By Michael Solomon, 10x Management Co-Founder
Whether your company is well-established or has just raised its first round of funding, there are many uses and benefits for engaging with freelance tech talent. On-demand tech talent often flies under the radar with many companies because of its association with offshore solutions or unsophisticated short term help. However, given the right on-demand tech talent, freelancers can bring serious advantages to organizations. When is the right time to employ freelance tech talent, and what advantages can they bring to your organization? See below for a list of the best time and the best ways to employ freelance tech talent:
- Bootstrapper: For entrepreneurs with a vision who need the expertise to realize it.
- Lean Startup: For companies needing expertise before building full tech departments.
- Bridge: Experts to temporarily fill a position until a full-time hire is found.
- Reinforcement: Extra support to augment an insufficient or incomplete team.
- Specialist: Specific outside expertise not provided by in-house teams.
- Cleanup: Expertise to fix issues / clean up technical debt caused by prior teams.
- Optimizer: To repair, update or upgrade existing technology.
- Devops/Maintenance: Ongoing (retained) expert assistance around infrastructure.
- Communications: Expertise in tech communications (branding, web, social media).
- “Packaging”: Entire end-to-end solutions (eg, instant app, startup, brand).
- Team-Building: Experts for vetting and hiring; building full teams and departments.
- Profiling & Vetting: Company, project and talent assessment.
- Testing: Assistance in verifying the operability and quality of technologies.
- Consulting: Expert advisement (eg, concepting, planning, strategy, intrapreneurship)
- Penetration Testing: Security audits to find potential vulnerabilities
Integrating freelancers into your business could bring you serious competitive advantages. Hiring on-demand contractors allows you to scale up and down easily, widen the search field for the best possible talent, bring in fresh perspectives for the work at hand, provides flexibility, diversity and innovation. There are many cases in which hiring freelancers makes sense from both a fiscal standpoint and a quality-of-work standpoint. The above list is meant to serve as a guide for when hiring freelancers, no matter the stage of development your business is in, could make sense for you. At 10x Management, we know first hand the benefits of hiring tech freelancers, and the productivity that freelancers have contributed to the progress of these organizations.
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