Working with freelancers and contractors is a great way for startups to quickly scale their teams with little risk. You can immediately access specialized talent in a cost-efficient manner and without the commitment of hiring full-time. This is especially helpful during the early stages of startup development when your company may have limited access to resources.
While hiring freelancers has its benefits, it can also cause a lot of headaches. Integrating external personnel to act as internal team members can prove challenging without the right collaboration tools to keep everyone aligned.
Here, we discuss the pros and cons of working with freelancers and contractors and how you can use workforce management software, such as coAmplifi, to position your startup for success.
Benefits & Challenges of Working With Freelancers in Startups
Aside from helping you mitigate long-term hiring costs and commitments, freelancers offer the following benefits:
- Fresh perspectives: Innovation is key in startup development, and outside perspectives can help your team avoid groupthink.
- Flexible hiring: You can hire freelancers “on demand” for specific projects, tasks, or gaps in knowledge that can help you overcome creative or operational slumps.
- Reduced legal risks: Hiring full-time employees requires adherence to certain laws, such as labor laws and managing employee payroll taxes. Working with freelancers may lessen your legal responsibilities.
On the other hand, hiring contractors comes with its own set of unique challenges, such as:
- Less reliability: Some freelancers may feel less obligated to meet deadlines or communicate effectively when they’re not an employee, which can lead to a backlog of late work.
- Inconsistent availability: Contractors often work with multiple clients at once. This can lead to challenges with inconsistent availability when you need them for projects.
- Wrong culture fit: Even though freelancers aren’t internal staff, they still need to match your startup’s cultural fit to work well with your employees. Hiring the wrong cultural fit can slow productivity.
How to Seamlessly Integrate Freelancers Using coAmplifi
Aligning your contractors and internal personnel starts with having the right tools for successful collaboration, and using an all-in-one solution with a single login makes it easier on both ends.
Implementing coAmplifi, a workforce management system with built-in project management and communication tools makes it easy for new freelancers to get up to speed and for internal staff to hold them accountable.
Here are a few features coAmplifi offers that can help your startup quickly build an efficient freelance program.
Easier Communication
It can be challenging for freelancers to keep up with multiple platforms for every company they work with. coAmplifi’s built-in instant messaging tools make it easy for contractors to find anyone in the company they need to talk with and shoot them a quick message.
This avoids the challenge of needing to keep track of internal email addresses. Having a chat feature integrated into their project management software also requires less training on applications, which equals less ramp-up time.
Real-Time Task Tracking
With coAmplifi’s real-time task tracking feature, you never have to spend time asking a freelancer where they stand with a project. You can monitor their progress as they go, giving you peace of mind knowing they’re on track. This eliminates unnecessary back-and-forth emails for updates.
Quick Identification of Missed Assignments
coAmplifi alerts your team of any past deadlines as soon as they’re missed, which enables you to quickly follow up with contractors for a status update before a project gets too far behind. These automatic alerts also mean you don’t have to worry about staying on top of freelancers’ deadlines to watch for potential missed milestones.
Increased Schedule Transparency
Freelancers and contractors often have their own calendars set up outside of your organization, which can make it challenging to schedule time with them and your team. coAmplifi offers schedule transparency tools that external personnel can update to accurately reflect their working hours, time zones, and obligations for easier meeting scheduling.
Integrated Time Tracking
If you pay freelancers by the hour, coAmplifi’s built-in time-tracking tools will help ease your administrative burden by keeping all of your freelancers’ information in one place. Freelancers can track their time and associate it with the tasks they are working on. This can help keep your internal records organized and make it easier to double-check invoices.
Seamless File Sharing
Oftentimes, freelancers need access to internal documents to do their work. coAmplifi has integrated document-sharing tools that make this easy. Internal staff and external team members can collaborate in real-time, and employees don’t need to worry about granting freelancers the right permissions to work on every document, which can slow projects down.
Build a Better Freelance Program With coAmplifi
Hiring good freelancers won’t do your startup much good if you don’t have efficient ways to work with them. coAmplifi combines all of the accountability, collaboration, and time-tracking tools you need into one solution, making it easier to onboard new freelancers and provide them with the information they need to perform their best.
If your team is struggling to align with external vendors, now is the time to update your tech stack with a solution that will grow with your business. Request a free coAmplifi demo!