Staff augmentation has turned to be the most buzzing word, attracting businesses to hire remotely. According to SAP Fieldglass, ‘’ Employees now represent only 58% of workforce spend, with the other 42% going to external resources* – contingent workers like independent contractors and freelancers as well as services providers like consulting firms or marketing agencies.'

While it is a great idea to hire freelancers and consultants, managing them is a pain!

What is staff augmentation?

Businesses can hire talents from all over the planet and also manage the team efficiently by following the staff augmentation outsourcing strategy. This is a great way of adding technical resources, temporarily, for augmenting the capacity of the business. You can hire freelancers or consultants to fill the gaps as per the project requirements.  Staff augmentation has many benefits. It usually needs no infrastructure investment, reduces recruiting time, eliminates the cost of in-house employees, and involves no geographical boundary. However, if you manage more than 50 freelancers and consultants, administering the relationship with all of them becomes a pain and that’s when Freelancer Management Systems ( FMS) come into play.

What is a Freelancer Management System?

Due to COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, remote working has been on the rise. Businesses are favoring contractual projects for optimal utilization of talents and skills in these uncertain times. As the inflow of new projects is unpredictable, businesses prefer to hire a skilled external workforce for balancing the cost and revenue. As a result, more and more freelancers are now doing a wide variety of projects. This makes it difficult to organize the talents, standardize onboarding, and process payments. Transformify Freelancer Management System (FMS) offers a cloud-based solution for managing all aspects of the remote workforce in the best possible way.

Who needs a freelancer management system?

Temp agencies and companies managing consultants and freelancers at scale face a whole lot of problems ranging from double payments, unreconciled invoices, unmet deadlines and the list goes on. In such cases, one is likely to need a system to keep track of the projects, payments, and the talent pool. Companies managing 100 or more freelancers typically need a freelancer management system. An FMS provides a single platform that includes all key information about the freelancers like contracts signed, availability, the status of the project, invoices, payments history, etc. The cloud-based centralized freelancer management system also helps to break down the tasks among different wings of the business for better management of the project. The marketing department can tag skills and onboard based on their availability. Finance can handle invoices and payments. HR can source and onboard freelancers and consultants and Legal can monitor the employment status.

Reasons for using FMS

• Saves time and increases productivity: Switching from the manual methods of managing freelancers and adopting FMS makes talent hunt easier and boosts efficiency.
• Streamlines hiring and ensures compliance: You need to onboard freelancers through email, phone calls, and other communication channels when you do not have a Freelancer Management System (FMS). This is a cumbersome and time-wasting process. Keeping records of freelancers in spreadsheets also does not guarantee that they are onboarded properly. Using FMS clears off all recruitment disparities and ensures compliance with employment requirements. Needless to say, Transformify FMS is fully GDPR compliant.
• Renders complete visibility: Businesses can gain complete visibility of all freelancers in company's network by using FMS. It provides contact details, rates, history of work & performance, payment, etc all at once for making an informed hiring decision.
• Ensures robust tracking: Tracking of time is vital for managing freelance works. Using FMS, businesses can easily track the progress of any project, the amount of time taken for completing the project. This helps to make strategic decisions for meeting deadlines.
• Improves relationships: Freelancers also need to be treated well to decrease the turnover rate. Retaining highly-skilled freelancers dramatically cuts sourcing and onboarding costs. As FMS facilitates seamless on-boarding and fast payments, it helps to build a long-lasting, positive relationship between the business and the freelancer.

Is Transformify FMS a good solution for your business?

Transformify FMS for Businesses

Businesses hire freelancers for a variety of reasons. Sometimes several small one-off projects can bog down full-time employees. Hiring an external workforce helps to get those done while the in-house employees can focus on more important projects for maximizing revenue generation. Transformify FMS is a great solution for businesses looking to source, onboard, assign and pay freelancers, consultants and independent contractors from a single dashboard.

As a fully integrated ATS (Applicant Tracking System) comes in the pack, businesses can use Transformify FMS to access a global talent pool for sourcing top-notch freelancers and consultants worldwide. Each posted job listing is automatically published by 100+ job boards worldwide to attract qualified candidates in no time. Assigning freelancers and consultants to various projects is via a click of a button.

Transformify FMS for Temp Agencies

Often, enterprises opt to hire on a temporary basis to address the hiring needs of strategic time-bound projects. ERP system integration or business transformation are great examples of such strategic projects that require a pool of highly skilled experts over a relatively short period of time. Hiring them on a full-time basis is not justified. Usually, these experts are sourced via temp agencies that compete with each other and often have less than 48 hours to respond to key customer requests.

With Transformify FMS, temp agencies can engage the right candidates from a vast pool of highly skilled experts, consultants and freelancers and place them with their business clients. As quick and seamless communication with the candidates is of utmost importance, it takes a click of a button to send messages to all shortlisted candidates, invite them for an interview or check their availability.

Transformify FMS offers customized integration with ERP,  accounting, time tracking, project management and payroll software. It incorporates a fully automated billing process. One can also download all invoices at any time. Custom exports of invoices are available upon request to streamline client's reconciliation process.

Duplicate payments are a great challenge when working with freelancers, consultants and remote teams. Businesses can easily avoid double payment using Transformify FMS. It also relieves businesses from collecting and keeping bank account details. There is no need to monitor foreign currency details to manage and pay freelancers. With Transformify FMS, businesses can transfer secure payments in any currency across the globe, except for a few restricted countries.

Splitting a single payment to several payouts or transferring to multiple e-wallets or bank accounts is an option as well. Most freelancers prefer part of their income to be paid into e-wallet accounts linked to prepaid cards to have access to cash all the time while part of their income is to be transferred to traditional bank accounts to cover rent, utilities and other recurring payments.

The takeaway

As remote working is evolving at a rapid pace, businesses need to be more flexible than ever before to remain competitive. Leveraging an external workforce on-demand becomes a norm for those industries working on a project basis. Using a Freelancer Management System allows businesses to seamlessly manage and pay freelancers and consultants while cutting administrative costs and improving the bottom line.