The 5 Best Places to Find Freelancers
The best virtual watering holes for the future of work
Outsourcing work to a freelancer is an increasingly popular way to scale your business or startup, especially if you’re not quite ready to hire full-time staff.
But finding the right people for the job can be a little different when working with freelancers. We self-employed folk tend to hang out in different online venues than your traditional job candidates, and if you’re not in the know, tracking down the cream of the crop can feel like an impossible quest.
Our team at Collabos are experts at hunting out the best and brightest freelancers, and in this week’s blog, we’re sharing a list of the best virtual watering holes to find them.
1. Social media groups
If you’ve never used the groups feature on Facebook or LinkedIn, there’s no better time to start than when you’re searching for freelancers. Groups exist to connect people to others with similar interests, so chances are good that you’ll find a few candidates in any freelancing group.
To find a group on Facebook, simply head to the search bar and type in “freelance,” “freelancer,” or “freelancing.’ Once the results page appears, you can filter your results by posts, people, pages, groups, and more (spoiler alert: You’ll want to choose Groups).
To find a group on LinkedIn, run a search the same way you would on Facebook. Once the results page appears, click the More tab, then choose Groups from the drop-down menu. Or you can access the groups you’re already a part of by clicking the Work button at the top right corner, then choosing Groups from the drop-down menu.
Because these special interest groups have become so popular, you may even be able to find a group for freelancers in your specific industry or in your specific area of need. For instance, there are groups specifically for freelance writers, designers, and IT professionals (to name a few); female freelancers; freelancing moms; new freelancers; freelancers who use Upwork; and more.
Most of these groups are closed, which means you’ll need to request permission to join before you can read members’ posts or create a post yourself. Once accepted, be sure to read over the group rules to make sure job posts are allowed.
2. LinkedIn
Of all the social media platforms out there, LinkedIn is by far the most powerful for finding freelancers. In fact, it even has its own freelancing marketplace, called LinkedIn ProFinder, built right into the platform:
ProFinder is free for job posters because their business model requires freelancers to pay a fee for each gig they apply to … which means that the people who respond to your post are invested and ready to see things through. ProFinder also promises up to 5 responses from qualified freelancers near you within 24 hours of posting your job, which gives you a good pool of candidates to choose from.
If you’d rather hand-pick your candidates, you can also use LinkedIn the good, old-fashioned way and search for freelancers with the desired areas of expertise.
This may not be as efficient as using ProFinder, but it does give you the opportunity to be a little more choosy about who you work with. And if you reach out to someone who doesn’t have the availability for your project at the moment, they may be able to refer you to another freelancer who does.
3. Job boards
If you prefer to find freelancers outside of social media, consider expanding your search to include online job boards.
Stay away from bidding sites like Upwork and Fiverr. The dirt-cheap rates freelancers charge on those sites may be tempting, but don’t be fooled — when it comes to the quality of your deliverables, you get exactly what you pay for.
Instead, look for more traditional job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, or ZipRecruiter. As remote work has become increasingly popular, these boards have started to feature more and more of the location-flexible positions that freelancers crave. These boards aren’t just for traditional employees anymore.
You can also find good freelancers on more industry-niche job boards, like:
If the boards we’ve listed here don’t apply to your industry, there are always more to choose from. Just search Google for “ [your industry] job boards” to see which ones are the most popular in your field.
4. Your colleagues
Never underestimate the power of a good referral. Your business bestie, your fellow mastermind group members, and your long-time mentor can all be good resources when looking for a freelancer.
Start by asking them if they’ve ever worked with a freelancer, and if they have, find out if they’re skilled in the type of work you need to be done. Ask your colleagues what they liked and didn’t like about working with that freelancer and whether they would work with them again. If you’re satisfied with all of their answers, ask if they’d be willing to put you in touch with their freelancer.
Not only will you cut down on your search time this way, but your colleague may even have some valuable advice on working with freelancers. And there’s a good chance your freelancer will be a little more on top of things knowing a previous client talked them up to you.
5. Collabos
The problem with all of the resources we’ve mentioned so far is that regardless of the platform you choose, you still have to spend a significant amount of time searching for candidates, screening their profiles, and managing whoever you hire to work on your project.
That’s a lot of company resources spent on just one person, especially if you just needed a quick turnaround on some new graphics.
That’s where we come in. Our goal here at Collabos is to make the entire freelancer-hiring process easy and fast so that you can get back to work growing your brand.
Our platform uses machine intelligence to match your needs with the right expert from our database of fully vetted freelancers. We clear the project details with you, assign the work to your freelancer, and check in with them along the way. All you need to do is tell us about your project and pay for completed tasks.
Ready to see how Collabos can help you get your project done on time without the hassle of finding and managing freelancers? Tell us about your project below.
