Freelancers can benefit your business in multiple ways and are fantastic team members for short-term projects and client-specific work. Not only can you save money on employee benefits, but you can also receive the expertise you need at a manageable price.

5 Steps to Hiring the Right Freelancer for Your Business

Here’s our guide on how to hire the right freelancer for your company, regardless of niche or profession. 

First Step: Understand What You’re Hiring For

Looking for a freelancer should come after you line out the terms for your agreement and what you’re looking for in your next employee.

Be clear about the services you’re looking for, whether that’s a 2,000-word article on Shih Tzu grooming or a half-hour-long video on the Pythagorean theorem. Establish your expectations immediately to avoid future confusion.

A property-written job post will allow you to find the right person for the job in your price range and time commitment.

However, even with clear guidelines, you could still run into issues. Before hiring, always send over a contract for freelancers to avoid any potential disagreement.

Second Step: Decide Your Rate

A variety of factors determine how much you should charge for an article. Most freelancers prefer to use the “cent per word” method because it helps them capitalize on the article’s length.

Others will choose an hourly rate, especially if a client’s articles have an extensive editing process that could take time away from creating more content. 

Understand that a creator from Asia will charge different rates than someone in North America because of the different standards of living, and experience will make specific freelancers out of your reach.

To understand how much you should charge for your article, take a look at what other businesses are charging for similar work.

Third Step: Use Quality Hiring Platforms

There are plenty of hiring platforms you can use to find the best freelancers, but it’s always a good idea to start browsing in your local network.

Your friends, family, and business partners may have their own freelancers they use that are reliable, trustworthy, and in your price range.

If you can’t find a freelancer locally, try the following websites for quality freelancers:

• Upwork
• PeoplePerHour
• ProductionHUB
• Problogger
• Fiverr
• Free Up
• Freelancer.com

Some websites are industry-specific. For example, Problogger caters to freelance writers specifically, and ProductionHUB targets the film industry.

Shop around for the best freelancers by viewing their portfolio, website, and samples.

Fourth Step: Narrowing Down Freelancers

After looking through your top freelancers’ portfolios, websites and samples, you need to determine if they can perform the specific job you want to accomplish.

If you don’t have skills in the field you’re hiring for, you may have a difficult time understanding how well they can perform in their role. The best thing to do is to seek the advice of someone in a similar position.

Always ask them to perform a paid test before hiring, even if their samples are incredible because your job may be more technical, or it may require a specific design element that wasn’t in their portfolio.

Comparing their test results with other freelancers can help narrow down candidates.

Fifth Step: Hiring and Monitoring

After hiring the freelancer of your choice, you should either place them in a probationary period or in a state of few or smaller projects.

After 3 months, your new hire will have the skill set necessary to take on more tasks but, until then, ease them into their role by setting them up with other team members who are more knowledgeable in the same area.

For example, if you’re a freelance writer, you could use a senior editor to monitor their work. Not only will that help the writer improve faster, but it will also give them a chance to form a relationship with other team members.

When hiring a back-end developer, you might want to assign tasks to full-stack developers to check their work and share the experience.

Frequent communication will help new employees ease into their role, so always make them a part of your community.