How you find the best
freelancers online.

It doesn’t need more masses of freelancers and more freelancer platforms, it needs more quality in selection, assessment and cooperation. There are more and more platforms that give you access to freelancers, but at the same time it is getting harder and harder in the flood of freelancers to find out which freelancers really fit you and the work you want to have done. Unfortunately there are also numerous fake profiles with account managers who sell you people you never got to know personally. Often you can find profiles on freelancer portals that look great, but then the cooperation with the freelancer does not meet your expectations. Most ratings of the freelancers on these platforms are often agreed upon and reflect a “good will” after the end of the cooperation, but not the real quality of the freelancer. So these ratings are not really meaningful for the selection of your freelancers. We help you to get more objectivity in the search and selection of freelancers.

If possible, try to define your role in such a way that you can fill it with an expert instead of an average all-rounder. My experience is that I prefer to have several freelancers in my team, that can do one thing really well, and let these experts work together in a structured way, rather than working with all-rounders who take on all tasks and say “no” to nothing, but who only provide average quality. The focus on experts ensures considerably higher quality and also significantly higher reliability.  On the basis of precisely defined roles, you can then check the skills and experience of the freelancers you really need. This role definition is essential. If you don’t describe exactly what your expectations and requirements are for the freelancers, it is just luck and coincidence if the freelancers deliver the performance you want. With this role definition you can plan the whole architecture, for example the setup of your team and then fill the roles with real experts. So you have already created 50% as a basis for a successful cooperation with freelancers. 

Structure in digital collaboration ensures that you have transparency and control over the results and progress of the virtual freelancer team. Scrum or Kanban, for example, are two templates for result-oriented management of teams. This is essential from my experience, I would never trust an account manager again without having this transparency and control in the management. We are not talking about micromanagement here, nor about not trusting your team. Trust in people is of course the basis for a successful cooperation. This only works if you have clarity about expectations and results and make sure right from the start that you find freelancers who show real commitment and provide the transparency you need. This will only work if the requirements and your expectations of working with the freelancer are clearly communicated and the results and progress are continuously transparent. Everything else is blind trust and hope instead of a reliable system.

Make it easy for your team to work with you by providing them with tools that support them in virtual collaboration. Especially tools for capturing and tracking tasks, for example Trello, Jira or Asana, for chats and video communication, for example Slack, Zoom, Teams or Google Chats are essential. It is not enough to provide the tools and I strongly recommend to establish standards that define how these tools should be used. In addition, there are also tools that are particularly good at supporting specialized teams for example for digital marketing or software development both structurally and technically. One person in the team should be responsible for ensuring that the team really works according to the standards. Of course, this can also be a freelancer, who is explicitly assigned this responsibility and accepts it. So the point here is to establish a digital leadership system that leads freelancer teams in a systematic, structured and transparent way, giving you full transparency and control and providing clarity and structure to the entire team. In this way, you eliminate a large part of frictional losses and can even build up real high-performance teams of freelancers.

In the meantime we have helped other clients to find individual freelancers and to build up whole virtual teams of more than 20 freelancers per client. These companies today have a flexibility and speed of implementation that they could not even have imagined before.

If you find it interesting to quickly and reliably find the right freelancers for your team and also to systematically expand the management of freelancer teams, then let’s find out together how we can introduce this system for you.

Manuel Pistner and his company have long sought a way out of the dilemma of the shortage of skilled workers – and finally found one in 2018. Through the increasingly consistent use of virtual teams consisting of over 150 global freelancers, we have developed a system that uses structured assessment to find the best freelancers and makes digitally working teams flexibly scalable with full transparency and control. This has enabled us to build stable freelancer teams and double our revenue without increasing our risk through new fixed costs. The tiresome topic of “shortage of skilled workers” is finally a thing of the past.

With Flash Hub we make these possibilities available to other companies.