Managing a labor force is one of the hardest challenges for today’s enterprises. In fact, in 2023, most professionals in the recruitment industry said tight talent pools was the main global hiring challenge.
Whether it’s retaining top talent, finding the right skills, or keeping a balance on expertise and cost — businesses are continually looking for new ways to hire, retain and engage workers.
If you’re looking for a new way to manage freelancers, check out Fiverr Enterprise, a Freelancer Management System (FMS) that streamlines hiring, onboarding, management and payments.
In the meantime, keep reading to learn about how enterprises are leaning on staff augmentation services to support a diverse labor pool.
What Are Staff Augmentation Services?
The idea behind staff augmentation services is that not all jobs need to be filled by full-time employees. While you might have a core team of workers who are on the monthly payroll, many roles can be taken by freelancers or consultants who are hired per project or even per hour.
Staff augmentation services help you find the right flexible workers to augment your full-time staff, including vetting talent, supporting compliant onboarding, and even management and payments.
Key Benefits of Staff Augmentation Services
Many enterprises love the idea of working with freelancers more, but in reality — it’s too much hard work for their teams. Specific challenges include:
- Finding the right people: Most people look for freelancers on freelance marketplaces or via their own social networks. This can attract a lot of leads, but the quality can be variable to say the least. Narrowing it down is a lot of work.
- Ensuring compliance: Hiring freelancers without thinking about compliance is a huge risk for any enterprise. Misclassification can lead to fines, penalties, and reputational damage. Compliance isn’t one and done, it’s an ongoing obligation.
- Onboarding quickly: If freelancers are augmenting your existing team, they may need to sign up to specific systems and applications, and get all the right documentation listed with Legal, HR and IT. This can slow down time to value.
- Keeping information up to date: You can work with a great freelancer, but lose their up to date contact data or accurate information on their rates or working status. This is especially true after some time has passed.
With staff augmentation services, a lot of these challenges are bypassed automatically. Staff augmentation services will have a pre-vetted pool of expert talent, which means you don’t need to sift through dozens or even hundreds of applications or profiles. Compliance is usually part of the vetting process, so you can onboard new workers quickly and help them get started with a project immediately. Staff augmentation services will have a record of who you have worked with, and a constant stream of new talent for specific needs.
How Staff Augmentation Services Work
Depending on the type of service you use for staff augmentation, the process will vary. If for example, you rely on staffing agencies for finding freelancers, you will be limited to a local pool of talent, with only a certain range of skills. If you use a niche staff augmentation service, you may find high quality developers for example, but you’ll need to form a relationship with a totally new agency to find creatives or financial experts.
Remember, most staff augmentation services are an intermediary between you and your freelancers. This means you are not forming a direct relationship, and many elements may be decided upon and directed by the service — such as contractual terms, payments, or access.
Choosing a Staff Augmentation Provider with Technology at its Core
Fiverr Enterprise is a SaaS solution that gives you full visibility and control over your entire freelance workforce by allowing you to source, hire, onboard, manage and pay, all while ensuring compliance, so your teams can work faster and maximize business growth.
As a complete Freelancer Management System (FMS), Fiverr Enterprise supports you in augmenting full-time staff with freelance talent from around the world. Simply post a job, and within 48 hours you will have 2-6 pre-vetted candidates, highly skilled, compliant, and ready to start work according to set terms to ensure full transparency.
Our automated workflows help freelancers to onboard quickly to your own systems and processes, gather all the relevant documentation automatically, and keep information up to date so that you can work directly with your preferred talent again and again.
Choosing a staff augmentation provider? Here’s how Fiverr Enterprise checks all the necessary boxes:
- Expertise in relevant industries or technical domains: Compared to local and limited staffing agencies, Fiverr Enterprise offers a global talent pool, ensuring you can find specific expertise in a wide range of skills, all from the same single platform. No matter how niche the need, it’s worth posting a job and seeing what skills are available.
- Screening and vetting processes for talent: Freelancer marketplaces are overcrowded, and it’s hard for enterprises to find the gold amongst the noise. Fiverr Enterprises pre-vets all talent for 5* quality across every field, from technical skills and management chops to creative ingenuity. You can rest assured your workers are compliant from day 1 to day 1001.
- Flexibility and responsiveness to changing needs: Whatever your workflows, we can help you automate and streamline the way you work with freelancers. Our AI engine monitors freelancer relationships for any sign of misclassification, and at the end of the month you can pay your freelancers in one click, across 80 currencies and 7 methods.
- Reputation, reviews, and case studies: Our customers tell it like it is! They save 20+ hours each month on admin tasks, double the number of freelancers they use, and issue payments 4x faster. Whatever your enterprise goals, speak to us about boosting productivity, adding expertise, and reducing administrative overhead when working with freelancers.
Talk to one of our workforce experts today to see how Fiverr Enterprise can offer you full visibility and control over your freelance workforce.