According to a recent survey by Deloitte, nearly 70% of UK businesses plan to expand their use of contingent workers over the next five years. Leveraging skills and domain-knowledge-specific freelance talent on a fractional basis can be hugely beneficial for startups and SMBs looking to validate assumptions, build products, and grow their business efficiently.
However knowing how to hire freelance product designers, developers, or specific marketers on a remote basis can be difficult, especially for resource and time-strapped founders.
When to hire fractional specialists and freelancers for startup teams? ⏰
Right place, right time, right resource.
Identify project or business requirements, on a software, skill, and domain-expertise basis. Try to be as granular as possible to cover gaps and optimise your internal team resources before bringing in freelance or fractional experts.
Following a deep dive in validating your requirements, alongside project/business roadmap releases and desired deadlines, you should start approaching your targeted talent or small independent agencies.
This could be done by using a curated platform and service like Rafiki Works to facilitate the process, or you could try your luck at larger platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.
How to hire freelance product specialists remotely? 🤷
Following your resource requirements for your upcoming project or business needs:
Put together a strategy around how you envision your contingent workforce working alongside your in-house team, what that structure looks like, and how the additional resources will be managed.
Now that you’ve got a clear picture of what you need for your projects both now and down the road, it’s time to zero in on finding the perfect talent. This phase is all about connecting and aligning with skilled professionals who have the know-how to make things happen.
Rafiki can help simplify and streamline this process by providing a level of hands-on freelance and fractional recruitment support, needs assessment, and matching of the right skills to your business needs. We can also help manage the process end to end, including a single point of contract and payment for multiple freelancers in a compliant way.
Where to source and hire top freelance and fractional talent? 🌍
There are multiple freelance platforms you can use. UpWork, Fiverr, Freelancer, or even LinkedIn can be used to hire freelance talent.
You can also use Rafiki to source, hire, and manage top freelance and fractional talent in a streamlined and efficient manner. Rafiki vets and onboards top freelance and independent agency talent in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, and blends traditional hiring processes with a modern approach to recruitment, consultancy, and fractional agency expertise to provide a flexible and customizable approach to fulfilling your business requirements and budgets.
How much to pay freelance designers, developers, and marketing specialists in South Africa? 💸
Rates in the UK vary, depending on where you hire from and via which platforms. Our research indicates that the average day rate for freelance developers in the UK is between £380-£460. The average day rate for freelance product designers in the UK is between £320-£430. These are of course dependent on seniority and specialty.
Compared to the UK, remote freelance rates in South Africa can be much more efficient, while the quality of talent remains highly competitive and increasingly senior. An average day rate for a freelance product designer in South Africa can vary between £160 - £260, while freelance developers can £200 - £320.
We recently surveyed 120+ mid to senior-level freelance product design specialists (UI/UX) in South Africa for Rafiki’s talent marketplace. Average daily rates across multiple levels of seniority were between £180-£260.
How to pay remote freelancers and fractional talent? 🫰
There are multiple ways to manage and pay your contingent workforce. Freelancers could be paid an hourly, daily, or even weekly rate, a fixed-term project-based rate, retainers, or 50% upfront and 50% at the end of a project.
We suggest a milestone approach to releasing payment. In this arrangement, the project is divided into distinct milestones or stages. Payments are made upon the successful completion of each milestone, as agreed on between freelancers and clients before final contract signing. This approach offers both parties clear checkpoints to monitor the freelancer’s progress throughout the project. It's however putting in place an additional contingency plan for scope creep, to protect both freelancers and clients working on more complex projects.
Hire freelance product designers and developers in South Africa 🏆
If you’re exploring various contingent workforce strategies for your startups or SMB, and need support on sourcing and managing individual freelancers or pop-up teams of fractional specialists, please reach out, we’d love to help.
Original Rafiki LinkedIn article here.
