Freelancer Management Solutions like Fiverr Enterprise are the new kids on the block. They are built to solve the growing need to source, hire, onboard, manage and pay freelance talent with efficiency and productivity in mind. If you’re using Vendor Management Systems (VMS) to build and manage a freelancer strategy — you’re likely paying a heavy premium for a sub-par solution. Here’s why.
VMS are Made to Attract a Different Kind of Talent
It’s all in the title. Vendor management is made for managing vendors. These are the vendors who hire workers on your behalf, also known as staffing agency workers. This could be when you need to ramp up security for your retail store during the holidays, or you want extra developers on site to help you reach a product launch on time. The best use cases could be long term staff augmentation, or a short-medium term SOW project. In these situations, you don’t need or want ownership over the relationship, and so you’re happy to lean on an MSP or staffing agency to act as the intermediary.
Fiverr Enterprise has a whole different focus. Today, there are more than 73 million freelancers in the U.S alone, 36% of its workforce. These are not agency talent, and usually have a lot more high level expertise. They are often niche experts in their area of interest, and offer both technical and non-technical talent for your business on an ad-hoc basis. Fiverr Enterprise is made to manage relationships with these people directly — not with a vendor who manages them on your behalf.
Why Does Direct Management Matter?
Top quality freelance talent doesn’t usually work through agencies, so a VMS is generally not the best route to helping you find robust skills and capabilities. On top of that, when you source via a VMS, you’re going to experience high markups of between 70% and 100% of what you’re paying the worker. In contrast, with Fiverr Enterprise, you are guaranteed low fees of between 5%-15%. Working directly with freelancers also speeds up time to hire, taking it from weeks down to hours, allowing you to hit the ground running.
As you have full ownership over the relationship, it’s yours to nurture — and so you can ensure you have talent in place for the long term, whether it’s a task or role that will evolve over time, or whether you want to stay in touch so you can reach out for new projects as and when it becomes relevant. With an agency model, you have no direct communication, so even if you love working with a particular person, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to continue the relationship.
| VMS talent | Fiverr Enterprise talent | |
|---|---|---|
| Type of talent | Agency talent | Non-agency talent |
| Fees | High markups (70%-100%) | Low fees (5%-15%) |
| Main use cases | Staff augmentation, high turnover jobs, long term SOW projects | Unique expertise, non-technical expertise, industry experts, niche experts, freelancers, Boutique agencies, micro-engagements (short term) |
| Time-to-value | Weeks | Hours |
| Engagement period | 3-24 months | Ranging from hours to years |
| High-level expertise | Limited | Widely available |
| Relationship | With intermediate (MSP), no ownership | Direct (hiring manager), full ownership |
Ongoing Management and Control with Fiverr Enterprise
As we’ve already established, a VMS isn’t made to manage freelancers directly, it’s made to manage vendors. That means that the technology itself is going to be clunky and awkward if you try to use it for direct freelancer relationships, and in the best-case scenario, it will rely on compromises and workarounds.
Fiverr Enterprise is built to manage freelance talent, from sourcing the right direct relationships, to onboarding them compliantly to work for your business, managing communications and workload, and making payments accurately and on time.
While a VMS won’t provide visibility over your freelance talent, only the vendors, Fiverr Enterprise gives you all the data you need to make holistic, strategic decisions over your freelance workforce and build a growing, evolving talent pool. Adding freelancers via a VMS is not a common approach to sourcing. More often, an MSP will hire the freelancers on behalf of your business, which is time-consuming, and involves a lengthy process of hiring that delays business outcomes. It also adds another 20%-30% of fees on top of the cost, to cover the agency’s own overheads when hiring them as a W2 employee.
Even if you are willing to pay the additional markup to avoid misclassification risk, this old fashioned approach diminishes the value freelancers can have on your business in the first place – the agility and speed.
Fiverr Enterprise lets you hire and onboard new freelancers in a matter of days, including gathering all the right contracts, tax documentation and signatures, which are monitored continuously from within the platform, so you’ll be alerted at the first sign of risk.
Fiverr Enterprise is Your Strategic Advantage
Choosing Fiverr Enterprise over a VMS is a strategic decision to take more granular control over your freelance workforce.
Instead of paying the heavy markup and lengthy onboarding times of using agency talent — it’s time to think about the advantages of working with freelancers directly. While agency talent is a great choice for simple staff augmentation or roles that require high turnover, the future of business is niche freelance expertise, and this deserves your full and direct attention.
See how Fiverr Enterprise works in more detail by scheduling 30-minutes for a walkthrough of the platform with one of our workforce experts.