Direct sourcing involves side-stepping third party recruitment or procurement companies, and sourcing and engaging with a potential workforce yourself, effectively cutting out the middleman.
Considering direct sourcing is critical for any enterprise. It’s a cost-effective model, and also gives you more control over the quality and skills of the candidates you onboard, alongside better transparency into the supply chain as a whole. Here’s how it works.
Advantages of Direct Sourcing Solutions
When your business directly sources freelance talent, you can realize a whole lot of great benefits for your organization. Here are some of the most relevant.
- Streamlining procurement processes: When your business uses a third party sourcing solution, there are more steps in the process. You need to identify and vet your sourcing solution as well as the candidates themselves. In contrast, when you approach freelancers directly — you’re speeding up the time it takes to get from demand to supply.
- Reducing procurement costs: Hiring new workers can be expensive, but you don’t need to pay for what you don’t need. It’s simple math that the less people are in the equation, the less expense you will incur. By directly approaching talent, your business is eliminating the 15-20% fee you’re likely to pay a third party to source and hire your talent on your behalf.
- Improving supplier relationships: When your business uses a Managed Service provider or a third party agency for procurement, the freelancers are ultimately loyal to the vendor — one step removed from your business. Communication can often be through the third party, as well as payments or compliance. With direct sourcing, you have a direct line to the freelancer, and ultimately more control.
- Enhancing supply chain visibility: Let’s say a third party company finds you an awesome freelancer — the best web designer you’ve had in years. You don’t know where they found this person, giving you a black box into your supply chain. With direct sourcing, you can trial different approaches and see what results in the best people on board.
- Providing opportunities for innovation: If you’re struggling with freelancer retention or engagement, direct sourcing can support you in revolutionizing the way you hire and retain. A direct pool of talent is a ready audience for open projects, already interested in your brand, and more likely to be engaged and loyal over time than a generic name from an agency.
This is part of a series of articles about Staff Augmentation.
How to Choose Direct Sourcing Solutions
Direct sourcing can be a fantastic strategy for your organization, but it’s important to have a clear plan in place, as you’ll often lose the support and guidance of a third party who spends all day recruiting.
Start by identifying your exact needs. What niche skills do you want this freelancer to fill? Is it a one off project that won’t be repeated, or will you want to lean on this worker for multiple projects moving forward, or the same work on a cyclical basis? Perhaps you will need more than one freelancer, with similar or different skill sets.
Once you know what you want, you can start evaluating potential suppliers. Depending on your direct sourcing solution, you’ll already have a limited amount of information about applicants. For example, you might ask on LinkedIn if your network has a recommendation, in which case you have a reference right off the bat. You might use a freelancer marketplace, so you can rely on a profile and reviews to give you the details you want to know.
Remember to consider whether the applicant will be a cultural fit, especially if you’re hiring remotely. This can be very important, especially if you’re expecting the freelancer to work well with an existing team, time zone, and systems.
When you use a direct sourcing approach, your organization may need to implement the right technology that can support onboarding, compliance, management and payments, streamlining working with freelancers and reducing the administrative overheads. The right technology, like a Freelancer Management Solution (FMS) can simplify the way you work with freelancers, handling your compliance risk, monitoring budgets and milestones when assigning tasks, and even paying all of your freelancers at the end of the month.
Using Fiverr Enterprise to Directly Source Via Your Own Talent Pool
The big question for many organizations is, how do I find freelance talent directly, without the agency or third party supplier in the middle?
One approach that we take at Fiverr Enterprise is to support you in building a private talent pool of freelancers. This is a thorough a database of potential workers, pre-vetted and listed with their skills and availability, so that you can get freelancers to work much faster on critical projects.
Who is in your talent pool? The choice is yours! Often, customers use their talent pool to organize freelancers who have completed projects for the company in the past, no matter which department or region they worked in, as well as ex-employees who may be consulting now, or unsuccessful candidates that have indicated they are open to work in the future. This provides the business with a pool of workers who are generally already a cultural fit, often know the way the business works, and who can be hired quickly for an emergent need.
Your talent pool becomes your competitive edge. While other businesses are in long onboarding processes with recruitment agencies or limited to the talent offered by one or two agencies, you have an ever-growing database of relevant candidates, tried, tested and vetted ahead of time.
There are many ways to approach direct sourcing, all of which will reduce the cost and complexity of hiring freelance talent. We love the idea of building a talent pool, and can add our expertise to the conversation, acting as a trusted partner to help you get started.
Interested in seeing how Fiverr Enterprise can support your organization’s direct sourcing strategy and streamline your freelance operations?
Related content: Read our guide to outsourcing employees