Living in the 21st century means perceiving, reflecting upon, and sharing large amounts of information regularly. Just imagine, your brain is being fed 34 Gb of visual, text, and audio content per day, which is more than some iPhone models are capable of storing. With such an enormous workflow, business owners need to optimize their businesses to both save money and stay efficient.
In such situations, it’s not surprising that 82% of digital agencies outsourced or planned to outsource tactical executions to some extent in 2019. Just for comparison, in 2012, the share of digital agencies who outsourced was 57%. Additionally, according to the research by the United Studios, digital agencies outsource 66% of technical work; 60% of HTML, CSS, and AJAX development; and 54% of LAMP (PHP/MySQL) programming.
The main reason to hire freelancers for these technical jobs is to save time for aspects of business like sales, marketing, and website and product design as these jobs are more complicated and less efficient to outsource.
In addition to saving you time, here are five other reasons why your agency should consider outsourcing technical jobs.
Saving Money
If you decide to have at least one in-house developer, (who will have to know how to code a functional back-end for the website, optimize the work of Database, complete QA analysis, and fix bugs if any appear) it will cost your company at least $96,000 per year if your business is located in the U.S. On top of that, the salary will be to pay a worker who is not really earning the whole salary because you, as a digital agency, will not have enough work for one full-time developer all the time.
If you choose to outsource, you’ll pay someone only when it’s needed. The average hourly rates are $70 in the USA and $74 in Australia for outsourced developers, but these are only the most expensive prices for hiring freelance developers. You can also choose someone from an Eastern European country, where workers are just as professional as their counterparts from other continents but are much less expensive ($52 for someone from Serbia or $44 for a developer from Ukraine). Hiring a freelancer will be more efficient and will definitely save you a significant sum of money when it comes to paying a salary.
The More Beneficial Scaling Procedure
After being in operation for a while, every professional agency needs to scale. If your designers are doing a good job and your marketing department applies effective strategies, the number of loyal clients and the number of new clients will increase. This means that the number of tasks, projects, and obligations will grow proportionally with the number of clients you are serving.
With this expansion comes a tricky situation: how do you produce twice as much content and not double your in-house team? In this case, outsourcing is the solution. If you see that your team is overloaded and they cannot finish a project on time, get extra hands. Again, you will only have to pay per hours worked on the project — no extra expenses for taxes, sick leaves, and vacations.
Increasing the Variety of Projects
It’s unlikely that your team will always deal with the same task; every new project requires a unique approach. This means that every new client and job requires completely different sets of skills.
You are lucky if the members of your team are fast-learners; however, it does not always make sense to force everyone to learn how to use a specific tool or how to code a small part of the project in a specific language for a one-time event. Therefore, if you want to save your time, and your employees’ time, search for a professional outside your business who is already skilled in the work you need done.
Reducing the Stress Level of Your Team
The workflow of a digital agency is not stable. It fluctuates depending on the time of the year, day of the month, or even phase of the moon (we are not sure about the last one). Because of this, there are periods when everything is relaxed and on schedule, and times when all the deadlines are burning, even though everyone is working hard.
Trust us, we know that in small teams there is always a lot of work, but if, for some reason, your sales manager is also producing marketing content or your front-end developer is also a QA and CRM-specialist, you probably need a few extra hands. Outsourcing someone to help with the increased workflow is an excellent solution during stressful periods of the year.
A Simplified Managing Process
Freelancers are easy to work with as they are available during holidays, on weekends, at night, or while on vacations (if you agreed upon on this). They are fast to hire if you need someone straight away and they are always in touch via different tools for business communication like Slack, GoogleMeet, Hangouts, and Trello.
It is not always easy to find a perfect contractor, especially if you are doing it for the first time in your life. The good news is that there are a few guidelines you can follow while searching for candidates.
Search for a Candidate on Your Own
If you have already worked with freelancers and you know exactly what you are looking for, you can try to find a contractor on your own. This procedure might take more time and dedication, but if you want the job to be done perfectly, you should vet candidates on your own.
- Check the candidates’ background references from previous jobs and talk with their last contractors.
- Let candidates complete a proficiency test to check their skills.
- Evaluate the test results of all the candidates to see who is the most proficient.
- Check the candidate’s soft skills as you going to talk with this person a lot, and you want to feel comfortable during communication.
Hire a Contractor on a Freelance Platform
If you don’t have time to search for a high-skilled freelancer on your own, let the professionals do it for you. One of the fastest and most secure ways is to use the services of freelance platforms. Here is a list of the best websites to hire freelance developers, who screen their contractors through a multi-layered vetting procedure. With these platforms you will be able to trust the freelancer that you choose to hire because the platform has already found the best in each field.
If you have an unlimited budget, you should check out Gun.io or Toptal. If you are looking for a WordPress developer, look at Codeable, and if you need a professional freelance developer within 24 hours for a reasonable price, give a shot to Lemon.io. Choose your platform wisely and enjoy the benefits of working with freelancers.
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