Should I hire a Company or an Individual Freelancer?

When you are looking for hiring Remote Staff(s), you often get confused between hiring a Company or an Individual Freelancer. You can get both the Companies and Individuals registered with their freelancer accounts in different Platforms like Freelancer, Upwork, Guru, etc. Experts always say “Hire a Reputed Company and Not an Individual”, but why? Here, we will discuss a few of those reasons.

Succinct  Introduction:

Individual Freelancers work directly with the client, where a client can directly hire an Individual Freelancer Account. To hire a Company, a client needs to hire a Company Account, where they will assign the Developer’s Account to the Client.

Twelve Reasons to Hire a Reputed Company and Not an Individual Freelancer:

1. Full-Time Focus or Partial Focus?

Most often, it has been noticed that Individual Freelancers are part-timers, who already have full-time employment in any company. They do freelancing for extra income. The Individual Freelancers, who are not employed somewhere and do full-time freelancing, they often accept multiple projects at a time from different freelancing platforms to earn more. They cannot depend upon one project and that’s why they accept multiple. Here, as a client, you don’t get a Full-Time focus on your project though your Freelancer pretends to be your Full-time worker.

Whereas a Reputed Company has multiple Developers, and they can assign any number of developers you want. Each developer you hire works full-time for you. Companies often use well-known Time Tracker apps, those they install in each of their staff’s system. The Tracker tracks the real working hours, idle time, and it takes the random screenshots. As a client, you get access to view those and monitor your remote staff very easily.

2. Does the Hourly Rate really Vary?

There’s a myth that Individual Freelancers charge less Hourly rate than the Companies, and that’s not true! There are many companies, who charge a very moderate hourly rate and provide you a very high-quality work! You can also track the Developer’s work so that you know for what are you paying! While you hire a Developer from a Company for a month and pay $1280 USD only, you can be sure that the Developer has really worked for a total of 160 hours. But the same you can’t expect from an Individual Freelancer as they are multi-taskers. You may pay an individual for 160 hours, with an output of 100 hours. Sometimes some Individual Freelancers come with exceptionally low Hourly rates. But remember, all that glitters are not Gold! Cheap Cost most often makes a Cheap Product! If the output doesn’t have quality, the value is Zero. That means you pay for nothing!

3. Direct Communication or through Project Manager:

When you hire an Individual Freelancer, you directly talk to the Developers.

If Direct Communication with the developer is your choice, a Company can easily assign a Developer, who will report you directly. For the Company, it works as per Clients’ choice. You can also opt for the option of communicating with the Project Manager and not directly with the Developers. The second option may save a lot of your time if you also handle other businesses. A company comes to you with Multiple options, whereas an Individual has only one option for you!

4. Resource Availability:

When the matter comes of remote hiring, resources are vital points. Resources mean the Desktop/ Laptop, Internet Service, Power Backup, Testing Devices, Required Software, etc. Here a Company will always be the only best option. The following things are expected in 98% cases while working with an Individual:

• Get Less than expected output because of a Slow Desktop/ Laptop.
• Your Remote Staff may not join Video/ Voice calls due to slow Internet Connection.
• An Individual may not afford all required testing devices, thus the output may not have 100% accuracy.
• As a Client, you may have to buy them some software to install in their system to work on your project

Here, a Company comes to you as an anodyne. Companies maintain each and every system in a proper way so that all of them are fast. Companies afford to keep a Dedicated Hardware Engineer to maintain all the systems. They also have Dedicated and High Power Internet Service Providers’ service available to provide you uninterrupted meetings and conferences. Companies have all required testing devices in stock with all the latest models and versions to provide you the 100% accuracy. They already have licensed software available to their system.

5. Hire a Pre-screened one:

Freelancing Platforms don’t do any screening of ability and knowledge. Anybody from anywhere can register to those platforms in 2 minutes. Therefore, hiring an Individual is riskier and the process is time-consuming than hiring a Company. It’s riskier because you may end up choosing the wrong Individual with less capability. It’s time-consuming because you will have to take interviews of many individuals to get a good one!

In a reputed Company, all of the staff are pre-screened. They are mostly employed from reputed Colleges and Universities. Reputed Companies let you interview their Developers as well. It’s easy to interview pre-screened developers, as it saves a lot of time. Time is Money!

6. Non-Disclosure and Intellectual Property Security:

A reputed and Government Registered Company is of course trustworthy than an individual. A reputed Company will sign an NDA and IP Document with you and take care of it very nicely. Reputed Companies keep bonds with their in-house staff where they already make them sign NDA and IP Agreement while hiring them.

Even if an individual signs an NDA and IP Doc, it’s not tough for them to delete the freelancing account in a minute and flee! How will you catch them next? Hiring an Agent can be a good option if you can afford it! Every day lots of fraud cases come on these freelancing sites and in 99.99% cases, they are individuals or a small team of freelancers.

7. After Development Support:

After Development Support is mainly offered by Companies and not Individuals. Reputed companies even provide Free Bug Fixing support for a few months after the product is live. Individuals don’t offer Bug- Fixing support and that means you will have to either hire the same or a new developer to fix the existing bugs. It’s a big wastage of time and money. Remember, only a quality service provider company will give you a free bug fixing support.

8. Leaves before Deadline:

This is a major problem of the Clients, who hire Individual Freelancers and not Companies. You may face the following issues while working with an Individual:

• Your Freelancer may fall sick before a major deadline, therefore, causing a delay. Most often sick leaves are not the real sick leaves but the extra time they want to buy.
• Your Individual Freelancer may go on their pre-planned vacations but you don’t have the backup developer!

Companies have multiple numbers of developers and they can put any developer as a backup if the main developer falls sick or take leaves. While working with a reputed company you meet deadlines in 98% cases. Reputed Companies also assign developers on weekends for compensatory works!

9. Is the Testing Free with the Company?

Testing always plays a vital role to make an accurate product. The Reputed Companies assign a Tester for Free on each hire. On Individual hiring, either you act as the Tester or you need to hire one separately. That means either you have to spend your time or your money and both are equally valuable. So, choosing a company is a wise decision as they are cost-effective.

10. 24×7 Support from your One- Stop Solution:

An Individual Freelancer can never give you a 24×7 Support, whereas, a reputed company offers you this. Companies have a large number of Tech Support Team available at one call. Wise Decision is always choosing a One Stop Solution where you can get multiple solutions with the best accuracy. If you run a system with high traffic, you will need 24×7 support that can only be fulfilled by a company.

11. The solution to your Short Term Projects:

There’s another wrong myth out there that Companies only do long term and big-budget projects. There are many Reputed Companies, who accept as small hiring as of 100 hours! Companies seek long term business relations and not long term or a big-budget project. Long Term Business relation means where you as a happy client offers multiple projects and also recommend them to others.

12. Who is Answerable if anything goes wrong?

Individual Freelancers keep looking for better projects with higher budgets or higher hourly rates than the existing ones. They set their priority level as per the project Cost. That’s the reason, clients with Individual Freelancers often complain about the Idle Chat Windows with late replies. Here, the Individual is only answerable to you but the chat window seems Idle for long!

But a reputed company always maintains it’s reputation. Here, You are always assigned with Dedicated Developers, who only work on your project. Therefore, they are always active in chat windows. But even, in any case, if you find them idle on the chat window or replying late, you can immediately report it to the Project Manager, Delivery Manager, or even the Managing Director. Companies maintain a hierarchical model to provide you the best accuracy level as they will not let their reputation gets hurt at any cost.

Conclusion:

So, all the above points prove that it’s only the best option to choose a Reputed Company for a 100% Accurate Output!

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