How do you grow your startup with Online Freelancers?
by Startacus Admin
How do you grow your startup with Online Freelancers? Kjetil Olsen, vice-president of Elance Europe highlights some of his top tips on hiring talents, freelancers & partners online successfully using Elance.com
As a startup you never have enough cash on hand. You just don’t. Therefore you need to stretch the cash that you do have as much as possible and spend
your time on what is most valuable for your business.
Earlier, launching a business could be a bit of a hassle. You needed a bookkeeper, an accountant, a website designer and a programmer. All of them you would have to locate within your local network, or at least within friends of friends. This made a lot of ideas, just be ideas and not actually tested and realized businesses.
Even, despite the economic climate, aspiring entrepreneurs should be feeling cautiously optimistic. The web today is providing a new range of opportunities to help small businesses access knowledge, tools and even personnel, all available at the touch of a button. Meaning, your ideas and business can be realized within days.
Elance.com is one of the platforms that can help you get started. Elance allow businesses to hire talented temporary workers for a variety of tasks from translation and business writing to fixing code on your website. Hiring freelancers who work remotely is an easy way to reduce overheads and quickly increase your workforce in times of high demand. Hiring a cloud-based workforce cuts costs, allows you to react flexibly to times of high demand and opens the door for freelancers to global business operations.
To start using Elance for hiring talents, freelancers and partners online here is my advice on how to do this succesfull. I will do it by answering three key questions:
How do you find the right talent?
Attracting the Freelancer
You can do a lot to attract the best talent to your projects. One way to do this is through your job post/job description. Here are the key elements that provide the details freelancers need to provide a good proposal:
- A clear and detailed description of what you are looking for
- A summary of the skills and experience that is ideally suited for the job
- Describe special and unique preference, in this case for a freelancer in a specific location
- You can also take advantage of our templates. But, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write your own job post. Templates are available, but add more detail.
Choosing the right freelancer
By default, Elance will offer recommendations of Freelancers you may want to invite to submit proposals on your project. However, ultimately the responsibility of finding the right Freelancer sits with the Client. Because of this, Elance provides you with several ways in which to make the smartest decision for your objectives:
- Review a Freelancers’s reputation, visible through their Feedback and Levels
- View additional aspects of a Freelancer’s profile including their skills, past work experience and sample work
- Review the proposals that are submitted for your project
Scanning the proposals
When posting your project you can receive any number of proposals. A good way to pare these down is to start with a review of the freelancers bidding on your project. Then, move on to looking out for some key indicators of the proposals:
- The proposal should match the tone of the project description. You should feel comfortable with your Freelancer and their professionalism should be reflected from the outset.
- A proposal should demonstrate a clear understanding of your goals. Freelancers should demonstrate they’ve carefully reviewed the project description by answering all the questions. Look for a proposal that restates your goals. This can indicate attentiveness to the project and shows a freelancer is not simply copying proposals submitted on similar jobs.
- The proposal should quickly highlight the most convincing reason for why a contractor is the best fit for the job. Look for unique skills and experience that are the right match to get the results you want.
- Look for relevant samples. Freelancers can also provide up to 5 links within the proposal.
We consider what the UK and Ireland edition of Mashable on Snapchat Discover might mean for digital content, publishers and startups. The mobile ordering app that'll help us all save time getting coffee and lunch! TableCrowd, a real-life business network that brings people together over food and drink is now crowdfunding via Crowdcube for £400k. Making Tax Digital (MTD) is set to bring about the biggest change to the UK’s tax system for a generation. Here are four things you need to know. Award winning social prescribing platform Elemental Software has raised a rather healthy £300k with the help of ClearlySo, Europe’s leading impact investment bank. Startacus is supporting the TheBigGive.org.uk fundraising appeal to support those affected by the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Forget play - with this deck of cards it's all about business... The innovative startup that's making health monitoring easier than ever... The innovative online network for everyone in the building industry to find, connect and work with one another... Canvas helps recruiters screen more job candidate's, and market employment brands to millennials with the first text-based interviewing platform.
If you would like to enable commenting via your Startacus account, please enable Disqus functionality in your Account Settings.
- Match Funding Initiative Means Donations Towards Grenfell Tower Tragedy can be Doubled 19th Jun 2017 Startacus is supporting the TheBigGive.org.uk fundraising appeal to support those affected by the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
- Touchpaper set to Light the Spark between Corporates and Startups 13th Jun 2017 Launched last week, Touchpaper is on a mission to make it much easier for startups and corporates to work together.
- Day 2 of Digital DNA upSTART 17 - the startup pitching battle 7th Jun 2017 Day 1 overview and day 2 preview of Digital DNA upSTART 17 - the startup pitching battle...
- It's day 1 of Digital DNA upSTART 17 - the startup pitching battle 4th Jun 2017 It's day 1 of upSTART 17, the two day startup pitching battle taking place at Digital DNA in Belfast. Here's how you can keep an eye on proceedings.
