How to work with freelancers

My experience shows that the most questions people have about work with freelancers without regard to the fact that the freelancer will disappear or just “throw”.

Indeed, a rather topical issue for customers. No one wants to lose their time and mess with unscrupulous freelancers.

Sometimes people ask me questions in the spirit of “how can I work with a team of freelancers at all? After all, they are constantly missing / tearing deadlines, etc. ”
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In fact, working with freelancers is not so difficult, and the experience of the last 3 years as a manager of a freelance team suggests that it is quite possible. During this time only one freelancer "threw" us - he just disappeared. The question of course decided on their own, but experiments with little-known personalities have decided not to conduct.

The main problem of customers is hidden in the fact that most of them are connected with little-known performers very often simply because they offer cheaper and swear, they are afraid to make it “cool and cool”.

I already once raised a similar topic and gave a set of tips on how to filter freelancers. Now I would like to go "deep" problem.

What do you do when you meet a stranger who offers you his services? If you are a cautious person, you will not use his services until you find out that he is not a charlatan and works here officially, and not a rogue.

The same tactic works with freelancers - you first need to make sure that the person who is in front of you is not puff. The above link to how to check for freelancers may well help in this. But this is at the selection stage.

And what if the freelancer is already selected?

Here is a typical set of tips to stay "with nothing":

• Do not give a large prepayment . 15–20% is usually enough to guarantee solvency. If you can’t do this without anything - use transaction guarantee services
• Do not throw the "freshly selected" freelancer under the urgent and complex project . It is best to give a project that does not burn, but set a hard deadline for its implementation. If something fails - you can always transfer someone from the team to this task.
• Get in touch . Learn all you can about this freelancer. Up to the point that talk with his former customers
• Be humane . Freelancer - not a machine for printing money. First of all, reckon with his personal time and rest. You won’t believe it - but the freelancer will answer you the same if you make concessions to him
• Think about the motivation of a freelancer . Why should a freelancer be interested in working with you?
  Get over the fact that working with freelancers is difficult . If you do not have the ability to understand other people and find common language with them - try not to work with freelancers in general
  Do not talk about future work . Very often we have to meet with the words “if everything goes well, then we still have N tasks here.” No one wonders why this should be interesting to the freelancer. . For which he is honored and praised!