Thinking of hiring freelancers?  While you may be wary of taking on full-time staff during these precarious times, you might have considered hiring freelancers online to help fill a skills gap on your team or add value to a project you had put on hold during lockdown. 

We’re gradually coming out of lockdown. Cue massive sigh of relief.  Restrictions are easing and we’re out and about that bit more. I’ve been meeting family and friends who I haven’t seen in months (at a distance of course). Others are heading to parks at the weekend to escape the apartments they’ve been cooped up in for weeks.

I’ve seen some pretty poor graphic design briefs during my time working in ad agencies.  As an account executive, I was the point of contact between clients and our design team. When a client wanted a new piece of content made, they’d send me a brief which I‘d pass onto to our designers. To be fair, most of the clients I worked with supplied plenty of useful information in their briefs. However, we received a fair chunk of pretty awful ones too. 

Client: I wonder if she got my message. I sent it a few minutes ago and still no reply. Look, I’ll send her one more just to be on the safe side… Freelancer: My god, if this person messages me one more time. Does she not understand that she’s not the only client on my books? Sound familiar?

Repeat after me: Managing remote freelancers is different to managing office staff. It’s really important to recognise this fact when working with freelancers.  Fail to do so and your freelancer may be left feeling frustrated and undervalued.  In this article, we’ve compiled a few simple tips and tricks to help you manage remote freelancers and develop positive relationships with them.

You're determined to make your next project a success but you’re swamped with your current workload.  The idea of hiring a freelancer to help out has crossed your mind once or twice. You're unsure though.  Using a freelancer can be hit or miss. It can also be very time consuming and costly.

How to hire a freelance writer... Where to begin? So, you’ve got a piece of content that needs writing for your business, website or charity. Rather than seeking out a writer internally, you’ve decided to embark on a mission to find the perfect freelance content writer for your project. Hiring a writer externally outside of your own employee pool can appear daunting, and the questions and doubts you have may cloud your perceptions of the benefits of using a freelance writer. Where do you even find a freelance content writer? What's the difference between a scientific freelance blogger and technical medical writer? How can you ensure that the experience is both mutually beneficial and efficient, saving your business time and money? Questions... so many questions!

Starting up or changing up – we’ve talked about the importance of teams before. It’s a truism that much of our success, enjoyment and satisfaction at work comes from those we work with.  Sharing the adventure of something that matters with engaged teammates is the holy grail for many businesses, especially startups. But holier yet? The flexible team. Building that dynamic group of individuals to join you on the journey in today’s shifting workplace isn’t so straightforward.