Expanding the capabilities of your organization is always an exciting prospect. But it is also a process with its fair share of obstacles and pitfalls.
Adding a new role or member to your team involves taking on the responsibility of another human being’s livelihood — no small burden to shoulder. In exchange, you expand your organization’s ability to tackle tasks and outmaneuver your competition.
But what if there was an easier way? Well, there is and it’s called outsourcing. But knowing whether you should hire freelancers or add a permanent member to your team instead isn’t always cut and dry.
So let’s break down the realities of outsourcing to make things a little easier by starting off with why people even consider outsourcing.
What are the Benefits of Outsourcing?
Outsourcing is certainly not a magic bullet for any and every problem your organization may face. But it is a great way to give yourself an edge over your competition while spending tremendously less than you would be hiring new staff.
The primary benefit outsourcing has over permanent staffing is flexibility.
Knowing When to Hire Freelancers: Best Roles to Outsource
Outsourcing is almost always going to be cheaper (we’ll talk about when that’s not the case in the next section), and more cash on hand gives your organization more flexibility.
Outsourcing provides you with the ability to quickly add new capabilities to your team without having to go through the hiring and training process. What’s more, outsourcing allows you to tap in skilled workers from every industry, country, and proficiency level with ease — making you more flexible.
Outsourcing can even help improve the morale of your existing staff. Some jobs are simply too tedious, monotonous, or technically difficult, making the task incredibly onerous. Having a process in place for hiring freelancers for jobs like these improves your organization’s ability to quickly adapt to changes.
But before we dive deeper into the types of jobs that are best for outsourcing, let’s first go over the drawbacks of hiring freelancers for context.
What are the Drawbacks of Outsourcing?
As mentioned above, outsourcing isn’t the solution to every problem. Depending on the specifics of your organization, outsourcing may not be reasonable.
The primary drawback outsourcing has compared to permanent staffing is permanence.
What I mean by that is the benefit provided by freelancers is more like instant gratification than a long-term payoff. When you hire a freelancer to perform a role, you’re also removing the opportunity for growing the capabilities of your permanent staff.
For instance, if you hire a video production freelancer to make advertisements for you then you’ll deny the opportunity for your advertising team to expand their capabilities, adding video production to their skillset. But if your company isn’t leveraging video content very heavily, then this drawback is really a moot point.
And that’s the main consideration that needs to be made when you’re deciding between hiring freelancers or adding permanent members to your team. The question you should ask yourself: will adding this capability to my in-house team provide me with a competitive advantage?
And the answer to this question leads you to the answer to the next big question:
What are the Best Roles for Outsourcing?
There is no easy answer to this question that applies to everyone. The best roles for your organization to outsource are completely different from other organizations. Some roles, like finance, customer service, or coding have a higher tendency for being outsourced due to their nature.
But that doesn’t mean those would necessarily be good roles for your organization to outsource.
The best roles for outsourcing:
- Roles not directly related to your organization’s primary services or products.
- Roles that would not provide your organization with a competitive advantage if done in-house.
- And, roles that your organization can perform better or more cost-effectively than freelancers.
Outsourcing Helps You Focus on What Matters
The whole point of hiring freelancers is to take some of the burden off yourself and your team so you can all focus on what matters most for your organization. If you aren’t creating software, you probably don’t need a team of full-time Python developers.
But you might have the need for a little bit of Python work or someone to build you an Android app at some point. And when that time comes, remember that Upstack is here to help make your freelance developer hiring process go as smoothly as possible.
Get in touch with us to find out more about how our remote developers can help you get back to what matters most.
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Originally published at upstack.co on Oct 27, 2021, by Charlie Harper.
