How Small Businesses Can Build a Team of Global Freelancers and Reap the Benefits
For small business owners, building a global team of skilled entrepreneurs can be a game changer. Not only are freelancers cost-effective, but they also bring specialised skills to help your business excel in the short and long term.
Additionally, broadening your horizons to the international freelancer market increases the likelihood of finding the right fit for your business with the required skills, experience, and expertise.
Today, GigLeads explores the step-by-step process entrepreneurs should follow to build a team of global freelancers.
Determine Your Needs
Even though freelancers cost significantly less than full-time employees, according to Crunch, you will incur costs to avail of their services.
Additionally, given that freelancers won’t physically be in the office and work independently on projects, it’s important to have a clear roadmap regarding their tasks, deliverables, and expectations.
Hence, the first step will be to assess which areas of the business you require assistance in, such as marketing, website design, strategy development, and so on. Next, you should ascertain the duration of the contract. For instance, social media management is a long-term project which needs to be consistently monitored.
Once you have all this information in place, move forward with posting vacancies on freelancing portals. When you share your post on social media, be sure to save it as a PDF as this file type is stable, accessible, and readable for SEO processes.
If you need to split apart a PDF for your post, this may help. It’s a free tool that will let you extract certain pages from your file.
GigLeads is a job search and productivity platform to help writers and freelancers find work quickly. Daily email alerts, member profiles, and more. Visit Gigleads
Use the Best Freelancing Platforms
Over the years, there have been numerous freelancing platforms that have become better and better at connecting businesses with the right freelancers. For instance, on UpWork, employers can search for freelancers based on years of experience, compensation, and reviews.
Reviews are a great way to distinguish the best freelancers from the rest. While the top-rated candidates will charge a higher rate than newcomers, you’ll be able to trust their skills and expertise to execute business projects to the T.
There are many different freelancing platforms to explore, including Upwork, People Per Hour, and Fiverr. Fiverr, for example, allows you to vet candidates by portfolio samples, rates, experience, years active, and ratings from past clients. If you are looking specifically for a writing freelancer, check out GigLeads. You can search by location to find the most qualified people near you.
If you want to broaden your candidate search, consider posting openings on Google Jobs, Linkedin, and traditional job search websites such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn.
Step Up a Payment Method
Rather than allowing freelancers to dictate how your company should pay, it’s better to establish a payment process everyone needs to follow. Not only does this streamline your accounting activities, but makes it easy to make timely payments to a team of global freelancers.
International bank transfers are expensive and time-consuming, hence the better option is to use payment applications such as PayPal or Blockonomics, according to SourceForge. Each of these apps imposes its own transaction and additional fees. Hence, be mindful of
these charges before creating an account and linking your banking information.
Use a Project Management Tool
Having a team of global freelancers means that not everyone will be online at the same time. This time barrier extends to project deadlines, submission, and more. Trying to manage the work of freelancers manually will be a tedious and error-prone process.
However, you can overcome these difficulties by using cloud-based project management software. Through this software, you’ll be able to stay on top of all deadlines and provide freelancers with a central dashboard to collaborate and submit deliverables.
A project management tool offers appealing options that can be used to manage personal tasks as well, from scheduling meetings to tracking the progress of daily tasks.
Formally Establish Your Business
While working with a global team of freelancers provides numerous benefits, it opens you up to a host of risks as well. More importantly, depending on the business structure you choose, you may be held liable if something goes wrong.
Look into your formation options and choose one that will suit your business’s needs, including protecting your personal assets.
Enjoy the Expertise of Freelancers
Building a team of global freelancers is a great way to hire the best talent for your business and excel in your niche. But, when it comes to staying on top of responsibilities and protecting yourself from risks, it’s best to use a cloud-based project management tool and establish legal protections through your business structure.
