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6 Comments
Pretty good – unless you’re treating your freelancers just like they’re employees, with regular working hours, booking holidays, enforced time off for Christmas, no working from home, etc. Yes, I’m bitter – I had to fight hard to BECOME an employee just so I wouldn’t have to feel like I was letting my now-employers get away with it.
preach on! what always killed me is how companies can lay off
or fire fulltimers in a day. but when workers want to leave they must
drudge through two weeks of notice, sometimes taking abuse because
the company or a boss wants revenge.
Interns are not bad either. We’ve just had an “experienced intern” work on a small project. We invoiced the client 25 hours x 200 dollars. We’ll reward him with a sandwich. He’ll be delighted to have a free lunch.
In my department they just cut back from 30 freelancers to 3, so I am pretty happy about being a full time lackey.
At least it will take a couple of months before its my turn too.
Whoever said that needs to check their math again; there’s some ‘hidden costs’ they’re missing.
Freelancers don’t ramp up overnight, and you’ve got at least one or two Full Time Employees (FTE) investing “your” time in training them to get up to speed. That knowledge walks out the door with your freelancer when they leave, so you won’t see a return on that time investment.
Your IT staff takes MORE time to set up a freelancers than they do for a FTE. A single cycle of building and configuring a machine, setting up server/network access, and then closing it all up after they leave is pricey. Repeated cycles for multiple contractors can be very costly.
A fellow freelancer pal has what he calls sliding “annoyance” fees. It’s silly to think that he’s the only one that does it. It’s extra hours he bills you for based on how big of a pain in the ass you are as a client. Did you keep him waiting for stuff, causing him to turn down other client work? “Getting their act together” fee. Did you call him at 8PM on a Friday to come in and fix something? “After hours” fee. You want him to document everything he did after the job is done? “Transfer of knowledge” fee. Sure, you can pass the costs along to your client, and run the risk of being called “pricey” or “Invoice Padder”. This isn’t a moniker you want in the current economy.
Did you ever wonder why your ad on Craigslist turns up sub-par candidates? Freelancers talk to one another:
“Hey, you worked at XYZ corp., how did it go?”
“Horrible. Avoid at all costs. They took 6 months to pay my invoice.”
“Yikes. Thanks for the heads up!”
We also get to know your FTEs better than you do. They’re more like to tell us your ‘dirty little secrets’ and give us the unvarnished truth about your company. HR’s “Corporate Perception” spinjob doesn’t work on us; “Lunch with Betty from Accounts” tells us all we need to know. She didn’t get a review? She got a 2% raise two years ago? She’s feeling unappreciated for putting 60 hours of work into a 40 hour week?
And later on, after we’ve said our goodbyes, I’m at my next gig. I’ll discover they’re looking to hire an accounts person with a job title and salary better than what you’re giving my now good friend Betty (we IM now). Will she jump ship during busy season and leave you scrambling in a lurch? I guess that depends on how well you’ve treated her.
Make no mistake, when you choose to hire a freelancer over an FTE there are more costs involved than what neatly fits into an Excel spreadsheet.
Feel free to continue chanting the “Freelancers are cheaper” mantra. We get more jobs that way.
reread the caption, dude. it reads: fulltimers cost HALF what freelancers do. and yes, please keep spreading the word that we freelancers are cheaper for you in the long run! call us when you need us. what could be a better model.
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