The pros and cons of hiring freelance staff over permanent staff

Some elements of running a business can be extremely straightforward. You want to ensure you have the best team of professionals supporting your company to reach its dreams and targets and with sensible recruitment and great staff benefits, you’re sure to have just this.

In modern business, however, there are a plethora of routes that you may go down with your employees. This includes full-time, part-time or freelance.

Freelancing has become a very popular practice in many industries but none more so than in marketing and journalism. The need to have full-time employees take on certain responsibilities is in some cases simply not necessary and if this is the situation for your business, then why not consider going down this route.

If you are unsure whether hiring one of the UK’s 1.9 million freelance staff over permanent staff is the right thing to do then read on to discover the pros and cons of both.

Pros

As a business owner, you’ll want to ensure you are consistently making positive moves for your company and for the most part, hiring freelancers over permanent staff will do just that. Here are some of the benefits:

• In most cases, freelancers are cheaper as they’ll only be paid for the work and not things such as bank holidays or annual leave.
• They offer flexibility to increase or decrease team size as and when you please.
• The best freelancers will already be experts in their field and should not need further training as a full-time new starter might.
• Eagerness to work and impress. Freelancers only get paid when the work is completed, therefore you may find a faster turnaround with projects. This will help to boost your company’s overall productiveness.

Cons

Unfortunately, however, hiring freelancers is not all sunshine and rainbows. They do bring some problems with them too. These include:

• Although freelancers can often be cheaper than full-time permanent staff, the frequency of work may vary. This can mean that it is difficult to manage payments, however, an open banking solution may be a good option.
• Many of the best people within your industry may not want a freelance role which means you’re missing out on a pool of talent.
• They can leave at any time leaving you short of staff last minute. If this was a full-time employee, they would have to give notice which allows time for further recruitment.
• Freelancers are often less loyal to your business than full-time staff. This is because they may work across a range of different companies meaning yours isn’t special to them.

As you can see there is a lot to consider when deciding who you want to hire next but if you do choose to go down the freelance route, advertising the job is simple on websites such as Indeed.