Businesses have access to a wide range of labor resources. For the sake of simplicity let’s classify labor into three groups: full time employees, agency/contractor, and a freelancer. Most people understand what a full time employee is. Agency/Contractors can be thought of as a collective of individuals, each with selective skills that can be combined to bring the best skills to the different phases of a project. For example, an agency may put together a team of talented people to design and build a web site, and optimize it for SEO in conjunction with a writer. Once they are done, they go away or set up a contract to update their work on a regular or “as needed” basis.

Usually it’s fairly easy for most managers to understand when they might consider the use of an agency, or when they may need to hire a new, full-time employee. The tricky decision is when to use a freelancer. The question almost always arises, with this logic. “Do we really need another full-to-part time worker, or can we just allow more overtime and use our existing workforce.” So here are a few guidelines and examples of specific conditions where it makes sense to hire a freelancer to balance the workload at a company.

Seasonal Spikes

If your company experiences predictable busy periods, a freelancer may be able to fill in the gaps. Typical spikes include winter holidays, tax season, spring holidays and various retail or e-commerce retail pushes. Most of these hires do not need to be highly trained so they can come up to speed quickly.

Specialized Skills

Sometimes a project requires expertise that is not readily available in-house. Some examples include checking for cyber security weaknesses, review procedures for imports and exports, and independent financial audits. Since this is only a periodic need and should likely be done by someone who doesn’t have a conflict of interest with your company, this makes a lot of sense to hire as a freelance position.

Short Time Project Narrowly Defined

A tightly focused project that is limited in scope and has a limited time frame, is ideal for a freelancer. A classic example is to perform a limited “deep dive” on your top five competitors as a precursor to developing a marketing plan. Results in one week (or whatever is appropriate). The company gets what they need and there is no ongoing overhead when that task is complete.

Budget

Sometimes you just need someone to spend a short amount of time to handle a simple task and you can’t justify taking any full-time worker away from their task. Maybe it’s covering for a receptionist, help unloading a shipment or setting up a new office location.

Testing New Products

When it comes to product testing, it’s great to get real-world feedback. For this task you definitely want to get an independent panel that will give you honest feedback on how easy it is to use your product. A freelancer, or maybe a half dozen or so can be an eye-opener when you want an independent view with a new market or service. You definitely want to test demand and product weaknesses before committing to a production run. A freelancer or test group of several participants provides a low-risk way to accomplish this.

Grants and Proposals

Grant writing is a specialized and fairly common task for freelancers.  The agencies that solicit RFP’s (Requests for Proposals), usually have a special format for each agency. This makes it easier to replicate a large percentage of the proposal work. The federal government is a good source of proposals, and companies can generate substantial revenue by writing successful grant proposals. There is usually a cadence to when proposals are due, so the work of writing proposals is well suited to part-time work.

If you ever find yourself in one of these situations that may cause you to contemplate the use of freelancers, just measure the weight of the decision against the type of work and cost. If you determine that the work is specialized, temporary, or needs to be independent, or if the use of full time labor would be underutilized or result in a financially unsustainable situation, then it should likely be a freelance job. Freelancers provide a much-needed service, and can be very cost effective, when used judiciously.

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