When you’re making hiring decisions, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is what kind of employee you want to hire. Many businesses today employ a combination of fully in-office staff, fully remote staff, and hybrid staff. Some of these are full-time and some are part-time. Some are seasonal employees brought in during the busiest months of the year, and some are independent contractors or freelancers brought in to lend their skills to a particular project.
There are legal consequences to getting this decision wrong; you can’t hire a freelancer and then treat them like a part-time employee, for example. Legal implications aside, working with a blended workforce presents unique challenges to business owners. Balancing the roles, needs, and rights of two types of employees—full- and part-time employees on the one hand, and independent contractors on the other—is an especially important one to get right. While a lawyer can help you with the legal aspects of hiring, we can help you with the business practicalities: when to hire, what kind of help to hire, how to find the best person for a role, and how to assemble a team that will help you meet your goals.
Know the Applicable Laws
Before you hire, know the law. Employees and independent contractors (whether you call them freelancers, gig workers, or temps) are two separate legal entities. We’ve seen countless complaints and lawsuits against companies hiring independent contractors and then treating them like full-time employees in order to avoid the taxes and regulations applicable to full- and part-time employees.
Understand When to Hire Employees and When to Hire Contractors
There’s an important decision you have to make before you decide who to hire, before you even decide who to interview: whether you want to add someone to the payroll on a full- or part-time basis or contract a freelancer to fill the role. There’s no one right answer to this question, but a clear strategy with clearly defined goals for growth will go a long way to helping you make the right choice.
We may sometimes turn to freelancers when we’re in a panic, when deadlines are tight, when we’re feeling overwhelmed and we want a solution now. While the ability to get someone in the door quickly is one of the advantages of outsourcing, it’s not the only or even the main consideration. Maybe you need help with a particular project, but past that, you can’t see a role for a new employee. Or you need to focus on other aspects of the business for a while and you need someone to work on tasks that will take up too much of your time but don’t necessarily require your expertise. Those are better reasons for hiring someone on a temporary basis. Generally, if the role they are filling is vital to the success of your organization, you want that role done in-house, not outsourced.
Balance the Needs of Employees and Contractors
Employees can take on any range of tasks and must perform them to the satisfaction of their supervisors. Independent contractors, on the other hand, are separate businesses providing a service to your business. The types of work they can do and how they can be instructed to do it are constrained by the nature of that relationship. One of the implications of this distinction is that not all temporary workers can be classified as freelancers. If they’re expected to be at work during certain hours and have a supervisor who can control how their work is done, they should probably be classified as an employee.
Because you hire a freelancer to work on a specific project, you might want to make it clear to employees with similar skillsets why they were not chosen for that project. If you have, for example, a graphic designer on staff, but you need to hire a freelancer to cover the workload, keep it transparent with your full-time graphic designer. You don’t want them to feel like the freelancer is getting the better, more fun, more creative projects while they toil away at the kind of rote, unrewarding, but necessary work that keeps a business ticking over. This is especially important if the two are working side by side in the same office.
This works both ways: while an employee shouldn’t feel like a freelancer is taking fun work away from them, the freelancer shouldn’t feel like a second-class citizen within the workplace. Onboarding will look different for freelancers, but they still need to be brought into the fold in terms of culture and process, especially if you plan on hiring their services again in the future. While employees and freelancers have different rights and responsibilities, it’s still important to make sure everyone feels like they are part of a team.
A freelance gig could be an audition for a permanent position, or there might be no chance of ever getting hired. Make it clear to the freelancer how it’s going to be. This is determined by your strategy and growth projections.
As independent contractors are small business owners themselves, developing a portfolio of successful work is how they get more business. Make sure they understand what they can and cannot include in their portfolios. You may have NDAs with your own clients. You may have trade secrets or other proprietary knowledge or techniques that cannot be made public. Make sure that your freelancers get this information in writing.
Set Boundaries and Expectations
This goes for both freelancers and employees. Both parties should understand the duties and responsibilities of the other. We’re here to help you work out the details of deciding whether to hire contractors or employees and onboarding any type of hire to create a seamless, collaborative workforce.
