiring process is precious so don’t make them waste their time.
If you don’t have a dedicated recruiter, you’re pulling precious work time away from other staff members, time that affects your bottom line. Using volume hiring services to get the right candidates (not just a pool of applicants) may be the way to go when you want to get the most bang for your buck.
As you can see, selecting the best candidate for your company can be difficult. You generally have two options to choose when it’s time to hire new people: you can develop the all hiring process or you can outsource the efforts to a professional expert in hiring.
With companies like Wisar, you can speed up the process, forget all the steps we’ve just explained, and trust your hiring process in an expert.
Unlike recruiters agency or other hiring companies, with Wisar you pay only for candidates that meet your expectations.
You can count on the right independent professional in a short time, without long and slow selection processes, and only paying for a successful hiring.
3) Be very clear when defining the rules of collaboration
It’s also crucial to be accurate about the requirements and collaboration rules. Mismatch of expectations often arises if things are not clear for both parts from the beginning. So when it comes to the contract, more detail is probably better.
Be sure both parties agree with timetables, project deliveries, and calendar, as well as the conversation partners or how the follow-up meetings will be scheduled, what characteristics they will have and how often they will take place.
Take in mind aspects such as the time difference and all the rest of the conditions regarding how the day-to-day will be from the beginning of the collaboration.
At this point, setting communication channels will be indispensable so the tools we propose below will help.
4) Establish your communication channels and ensure good communication flows both ways
It’s important to choose the right communications and follow-up channels so information can flow in both directions.
The success of work collaboration depends on a lot on your communication.
There are several apps and software that will help you to manage the workflow and communication with your team and collaborators.
We identified these standout communication and managing tools that will make your work and life easier:
Communication tools:
- Slack allows people to communicate via instant messaging and chat. With Slack, you can have one-on-one conversations, create a private channel and collaborate with your team and independent professionals.
- Discord is another communication software that helps your team communicate faster and collaborate easier.
Collaboration and work management tools:
- Trello helps you to keep your tasks and goals organized. Use Trello to organize “cards” into lists: Backlog for a list of ideas, To-Do list to hold your to-dos, “doing” for those that you are working on, and “Done” for finished tasks.
- Monday is also useful for organizing your work. You can plan, track and collaborate from only one place.
- On Asana you can prioritize and organize tasks in real time and improve your team collaborations and communication.
- With Basecamp you will manage the tasks and projects of your company, and assign responsibilities and objectives in a simple and intuitive way.
- Podio is easy to use and very useful to manage tasks and projects.
Videoconference and online meetings tools:
- Hangout, Appear.In or Skype will be a great help to hold meetings. Slack also allows you to make calls and video calls among the team members.
- And a long etcetera.
It is quite obvious that every project, small business, startup, agency or even a large company will have to hire at some point an external professional or freelance.
Depending on the experience, skills or profile you are looking for, the hiring process can be easy or complicated.
As we mentioned in this post, there are many other options for hiring a professional in your company rather than a traditional full-time employee. You can hire an independent professional to work on a project basis, per hours, to achieve goals or to help you get your project or work completed.
The question of whether the hiring process is best done with internal or external resources can only be answered at an organizational level, depending on the budget, time and effort your company wants to put into the process.
You can develop an internal hiring process, or you can work with companies like Wisar that help you to find the right job candidates your company need.
There is no doubt that the number of tools you can find to improve management and communication flow of your team and workers is large and growing every day.
Are you ready to take the next step and hire an independent professional that make a real difference to your business or project? We hope that after reading the post, you already know how to start 🙂
