Top 7 Sites To Hire Experienced Freelancers For Your Business
Freelance hires are cost-effective and let you access amazing talents without committing to long-term contracts. You’ll find this to be a great alternative to hiring full-time staff members for certain roles – and it’s also a great choice if you have temporary work/projects that need doing. With so many freelancers out there, it’s usually very difficult to decide who’s worth hiring. You want someone with experience, but you don’t always know where to begin.
Thankfully, there are lots of great freelancer platforms out there to help you hire experienced and talented freelancers – and here are some of the best sites to use right now.
1. FreeUp
Trusted by thousands of organizations, FreeUp has rapidly become the best overall site to hire freelancers. What’s unique about this site is that it genuinely recruits, interviews, and vets thousands of freelancers every week – and it has extremely strict criteria. The result is that only 1% of all applicants make it onto the platform, and this allows businesses like yours to access the best talent.
It stops you from dealing with the vetting process as they’ve done it for you, so it’s a simple case of looking for freelancers based on the skills you’re after, and then hiring with confidence. You can legitimately reduce the entire hiring process to a couple of days instead of a few months.
2. Upwork
You’ll always see Upwork as an option for hiring freelancers, and it’s been around long enough to earn a stellar reputation. The main thing that Upwork has going for it is that it’s so vast. There are more freelancers on this platform than anywhere else, so you could argue that you’re spoiled for choice. It’s also a very easy and intuitive platform for businesses to use; simply make an account, post a job, and wait for the applicants. You can also reach out directly to freelancers if you find someone who ticks your boxes.
The one downside of Upwork, and this is why it can’t claim the top spot, is that freelancers aren’t exactly vetted. It’s easy for anyone to make an account and start bidding on jobs, which means you do have to go through the process of separating the wheat from the chaff.
3. Fiverr
Fiverr is another freelancer marketplace that’s been around for a really long time and gives you access to a huge talent pool. The basic version of this service is okay at best, but Fiverr Pro takes it to another level. You’ll unlock vetted freelancers and can use the site as an all-in-one solution to recruit, onboard, manage, and pay freelance talent.
It sounds great, and you will certainly find talented individuals, but you will have to pay $129 to unlock the Advanced version of Fiverr Pro, which includes some of the features mentioned above. Is this worth it? Probably not for most businesses, which is why we can only place this as high as number three on the list.
4. Malt
Home to over 1 million freelancers, Malt is a great platform that helps you find the people you’re looking for. It has a lot of useful categories on the site that split freelancers based on their skills. For example, if you need someone who’s well-versed in AI, there’s a whole category of talented individuals for you to sort through. You can also search with keywords to pick out specific skills – and the location function lets you find nearby freelancers, if that matters to you.
Another good thing about Malt is that all freelancers are verified and rated, which makes it easy to decide which ones to avoid. However, that’s also what holds it back: it allows anyone to use the site as a freelancer, so you may deal with pointless applications from one-star freelancers now and then.
5. Behance
If you only care about hiring designers, then Behance will probably be in the top spot for you. It’s a freelancer-hiring platform that’s built for everything revolving around design – and this includes graphic design, 3D art, UI/UX, photography, product design, fashion, and so on. You soon realize this covers a lot of potential jobs/projects, so if you need anything designed by talented creatives, this could be the right platform to choose.
There’s an obvious downside that restricts Behance from moving any further up our list: it’s useless outside of hiring freelancer designers. You won’t find anything here if you need people with financial skills, marketers, copywriters, or anything else!
6. Freelancer
The aptly named Freelancer may have won the race when securing domain names many years ago, but it’s not quite got what it takes to reach anywhere higher on our list. We have to highlight it as it is a massive freelancer platform with millions of willing applicants. You won’t struggle to find people for your jobs – and it’s nice that you’re only obligated to pay when 100% happy.
Why isn’t it up with the big dogs at the top? Mainly because it’s basically Upwork or Fiverr, but not as popular with the freelance market. In other words, you’re more likely to find freelancers on those two platforms that aren’t on Freelancer, but almost everyone on Freelancer will be on the other two. Plus, it lacks the exclusivity of our top pick, FreeUp, as you don’t get any freelancer vetting.
7. Nibble
We’ll round off our list with another specialist freelancer hiring platform, Nibble. This is easily the newest site on the list, and it’s only useful for businesses that need marketing and PR experts. That probably covers a lot of you, and you’ll like how the site vets all freelancers to ensure they meet the mark.
It would honestly be a lot higher if it had been around for long enough to see if it could actually compete with the big guns, or if it offered general freelancer services instead of just focusing on a niche.
All in all, when it comes to hiring freelancers to work for your business, these seven sites are the very best choices out there at the moment. FreeUp is currently the number one choice, purely because it has the best vetting system and only includes the top 1% of talent. This takes half the work of hiring freelancers away from you, so it’s way easier to post a job and hire someone confidently.