Upwork, a leading freelance platform conducted a survey and found out that 20% (10 million people) of the current workforce is considering doing freelance work. The growing number of freelancers have some important implications for business leaders and talent hunters. For instance, the expanding freelance workforce means businesses are more likely to lose full-time employees.
However, the good news is that organizations will have access to large pools of talented, and highly skilled independent workers. With more people looking for flexible, remote work, businesses that don’t consider adding freelancers to their teams will miss out on a talent share.
If you’re already working with freelancers and not sure how to manage them, this blog post will help you understand what a freelance management system (FMS) is. We’ll briefly talk about the functions of an FMS and how it helps organizations meet their talent needs.
What is a Freelance Management System?
FMS is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses streamline all of the financial, managerial, and legal components of working with independent contractors. It reduces paperwork while boosting your overall productivity. If freelancers are a key part of your workforce, you need a solid FMS to simplify your processes.
From hiring the right people to ensuring compliance, FMS can help you produce better results and save you time and money. If you’ve already been working with a contingent workforce, you probably understand how complex and time-consuming it is to manage everything without a system. As a business, you need a technical solution if you’re managing more than 10 freelancers.
Key Functions of an FMS
Your marketing, finance, HR, law, and other departments can use one FMS for different reasons. For example, your HR team can use it to create standardized contracts and store them within the system. Likewise, the legal department can use the same platform to ensure compliance. The following are some of the key functions of an FMS:
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Finding the right talent
One of the characteristics of a good FMS is that it makes it easy for recruiters to find new freelancers. Since you need to hire freelancers quickly, you can’t spend plenty of time sourcing candidates manually. It’s certainly challenging and time-consuming to find skilled, dependable freelancers. However, an FMS will make the talent pool creation process easy and quick.
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Preparation and signing of contracts
Imagine how it looks like to have your data scattered across different platforms. An ill-organized way of managing freelancers will only cost you more time and money. An FMS is where you prepare and store your documents in a flawless way. From contract preparation to onboarding, everything happens within a system. When you need to pull up a particular document, you know exactly where to find it.
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Managing invoices and payments
We often see relationships between companies and freelancers sour due to late payments. When working with freelancers, trust is probably the most crucial factor that determines the health of your collaborations. You don’t want an inefficient invoice and payment system to break the trust between you and your workers. A smart freelance management system enables you to manage invoices and process payments in a time-efficient fashion.
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Onboarding and offboarding
A robust onboarding process helps companies get freelancers ready to work quickly. However, the lack of a standardized onboarding process, you’re likely to face time-consuming paperwork, delays, and bottlenecks. With an FMS, you would be able to streamline and simplify every step on your onboarding checklist through automation.
Offboarding is also a crucial process and you need a system to properly manage it. A good FMS will ensure you cover your offboarding basics. Besides, it gives you control over how freelancers access your organization’s sensitive information.
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Compliance
One of the challenges hiring managers face when working with independent contractors is protecting the company’s ideas and products. This is where you need to pay due attention to your compliance and documentation processes. Implementing the right FMS will streamline the process of managing and signing legal documents.
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Time tracking
Are you able to accurately track time and find out how much time your freelancers are spending on each project? If not, you must take advantage of an FMS that allows you to access workers’ timesheets without facing a learning curve. Leading freelance platforms use their time tracking tools to help businesses monitor the process of each team member.
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Project Management
Project management tools are essential for almost every business. When managing projects with freelancers, you need to keep everything organized in one place: files, tasks, milestones, payments, and communication. Freelance talent management tools are designed to help businesses achieve this goal. With an FMS, everyone in your team will be able to access the required information from any device without downloading anything or using additional tools.
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Accounting support
When working with on-site, full-time employees, companies deploy accounting systems to manage finances internally. The same should be the case when working with freelancers. An FMS can eliminate the need for outside vendors to run your finance-related business affairs. Ideally, you should be looking for a platform that offers multiple features without any additional cost.
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Seamless Communication
Needless to mention that communication between freelancers and business managers should be seamless. To boost productivity and complete projects on time, there must be a system that streamlines communication. An FMS can also handle the communication part of your organization.
Use an FMS to boost your overall productivity
There are more than 1.1 billion freelancers in the world. This means more than 30% of the workforce consists of freelancers. An FMS is inevitable when it comes to managing the growing need for freelancers. The challenges and processes we mentioned above may seem overwhelming but the right implementation of a talent management solution will make them a non-issue.
With one system in place, you can automate all of your hiring processes related to independent contractors. It’s time to take full advantage of on-demand talent without worrying about internal bureaucracy.
Wiggli: The Best FMS Tool
Wiggli is a cloud-based talent management tool that makes it super easy for you to build talent pools, hire the right people, and implement a smooth onboarding and offboarding process. From applicant tracking and hiring to recruitment marketing, Wiggli has everything you need to hire and manage your talent.
