How to Hire Freelancers & Contractors in 2024👩‍💻complete guide to outsourcing, hiring, onboarding

[Music] a lot of you have been asking me how and where I hire my contractors so in this video I'm going to cover all of that as well as the best process for hiring how to assign a test project and tips for onboarding them and a lot more throughout this video I'll be referring to this Nifty guide by HubSpot who is the sponsor of today's video and who has provided us with this free downloadable beginner's guide to hiring and managing a team of Freelancers this is honestly a really really great guide that you can use as a checklist for when you hire so I highly recommend you download it below and I'll also share a lot of my personal tips and hiring documents in this video so why should you even work with Freelancers there are a lot of reasons and for me what I have found really helpful is that they actually help me save money yes I know that you have to spend money to hire them but they actually save you money in the long term because it frees up your time so you can spend more time doing more important things that only you can do and especially with the more creative tasks that I need help up with like video editing or graphic design on canva they also give me a fresh perspective because they come from different educational backgrounds and they have different kinds of experiences so I've noticed that when I work with Freelancers there's always some innovation in the stuff that I create and definitely turning projects around quickly and actually even if you hire somebody for let's say five hours a week which doesn't seem like a lot it's actually really really helpful because in those five hours you could be doing something else that person you hired is working on your project and so things get done a lot quicker on the flip side hiring Freelancers also helps people in general because you are giving people a job it says here in the HubSpot guide that 42 percent of Freelancers report that remote contract positions are their only option for work so when you hire a freelancer you are giving somebody the opportunity to work and that's amazing that is some real impact that you're making on the world so now let's talk about how to find Freelancers and I want to show you a list of places that you can hire so there are a lot of websites you can used to hire people including upwork Craigslist Fiverr Guru freelancer workhoppers some of these I've never heard of before but the ones I have used are upwork Fiverr I definitely know LinkedIn and I actually want to show you where I hired my Freelancers so out of these people that I hired oh by the way the first person is not a freelancer I actually used a venture for Canada grant to get reimbursed for the salary so it was a part-time job that I had to put them on payroll but for this one I used my own network so I posted the job on LinkedIn and I think a bunch of other places and that person found me through Linkedin the next one was my own network again my video editor was following me on Instagram the next one was my VA which I found on upwork and then upwork again for my second video editor and then my own network for the third video editor and then upwork for my canva assistant so I mainly use my own network and for upwork I used it mainly to find the more long-term positions that I have you can definitely hire for short-term projects on up work but actually used Fiverr to hire for a bunch of short-term like one-off projects which included video editing making music Pinterest pins making greeting cards this is like designing making a YouTube intro cartoon which I did not use and printable banner for an event and research for companies and honestly using Word of Mouth to hire Freelancers or contractors is really great because if people are already in your network there's already some level of trust that you have with them it might not be a lot but it is more trust than hiring just a random stranger and you have to build that trust with that stranger with time now when you're posting to these kinds of sites or you're posting on LinkedIn what do you write in a job description so actually here there is a list of things to include and I think this is really good I would definitely write about all of these things especially if you're hiring for something more long-term and it's going to be a relationship that you're going to develop so I want to show you an actual job description that I use to hire a virtual assistant and you can see I wrote down exactly what they're going to do what they need to have like excellent English writing skills pay attention to detail previous experience this is what I need them to use so I would prefer if they have experience and I have responsibilities so these are the exact things that they're going to help me with like the main tasks they're going to do and usually when I post a job description I also post my social media links so they can take a look at who I am and what my content is about and usually if they really want to work with me they'll comment something about my content like hey I saw in your YouTube video this this I really like this I like what you do I like how you do this and for me I personally want to work with somebody who resonates with the kind of work that I'm doing so I also suggest putting into your job description who you are and what kind of business you have now once you've posted the job description you'll have a bunch of people applying and so how do you actually hire them what is the process so I definitely first take a look at their application and I look at is it generic is it specific did they put effort into the application did they actually say hi Dina or is it just High the hiring manager and if it's something creative that I'm hiring for I'll definitely review their portfolio and take a look at what other work they have done sometimes I get people applying who are just in the beginning stages of starting to do this kind of work so they might not have a portfolio but if they have a really good application and they've written something that is not generic and is super tailored towards the job description I would give them a chance and give them an interview for me what I really value in a candidate is their personality and character so I'm looking for that fit I think that skills can be trained but people's personality and who they are as a person and their energy level and their enthusiasm that cannot be trained for each job that I hire I usually interview three to six people and I'll just schedule that within one week and do it on Zoom okay something really point I want to mention is that after you interview people you might want to do a test project with them and I'm really happy HubSpot included this because I think a lot of people hire people without really getting the feel for how that person works so it says here try to do a test project around three to four hours Max and be very clear whether it is paid or unpaid so when you do a test project it's a really great way