As a business owner, you are burdened with a lot of responsibilities. You have a website to run, clients to find, a product to market, and a lifestyle you want to maintain. If you are here, then you have probably realized that you can’t do it alone. You need to outsource. To help you find what you need, we have compiled a list of the best outsourcing websites to suit your every need.
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When you outsource, you need to remember that you are doing it to make things easier for you. To prevent mistakes or complications, you need to need to think about four things:
Top Outsourcing WebsitesYou can outsource three types of workers: freelancers, remote workers with a regular salary, or an IT/BPO company. If you want one-off projects, go for freelancers. If you need constant work done, hire someone with a regular salary. If you have a high-budget, complicated project, for example, you need to create a specific computer program, an agency is the best way to go.
Note that a lot of these websites offer multiple options for contracting workers but they usually specialize in one thing.
Freelancers are perhaps the most popular type of outsourced worker out there. One thing to note about freelancers is that they don’t work for you, they work for themselves. You are their client, not their boss.
You pay a freelancer per project and there are no strings attached. This is perhaps the main charm of freelancers. If you aren’t satisfied, then you don’t have to work with them ever again, if you are happy with their quality of work then you can easily hire them again for a future project.
If you need work done every day though, this is going to become very expensive quickly. It’s better to hire someone with a regular salary than pay a freelancer ever day. If you want to have access to a particular freelancer’s talents on a regular basis, a retainer contract might be to your advantage in which the freelancer would agree to do one project a month for you at an agreed fixed price.
Here are the most popular websites to outsource freelancers:
The most popular outsourcing destination right now. It used to be two companies named Elance and oDesk that merged and became Upwork in 2015.
Upwork is probably the largest and most competitive freelance website out there. This means that not only are there plenty of topnotch talent in the site but also less expensive freelancers new to the site looking to build their reputations.
Every freelancer on Upwork has been verified before joining and the site has a review system on each worker, eliminating worries on trustworthiness.
Upwork also has a software that monitors your contracted worker’s activity at different stages to ensure that they are using their time for what you are paying them.
Upwork has three payment plans. The basic model is free to sign up but you will need to pay a standard 2.75% on the payment amount for every transaction. Premium options include Upwork Pro and Upwork Enterprise.
Probably Upwork’s primary competitor. Freelancer has been around for a long, long time. Because of that, it has more than 17 million users and more than 10 million jobs posted. That’s a lot! You will be sure to find a specialist of any kind for any project.
Freelancer works a lot like Upwork, it also has a monitoring software and review system in place to promote trustworthiness.
An interesting feature in Freelancer that Upwork lacks though is the ability to host contests. Have a project idea? Post the specifications on the site and get freelancers to work on it until you find the one you like best.
It’s free to sign up on Freelancer and the transaction fee is 3% standard. For contests, employers must pay the funds for the contest prize.
Fiverr is both popular and notorious for providing the cheapest freelance services on the web. It’s called Fiverr because you pay a minimum of $5 dollars per project.
The site works a little differently from the last two sites. You don’t have to come up with a detailed job listing or even know everything you want. Instead, you can take a look at the available freelancers with the right skills you are looking for and contact them to discuss the project.
Despite how it sounds, you can actually get quality work done for $5. A lot of people in Fiverr aren’t cheap because they’re bad, rather it’s because they are still building their portfolio. They usually plan to move someplace else after they get enough experience.
Because of all this, Fiverr is ideal for simple one-off projects like if you want a logo designed or a press release whipped up.
A freelance outsourcing website focusing solely on one thing: designs.
99designs is one of the most popular websites for freelance designers of all types. Anything you want to be designed, you can find someone to do it for you here. Logos, websites, t-shirts, ads, and whatever else you need. Price varies but logo designs typically cost $299 dollars at the lowest.
Like Freelancer, 99designs feature a contest feature where you can have anyone in the entire site’s design community to work on your project. You pick the design you like the best out of all the ideas submitted. This is great for those who want to explore different possibilities.
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Outsourcing a remote staff from a different country is a smart cost-effective option for businesses that rarely gets talked about. This decision could easily save you 20 hours a week to spend on other productive tasks or to simply enjoy some free time.
Say you need someone to write a piece of content every day on your site. Or you need someone to handle the data on your e-commerce website to keep it running. Or maybe you’re a busy entrepreneur needing a virtual assistant to set your appointments and manage projects.
Although might be a good idea to hire a freelancer to design your website and pay only once, it is highly unreasonable to pay $300 every day to maintain a blog. Why not hire a full-time employee from the Philippines and pay $300 a month instead?
Offshore outsourcing a virtual employee is a lot like having an in-house employee with you, except it’s far less expensive and you communicate through the computer.
There are two ways to go about this: The first is to hire someone directly yourself and the other is to have a recruitment agency find appropriate workers for you.
For the first option, the salary of your virtual employee will depend on skill level and experience. You can hire workers low on experience for a very low price and take the time to train them. Don’t worry, they usually learn very fast. Alternatively, you can find someone highly experienced who will need minimal training but it’ll be more expensive. Your choice will depend on your time and budget.
As for the second option, it tends to be more expensive because the recruitment agency will be the one to do the work in finding the right workers for you. Plus, there are costs like overhead since these employees will be working for you through the agency’s offices. The advantage of this though is that you will already have a team of qualified employees ready to do the work required.
Because it’s pricey to hire a full-time online worker in North America, Northern Europe or Australia, yet you want someone who could communicate efficiently in English to prevent misunderstandings, we are going to focus on outsourcing to the Philippines.
OnlineJobs is the leading site for directly outsourcing remote workers from the Philippines. It’s probably the most popular so it has the most number of resumes and the most skilled individuals. You will be sure to find the type of worker you are looking for with the amount of talent on the site.
What you do is you post a job listing, interview applicants, then hire the most promising one. Simple!
For more information on the steps to hiring online Filipino employees, go here.
The subscription is also very affordable, only $69 a month (or $99 a month for premium) and you can cancel as soon as you find the employee you are looking for. There are no extra fees when you contract someone.
OnlineJobs has an Identity Proof system where applicants have to go through a vetting process to verify their identity which will eliminate the chance of fraud.
VirtualStaff is just like OnlineJobs except it’s not as popular, therefore it’s less expensive and has fewer applicants.
The basic subscription plan is exactly like OnlineJobs except it’s only $50 a month. VirtualStaff is still growing though and it doesn’t have as many resumes as OnlineJobs.
If you want to save $19 and don’t want to deal with as many applicants, then go for VirtualStaff.
Note: As of the time of publication, the subscription price of VirtualStaff is currently 20% off, reducing the price to $39.99 a month.
Outsourced is a recruitment service website so it works differently from the last two. It costs more, but you will have less work to do.
All you have to do is submit a job description to the site and they will be the ones who will find the right people for you. They also manage operations themselves. All the employees you hire will work in offices in Manila.
The full-time employee you hire through Outsourced will work 20 days a month and 8 hours a day for a total of 160 hours per month. Pricing is negotiated per employee but the website has a pricing guide to give you an idea of the costs and you can plan a budget. The price you pay will include office space, amenities, equipment, insurances, and so on.
Virtual Coworker is another recruitment site that works similarly to Outsourced. You send a job description, then they will find the right candidates for you, next you conduct interviews and choose the candidate you like. The agency will handle the management, paperwork, monitoring, etc.
You can choose to hire employees part-time or full-time. Hourly rates start at $6 for virtual assistants, data entry specialists, and customer support.
These are large companies that operate worldwide and provide many services for multiple industries. These companies usually partner with large businesses, so if you’re a small business owner these firms may be way above your budget.
To complete the list, here are the top IT/BPO companies in the world:
One of the biggest and most successful BPO companies in the world. It is based in Dublin, Ireland and operates in 120 countries. It’s reported revenue in 2017 was $34.9 billion.
Accenture has six divisions: strategy, consulting, digital, federal services, technology, and operations.
Genpact is a multinational corporation providing various services to businesses. It began as a unit of General Electric in 1997 and became an independent company in 2005.
Genpact has an artificial intelligence platform named Genpact Cora used for services like customer service, data processing, financial reporting, etc.
Convergys is an Ohio-based company that operates in more than 140 locations in 33 countries. Its focus is customer and information management products.
They provide services to various industries like health, retail, technology, insurance, customer care, etc.
A multinational company based in Paris, France that operates in 40 countries. Capgemini is one of the largest IT outsourcing companies in the world.
Capgemini has four divisions: consultancy, technology, outsourcing, and local professional services.
Going for those multinational IT firms will be too expensive for small businesses just starting out. If that’s where you are right now, your choice will be between freelancing and having an online staff.
These options come with their own advantages depending on the business you run or the project you are working on. The most popular choice is to hire a freelancer. It’s understandable, there are a lot of them, there aren’t any strings attached, and you only pay for completed work.
However, offshore staffing is an alternative that gets ignored all too often, especially hiring contractors directly. It’s actually not as hard as it sounds and it comes with a plethora of advantages. You get more control, more stability, and the longer you keep your employees the better they get. It’s also a lot less expensive too.
Training an employee doesn’t take as long as you think it does. You don’t even have to do it yourself, you can simply refer your worker to a free course on the internet.
Before you go to the popular freelance websites out there, think about outsourcing to the Philippines and hire a dedicated team of online workers. It just might be one of the smartest business decisions you will make.
There you have it! Twelve different websites to outsource and grow your business. All of these sites are good depending on your business needs.
Our personal favorite is OnlineJobs.ph because of its wide range of talented and dedicated workers at affordable prices. In the end, you will be the one to decide where you want to outsource. After all, only you truly know the needs of your business. Whatever your decision, we wish you luck in your outsourcing and hope you enjoyed the article!
Leave us a comment if you have anything to say about these sites.
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