FIELD ENGINEER
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Freelance
by
Syed Ali
|
July 19, 2019
For any organization to succeed, they must have access to a team of reliable, skilled and talented workers. Traditionally, companies tried to attract and retain these workers as full-time employees. However, hiring full-time staff is expensive, and your wage bill is already likely to account for the largest portion of your outgoings. As a result, freelancing has become more useful than traditional employment.
As businesses routinely need to cut costs, attempting to hire full-time staff can be a significant burden. Often times companies can save up to 60% on costs by using freelancers. Furthermore, if you rely only on in-house staff, you’re effectively limiting the talent and skills your company can access.
Rather than cultivating a diverse and expensive in-house team, businesses can benefit from hiring freelance workers, or independent contractors. Currently, one of the fastest-growing industries in the US, around 30% of the country’s workforce are defined as independent workers. Providing ad-hoc assistance, on-going services, and project-led assignments, freelancers routinely operate in the IT industry, and companies are reaping the benefits.
Firstly, using independent contractors enables you to operate with a smaller in-house staff. As well as cutting your wage bill dramatically, this ensures you can operate from smaller premises, thus minimizing costs even further. In addition to this, there are various other ways that independent contractors can save you money.
When a company hires employees on a permanent basis, they are responsible for making tax contributions on their behalf, managing their on-going employment via in-house or outsourced Human Resources departments and possibly providing benefits too. In contrast, businesses aren’t required to do this when working with independent contractors. As a freelancer isn’t legally considered to be an employee, there is far less red tape to contend with, and as a result, your costs can be reduced.
With approximately 57% of businesses reducing their outgoings by using freelance workers, it’s not surprising that more and more companies are turning to the gig economy in order to access niche skills and advanced engineering services at negligible costs. However, there are additional benefits to hiring a freelancer or independent contractor.
To work as a successful freelancer, individuals must be reliable, organized, self-motivated and highly-skilled. For businesses, these attributes are always advantageous. In addition to the industry-specific skills, you’re looking for, working with freelancers who utilize best practices for working remotely, are experienced and dependable is the basis for a productive working relationship.
When you require certified or highly-skilled workers, hiring independent contractors is even more beneficial. Typically, freelancers spend more time honing their skills and advancing their professional development, simply because they need to be at the top of their game to attract new clients. As a result, you’ll find that independent workers tend to be proficient in the latest technologies and engineering methods, which can only benefit your business.
Whilst hiring these individuals full-time could be an expensive option, due to their skills and expertise, using them to complete particular projects can be extremely cost-effective. Furthermore, companies often require specialist services for a limited period of time only.
If you require a Network Engineer to design, create and establish your network, for example, you may only require on-going maintenance and regular upgrades afterward. Obviously, this workload may not be enough to satisfy a full-time Network Engineer, so you would be losing money unnecessarily and your Network Engineer would quickly become bored and dissatisfied. By using an independent contractor, however, you can hire them on a project-by-project basis, for a fixed term or ad-hoc help, as and when it’s required. As well as keeping your costs low, this working arrangement fulfills the needs of your freelancers too and enables them to work on a variety of projects.
Depending on the particular needs of a project, you may want to hire local freelancers in some instances. If you’re looking for a Datacenter Engineer to upgrade or maintain the hardware in your offices, for example, you may want to find an engineer who works locally, so that they can access your premises easily and work on-site.
However, there are a number of IT and engineering roles which are performed in the field or carried out remotely. As a result, you don’t need to rely solely on local freelancers to fulfill the role. In fact, if you need on-site work to be carried out at a different location, being able to hire freelancers from varying towns and states could be advantageous.
When you commit to using independent contractors, however, you aren’t limited to local or regional workers. In fact, you can scout talent from all over the world. With thousands of engineers and IT professionals working remotely and/or traveling for particular projects, your company has the opportunity to work with the best in the business. At Field Engineer, for example, we have an established network of over 40,000 engineers operating out of 180 countries, so it’s easy to access qualified personnel with the skills you need.
A major advantage of using independent contractors is the ability to scale your workers to meet project demands. You may not need ten or twenty IT Engineers on the payroll permanently, but you may need them to carry out a one-off project. As demand increases, over 42% of businesses rely on independent contractors to meet their needs.
Furthermore, the Field Engineer makes it easy to manage independent contractors, from the start of a project until culmination. Post jobs within seconds, and review applications as they come in. When you’ve assigned a particular task to a freelancer, you can manage the project via our easy-to-use platform or integrate it with software and apps you already use. We make it easy to manage freelance projects and offer a range of tools to ensure every task can be completed efficiently and productively. Track worker location, monitor the progress of each project and authorize payment seamlessly, all from one, user-friendly platform.
Businesses are able to meet project demands successfully with the utilization of freelance engineers. Is it time for your team to start working with freelancers, too? Sign-up on Field Engineer for free today.
