2 Main Ways to Find Creative Talents (Pros and Cons Are On Us!)

We all know creative talents are hard to find, and if you zoom out and look at the big picture, there’re always solutions out there. 

Basically speaking, there’re mainly two types of creators out there: freelancer/part-timer and full-time employee. Here are the pros and cons of each type and perhaps you’ll find the one which suits you best.

🤔Freelancer / Part-timer

Sizable companies seldom consider freelancers since they have more than enough budget to hire and groom their employees. 

However, freelancers can come in handy when you need an extra hand, especially there’re now platforms like Freehunter, which provides you thousands of relative talents with portfolios and experience. 

👍🏻Pros

1. Greater Flexibility

Since the hiring of freelancers is usually based on projects or hours, long-term contracts, and commitment from both parties are not required, giving the employer a much greater flexibility. Employers can have more freedom and control when it comes to the work, cost, or even the person—working with different freelancers until finding out the one who’s the best fit for you.

2. Lower Risk

When the economy or the business is not doing well, wage cut and layoff could happen, causing distress to both the company and employees. Hiring freelancers allows the company to allocate the resources better and maintain the budget, by only requiring services from freelancers when there’s real work to be done.

3. Quick and Lower Cost

When it comes to hiring freelancers, employers don’t have to consider a lot as hiring a full-time employee. Things such as employment packages, benefits, and career paths can be put aside, making the hiring process much faster and efficient. Feel like the freelancer is not right for you? You can always look for a new one at any time.

🙁Cons

1. Quality

Being away without face-to-face contact, sometimes a freelancer could have his/her quality of work affected by various factors, such as whether the freelancer has sufficient communication with the employer, proper practice of self-discipline or the number of projects he or she is handling at the same time.

2. Not Always Accessible

As freelancers work remotely and usually working for a few employers at the same time, he or she might not always be able to respond instantly. If you suddenly got an urgent task, you

cannot always expect your duty to be put at the priority, as the freelancer could have a lot of responsibilities and tight deadlines from other employers as well.

3. Can’t be trained

With full-time employees, employers can provide training to help employees improve their

performance and develop skills, which are not applicable in the case of hiring freelancers.

Without training or dedication as a full-time employee, freelancers might be missing out on details that can only be spotted by full-time employees.

🤔Full-time Employee

This group is always the go-to for most of the companies since it’s the most “secured” working population. 

It could be a pain in the neck to attract candidates, screen through applications, review portfolios, and select the right fit for your company culture. 

Yet, with innovative job platforms like Wantedly, these procedures are 10x less time-consuming, not to mention the millennial talent pool existing on these platforms. 

👍🏻Pros

1. Stability 

This is obvious, right? As a full-time employee, their commitment, reliability, and trustworthiness are relatively higher than those of freelancers. 

Being always reachable and manageable, you’ll be more confident in giving them essential tasks, and even when they resign, you’ll always have sufficient time for handover instead of having projects or campaigns hang in mid-air. 

2. Employees’ Growth

What’s great about hiring full-time employees is that they can be trained, be it soft skills or hard skills.

With the potential of growth on top of their stability, their performance will only be increased if appropriately mentored. They can even become a significant pillar of your company as you see fit. 

3. Employee Loyalty

For freelancers, most of the time, it’d be money-driven when it comes to jobs. However, that’s a different story for full-time employees.

Whether they love your company or the colleagues around them, the sense of being loyal to and wanting to work for a company is there. With that said, eventually, they’ll not only be your employees but an evangelist who recommends your company to people around them as a great workplace. 

🙁Cons

1. Higher cost

It’s always said that “you pay what you get.” Although the cost of having a full-time employee is higher than hiring freelancers, the benefits are evident, as mentioned above. 

In times like this, your company might be suffering from the global situation, and that’s when you should consider whether you have enough budget to maintain your full-time team size. 

2. Turnover risk

For freelancers, it’s always like “easy come, easy go.” You don’t want your full-time employees to be like that. 

However, the risk is there. It’s either the lack of retention power, or they simply aren’t for your company. That’s why you should always try your best to make sure they’re the right cultural fit for your team. 

You always want your new hires to pass the probation period, right?

3. Decreasing Motivation

Laziness is human nature. 

When your employees have been in your company for years, some of them might lose their motivation to drive the company and even themselves forward.

In that case, it’d be you to getting them back on track. If your effort is futile after all, perhaps it might be the right timing to reflect on what you could’ve done better to prevent similar events happening again on other staff. 

To sum up, creative talents might be hard to find, but there’s always a way – whether to look for full-time employees on platforms like Wantedly or freelancers like Freehunter. 

It’s just like hiring; there’s no perfect candidate but the one who suits your company best. Instead of struggling between the full-timer and freelancer, how about experiencing both and discover the answer for yourself?

Freehunter is a social network for browsing and contacting over 10,000 creative talents from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Freehunter offers clients an easy and quick access to a large pool of professional talents with different expertise across various industries, such as photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, and more. On Freehunter, clients can freely browse different profiles and works, as well as instantly getting in touch with the ideal candidate without any fee or hassle.