Hiring a freelance designer could save your business a lot of time and money while providing access to in-demand skills.
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(Image credit: Mapodile)
Hiring a freelance designer could save your business a lot of time and money while providing access to in-demand skills.
Choosing to hire freelance talent can have a wide range of benefits in many areas, but it’s a particularly attractive solution when it comes to design work and other creative needs. The design requirements of many companies tend to vary, both in form and frequency, and it can be very challenging to find people with the mix of skills to be able to cover them all.
Hiring a freelance creative can allow you to secure the talent you need when you need it. It’s often faster, more cost effective and, best of all, it also means you can pick out specialist skills that an in-house team is unlikely to possess. Here we round up seven reasons why you need to hire a freelancer for your creative needs, be it graphic design, illustration, video editing, photography or anything else.
01. Cherry pick the best talent for a specific task
When hiring in-house designers you often have to make compromises, opting for solid all-round skills and experience rather than someone who truly excels in a particular area. But it’s very unusual for one person to be good at everything. A great graphic designer might not do a good job of designing your social media content or UI. By hiring freelancers, you can choose the perfect skill set for every job.
Many freelancers have specialised skills and expertise that they have built up by choosing a specific niche to work in. They also tend to have a passion for their work because they enjoy what they do. In many fields, there is lots of talent to choose from because freelancing has become popular among designers who prefer the flexibility of freelance work, especially after remote work was fully embraced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Statista estimates that 60 million people in the US were working as freelancers in 2022 and that there will be 86.5 million freelancers by 2027.
02. Benefit from broader experience
Having worked across a range of different companies, freelancers tend to have much broader experience than people who have only worked on internal teams. That means they sometimes come up with ideas and solutions that might not have been considered. They might have more innovative ideas, and chances are they may even have worked with competitors in your own industry.
And, while there are always exceptions, many freelancers are regularly learning and incorporating new skills to make sure they keep up with trends. This is partly because they need to in order to win clients, but also because of their own interest in the area they work in.
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03. Fill skill gaps
Some specialist skills have high demand and little supply, which can make finding a full-time hire challenging. And in many cases it turns out that the people with those specialist skills you’re after prefer to work on a freelance basis so they can manage their schedules and choose the projects that interest them. Hiring freelancers can therefore allow you to fill the skill gaps in your own team without having to go through a lengthy and expensive recruitment process.
04. Go global
Even in these days of remote or hybrid working, the recruitment of full-time staff is often constrained by physical geography. Not so when hiring freelancers. Since you’re not limited to one physical location, choosing a freelance creative opens opportunities to hire the best talent from anywhere in the world. Some skills have greater supply in certain geographies. In fact, some skills are only in supply in certain geographies. If you’re looking to localise the texts on a UI design for the Slovenian market, it makes much more sense to turn to a specialist in the actual target market.
This global potential can also allow you to make your operations much more efficient. It’s possible to hire freelancers in various countries and develop a workflow that follows the sun. A designer in Japan can have their work ready for when a developer in Europe starts their working day, for example.
05. Match your needs
If you need to create a one-off capsule of promotional videos for a social media campaign, it doesn’t make sense to hire a whole full-time in-house team. That would be an expensive waste of money. Hiring a freelancer can be more cost-effective because you only pay for the work that’s needed when it’s needed. The upshot is reduced overheads, helping your budget go further, which in turn allows you to hire more talent for other projects.
Freelancers are a particularly good option if you have one-off projects with different launch dates and deadlines throughout the year. Each project might require an entirely different skill set. Choosing the people you need for each project avoids doubling up or creating overlapping roles and reduces inefficiencies.
06. Control your costs
In fact, hiring a freelancer can be more cost-effective in many ways. Amid high Inflation and energy prices, it's more important than ever to be able to keep control over costs. Freelancers don’t need office space, furniture or equipment since most work from their own home or studio.
And payment is easier and more streamlined too; there’s no benefits, health insurance or paid time off and sick leave to factor in. The savings here can quickly add up, as do the time savings.
07. Work faster
Speaking of time, hiring a freelancer is usually quicker than hiring and onboarding an internal employee. A lot quicker. No matter how organised your business is, design needs often come up at short notice, and if there’s a tight deadline the slow process of seeking out a full-time candidate isn’t going to work.
When you hire a full-time employee, it can take weeks or even months to onboard them and fully incorporate them into your team. Freelancers are often used to stepping in and adapting to a new situation rapidly, and they’re used to racing against the clock and working antisocial hours to get deliverables to sign off on time. And while they might have distractions from other clients, they don’t lose time because of distractions like internal meetings.
This speed can make you more competitive. A study by Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that 40 per cent of businesses believed hiring freelancers had helped them increase their speed to market.
Hiring a freelancer can have some drawbacks for some projects. There’s no quality assurance, so you need to select talent carefully based on their experience and recommendations. However, it’s worth remembering that freelancers have a huge incentive to produce good work. Being self-employed, their next job depends on it since a customer will only come back if the deliverables and the whole experience of working with them is positive.
Freelancers particularly suit one-off project-based work but they can also be an option for longer-term requirements if they don’t justify hiring a full-time employee. This option allows you to build a more complete team to rapidly respond to changing design needs in the most cost-effective way.
Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
