Six Major Risks You Will Face When Hiring a Freelance Developer

Living in a digitalized world has many advantages for both employees as well as companies. The popularity of digital platforms has given rise to a new trend of freelance working. People are starting to switch to remote work more and more and companies prefer to outsource their work to freelancers.

For companies, freelancing is the best way to save many additional expenses like social security, medical insurance. This is especially beneficial for start-ups and small scale companies. Companies specializing in many different sectors like marketing, technology, advertising, content marketing and more can hand over their work to freelancers.

The tech industry, however, has seen the concept of freelancing since a very long time. It is common for big and well-established tech companies to outsource a new project or task to freelancers as it saves a lot of their time and resources.

If you are familiar with the costs that are accompanied with hiring a professional, full-time developer, you will agree that freelancing is the most efficient and cost-effective solution to creating new projects and handling app or website development. However, freelancing also has certain risks involved that need to be considered while taking the decision to freelance your developing project.

Here are the six major risks you need to be prepared for when hiring a freelance developer:

1. Quality of work

Hiring freelancers are far cheaper than hiring full-time developers on the job. However, the quality that freelancers provide can never be guaranteed.

More than most freelancers and freelancing firms lure tech companies by promising low rates. Clients easily get attracted to the prospect of getting work done for a better price but you can never trust the credibility of such freelancers. By compromising in terms of money, you might as well be compromising the quality of output you will receive.

The fact remains that you reap what you sow: If you pay less for to your freelancers they will deliver poor quality work.

If you want to develop quality software then you need to invest a little amount of money into its making. This includes providing your freelancer with an adequate amount of money so that they work harder and produce good outputs.

If you want to hire reliable freelance developers at a cheap cost, you need to do some research. Remember, you cannot compromise the quality of your software for cheap rates.

2. Project Deadlines

Another risk involved in working with freelancers is the uncertainty that the work will be delivered before the deadline or not. This is a very common issue faced by every employer who hires freelancers. This is because unlike full-time employees, you cannot control freelancers.

Freelancers do not just handle a single project; they have multiple clients and take on many projects at the same time. This is the nature of the freelancing industry; you cannot expect them to work for you alone.

This is the reason many a times freelancers miss out on important submission deadlines. They might be busy in another client’s project on priority bases or did not plan ahead and lost track of time. Whatever the reason be, this is a recurring issue when you work with freelancers.

Before hiring a freelancer developer, take into account the level of commitment they are providing and how reliable are they.

3. Miscommunication

Miscommunication between employers and freelancers is a frequent problem. Miscommunication can happen from the client side as well as from the freelancer’s side. The reasons for miscommunication can be many, including:

• Client’s provide incomplete project details to freelancers
• Misheard or misunderstood requirements and project’s specification
• Deadline not communicated clearly
• Output expectations not specified clearly

There can be many more reasons for miscommunication and it always leads to loss and waste of time as well as money and resources. Companies often hire freelancers from another country and language and cultural barriers, if any, can also be the cause of miscommunication. Therefore, in order to hire a freelancer to handle a project you first need to make efforts to reduce the communication gap as much as possible by getting to know them on a personal level. If your freelancer is not native but resides in another country, it is best to first understand their culture and language and then hire them for work.

4. Hire freelancers according to your project

Hiring freelancers to develop a project which is going to run for a long time is not advisable. Why? Once the project is complete and in its functioning stage and requires certain maintenance you will require the freelancer again.

Another reason not to outsource a big project is that it requires lots of planning and monitoring which can only be done in-house.

Freelancers are best for small scale and short term projects as you can relieve yourself of the responsibility of such projects and focus on larger, more significant ones. You can let your in-house developing team handle and focus on larger projects and let freelancers take control of small ones.

This is the best way to handle projects and manage the resources you have efficiently.

5. No Guaranteed security

For tech companies, it is very important to keep data and coding of the systems they develop secure and confidential so that no one can misuse or steal your code. This way you can keep your projects completely authentic and safe from plagiarism.

In-house developer employees are bound by certain company privacy policies that require them to be secretive about their work. However, when working with freelancers there is a big risk involved of having your confidential data leaked.

Cybersecurity and illegal use of company resources is a huge concern of employers working with freelancers. Your company can face a huge amount of loss if you hire even a single corrupt freelancer.

This is why you need to be very particular while hiring freelancers. Research and hire someone you can completely trust.

6. Beware of ghost freelancers

There have been many scams in the name of freelancing and you need to stay prepared in order to prevent yourself from entering such situations. Falling into a ghost freelancer’s trap is very common. Who exactly is a ghost freelancer? A person who pretends to be a freelancer and scams you into assigning them a project then disappears with your money is a ghost freelancer.

There are some newbies who do not communicate professionally and do not respond to your calls or keep you updated on the progress. Such freelancers are also very troublesome. One day they are there and the next day they just vanish like a ghost.

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