Freelancers can be a great way to strengthen your company culture and grow your business. Every founder wants to hire high-quality talent with missions and values aligned to your business — otherwise, you risk lacklustre performance and internal disputes. If you want to use outsourcing to bring your business to the next level, you'll need to find skilled, purpose-driven people.
Rita Rodrigues is the Chief Operating Officer at Work For Impact, an all-in-one freelance hiring platform. Its mission is to help businesses grow by connecting them with the right purpose-driven freelance talent. Here are some of her insights on finding purposeful people to elevate your business and mission based on Rita's CEO journey.
Outsourcing Talent
Work For Impact helps organizations connect with purposeful freelancers. Usually, their clients narrow down applicants themselves or provide them with some pre-screening questions. But when it comes to matching freelancers to clients, they follow a particular process:
Freelancers will provide personal information (e.g. background, education).
Verify the applicants’ identities.
Determine the freelancer's mission and manually assess their skills.
Recruitment specialists will match their mission and skills to an organization or job.
Create contract and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) between freelancers and clients.
Growing your team through outsourcing talent has many benefits. You get high-quality skills and gain the opportunity for more diversity while also accessing local knowledge.
Using platforms like Work For Impact is a great way to find freelancers. As Rita shares,
“While you focus on your organization’s mission — and in our case, it’s very purposeful missions that we aim to support — we focus on finding the best match for your company. You just need to post the job and then we’ll do all of the rest for you.”
Quality Control
Work for Impact uses a time tracking app built within the platform. They ensure that the freelancers log in the hours they work on a project so that the client can extract records of it.
The app also contains financial records. The clients approve all payments before they're released to the freelancer. If either a client or a freelancer isn't satisfied, they also have a module called "Disputes," where they can submit a claim.
Top Five Outsourcing Rules
1. What Do You Want to Achieve?
Create a roadmap of success. Set up your goals, develop a clear strategy, and be clear on what success looks like to you. Knowing the future of your organization will be the starting point.
2. What Are You Looking For?
When determining what you’re looking for in outsourced talent, ask yourself:
What skill set are you looking for?
What’s the size of your outsourcing team?
What will be the roles and responsibilities of the team members?
3. What’s Your Budget?
Know your budget for the outsourcing team. Balance your budget with expectations. Make sure it's sustainable for your organization and consistent with the quality of the talent you want to hire.
4. How Will You Measure Success?
Since you've also defined what success will look like, you need to determine how you measure success. Consider the following:
What are the channels of communication?
How will your outsourced team report to you?
What will those reports tell you?
What will their deliverables be?
How will you provide them with feedback?
5. How Are You Going to Evaluate Freelancers?
Finally, you should carefully evaluate the profiles you're receiving. Centralizing all of the necessary information in one place and pre-screening profiles is helpful. You want to find people aligned with your organization's mission, culture, and skills.
Building a Successful, Long Term Relationship
Listen to your people. Two-way communication is particularly critical when working with freelancers since they have diverse knowledge and experiences other employees may not have. Everyone has so much to learn from each other.
As an employer, you should strive to be fair, transparent, and inclusive. Giving and receiving feedback will strengthen communication between the team members. If you're looking to work with freelancers, it's essential to engage them with the team culture and encourage them to build that culture. Rita states,
“Because I think in the end, we’re all human and we’re always craving that connection. I think the pandemic proved that more than anything that we really do. And when you’re connected with talent that is truly passionate about your purpose and your business purpose, there’s sort of a natural alignment that you can feel.”
Deciding on Rates
Here are some ways that Work For Impact helps freelancers and clients decide on rates:
Freelancers can display the hourly rate they want to receive.
They can also adjust their pay according to the job they're applying for.
Rates can also be decided based on the specific project or job.
Get expert advice, like from a fractional CFO with expertise in financial strategy.
If you're searching for freelancers to outsource, Work for Impact's platform allows you to create market research. It helps you canvass talents or simply use it as a reference when you're hiring. You can choose to set rates based on your budget, fixed-job, hourly rates, etc.
On the client’s side, creating a profile and posting a job is completely free. When a freelancer is hired and the contract starts, the clients will pay a fee of 4% to cover their processes. They will also be releasing more features and different solutions for businesses; however, those will have a fixed subscription fee.
Learn more about Rita and Work For Impact. Get to know why they are doing what they are doing on their website. Reach out to Rita by sending her an email.
If you want to grow your team to take your business to the next level, a CFO can help you figure out your next best move. Understand how to price fairly yet competitively and maximize your profits with the help of a finance team. Schedule a discovery call with Profit Reimagined™ to help you cover your foundations and deepen your understanding of these concepts.