Why Do Successful Businesses Outsource Talent?

Do you usually fall behind expectations and deadlines? Perhaps there’s more work in your company than time to do it. Is outsourcing the best solution for you?

Working under pressure can cause massive stress. So, what can businesses do to relieve their employees from unnecessary tension and meet their expectations?

There are a number of things to do, like hiring more employees to reduce the workload. However, the most common practice among successful businesses is outsourcing. Outsourcing is also essential for the work that requires skills no one in your team possesses.

So, What Is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is letting a knowledgeable person outside your business to do the work for you. This is mostly the case with small businesses.

For instance, you want to offer your audience a whitepaper, but you don’t have the skills to design it yourself. In this case, you can hire a skilled graphic designer solely for this job. In this case, you’ve outsourced the graphic designer.

Outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to hire a single individual for the job. Sometimes, you could hire a whole firm to operate a part of your business. Other big companies even go all the way to ship some business processes from overseas.

It’s true that the person that you’ve hired may not fully understand your company’s cultural values and how much you value certain details – that’s why it’s important to know what to look for in a candidate before trusting them with your project.

How to Ensure Quality in Outsourced Work

Here are some of the things you should do to ensure you get quality outsourced work.

Take Your Time in The Hiring Process

Being fully involved in the hiring process makes a huge difference. Before advertising the job position, go through the job description one or two more times to ensure it’s accurate and extensive.

Remember, you’re hiring someone for the job at hand, not for something close to it. 

What Processes Do They Already Have in Place?

This is something you must ask during the interview.

A good candidate should already know what you want from the job description and will come ready to unleash all the processes required for the job. Let them describe all these processes and how they will use them to give you quality work on time. 

How Are They Planning to Resolve Mistakes Should They Arise?

No one’s perfect, so a mistakes could always happen.

If it does, will they rectify it at no extra cost? Will they be available after they deliver your work for any clarification, or is this something you’ll deal with on your own? These are some of the things you must discuss beforehand.

Provide Clear and Precise Briefing

In some cases, you might not get quality work because of your own doing.

You need to provide your outsourced employee with a clear and detailed brief about your work. Be transparent about your expectations and the deadline right from the start.

Frequent Communication

While constant communication may seem like a burden to some people, the outsourced employee must keep you updated on the progress. For this reason, you need a mode of communication that works well for both of you. It could be through phone calls, text messages, email, zoom, etc.

With a bit of effort and proper planning, you can maintain or – even better – increase the quality of your work with outsourcing. Follow the above recruitment strategies and practices to relieve yourself from the quality concerns.

Why Is Outsourcing Necessary For Your Business Growth?

As a head of department or director, you often find yourself in the middle of everything happening within your business. You have to attend to almost everybody at work. The managerial, operational, and other tasks – they all require a little bit of your time.

This is truly a little too much for one person to handle. What do you do in such a scenario? 

Remember, besides the lack of time to do it alone, you also don’t have enough cash resources to hire more staff. Still, you want your business to grow and move to the next level.

It’s evident that you need help, which can only come from outsourcing. This could be the key to your business’s scalability and growth.

With business process outsourcing centers, it’s possible to minimise your costs and maximise your company’s productivity – only if you adopt the partnership attitude.

When you outsource, you also get enough time to concentrate on your business’s core. That is, doing what you do best without any possible distraction. Therefore, if you find yourself in any of the following instances, then outsourcing is necessary.

• You believe that you and your existing employees can no longer take care of the daily business operations effectively.
• Have you just signed a new deal but lack the internal expertise or bandwidth to handle it and offer excellent results? It’s time you outsource.
• You have no time during the day to focus on the growth of your business.

Reasons Why Companies Outsource Talent

A company may have enough staff at its disposal but might still choose to hire talent. You may wonder why. Sometimes it could be because the task needs an extra hand to finish on time or the staff lacks the level of expertise required for the job.

There are a lot more reasons why companies choose to outsource talent. Read along to discover some of them.

You Want to Focus on the Business Core

As the business leader, you and your team may be preoccupied with so many activities that you forget about what matters the most. Focusing on the core of your business is one of the main reasons companies opt to outsource rather than hire.

With this, you get to free up time to concentrate on what matters. And when you do, you’ll be improving the workflow and allowing your project team enough time to handle the company projects and finish them on time.

Dedicating your time to doing what matters most in your business will, in turn, increase your profits, generate more revenue, and also increase your cash flow.

To Bridge the Skills Gap

Your company may be taking on a project that requires expert knowledge, skills, or experience not available in your team. Perhaps it’s because you believe the project could grow your small business in the long run.

So, outsourcing, in this case, is the most viable thing to do instead of going through a lengthy recruitment process. In most cases, you’re not even sure you’d get the right talent for the job should you decide to hire.

Let’s say you need to take your operations online. In this case, you’ll require a website for your business, and someone must create it. Therefore, you’ll need a website developer. But if you don’t have one in your team, what do you do? You simply outsource if you don’t want to hire someone permanently.

Overall, you get your work done by a knowledgeable person on time and at reduced costs.

Faster Delivery

First, note that many freelancers out there have the same knowledge and expertise you’re looking for. So, if one doesn’t agree to your set deadline, you can always hire another.

Also, a skilled freelancer knows what to do. Remember, this is something they’ve been trained to do. And, they’ve been doing it over and over. This means that with a clear briefing on quality and your expectations, they can deliver your work faster than you or your team could.

Giving out some work also means that you’ll be freeing up your employees’ time. Their duties don’t have to wait in a queue for them to finish up on this other task. It’s, therefore, a win-win situation for your business as the outsourced work gets finished on time, along with the other important projects.

To Minimise Costs

Hiring a permanent full-time employee takes a lot more time and company resources than you can imagine. You have to plan well beforehand, especially with your HR team, before you can even advertise the position.

Also, you sometimes have to pay to get your job advertisement out there for the right candidate to see – as well as pay for the background checks on all the listed candidates, job training, monthly salary, medical cover, and other benefits. Remember, the law also requires you to pay these employees sometimes when they’re not working, during sick and annual leaves.

Considering all these factors, it’s a lot cheaper to outsource your work than to hire someone. You’ll not only save your company’s time and money on the hiring process, but you’ll also reduce overheads such as office space, internet, telephone, office supplies, rent, etc.

Outsourcing also eliminates the need for training and other benefits mentioned above that you usually give to your permanent employees.

To Reduce the Risks Involved

As previously mentioned, the recruitment process is lengthy and, more often than not, quite costly – and ultimately, it does not guarantee you find the right person for your team. Even if you do find a good candidate that ticks all the boxes, you cannot be certain that they’ll stick around for a long time.

However, when you choose to outsource, you can engage and test candidates with real projects, so you can see how they will likely perform before taking them on permanently. This helps you to avoid wasting thousands of pounds on the wrong hire.

Need for New Technology

We all understand how technology has changed how things run in the offices and at home. Human behavior has completely changed.

Take communication, for instance. Initially, people used to communicate mainly through email and phone calls in the offices. However, these days there are various modes of communication as a result of technology. These include teleconferencing, video conferencing, instant messaging, social media, etc.

Also, you can adopt new technology practices such as Artificial Intelligence-AI, cloud computing, and IoT in your business to generate more revenue. However, these technologies require you to train your staff on how to use and control them.

Why would you spend a lot of money training your staff on these new technologies when you can just outsource a knowledgeable freelancer whenever you need them?

For Your Peace of Mind and Freedom

As mentioned above, one of the reasons for work-related stress is working under intense pressure. Imagine the pressure you can put yourself through with several unfinished tasks on your desk and with limited time.

Outsourcing can relieve you of this problem. It reduces your workload so you can get the freedom and peace of mind you so much deserve.

Moreover, knowing that you’re dealing with a reliable person relaxes your nerves. You know they will do the work efficiently and provide what you ask for, even without supervision.

To Enable Smooth Restructuring

Perhaps things have changed from how you initially did tasks around your business, either due to growth or restructuring. Growth and company restructure usually come with a lot of changes one must take into account.

For instance, you may have promoted your existing personnel, meaning that they have to take up other roles, perhaps more important ones. What happens to the jobs they used to handle before? These roles may not be as important, but someone still has to do them to keep your business operational.

Outsourcing could be a better option if you must get people to fill up those positions quickly.

Outsourcing Frees Up Capital

Capital is the backbone of any company’s growth and development, either small or big.

Hiring someone for a specific job is sometimes necessary and inevitable. But it is good to avoid it in certain cases since you’ll be adding fixed costs to your company’s balance sheet.

However, you can change your fixed costs to variable costs if you choose to outsource talent. Remember, you can easily shed, control, and even change variable costs. Anything that can save you some money is always a plus.

Minimising fixed costs means that you have some spare capital to finance other essential parts of your business, which in turn could increase your profit.

Having enough capital to use in generating your business’s revenue, you’ll be showing an excellent business image out there. This will attract more buyers and people looking to invest in such companies.

Embracing a New Operational System

There could be a new computer or manufacturing system that you just introduced in your company. The problem arises when none of your staff understands this system, so they can’t utilize it.

In such a scenario, you could hire an expert freelancer to install this system and train your staff on how to use and maintain it. This is just temporary recruitment that ensures that the operations in your business continue as always.

Moreover, it’s way cheaper than hiring a permanent employee whose services you only need for a short period.

Should You Start Outsourcing?

Just because you’ve found out that outsourcing is quite beneficial to your company doesn’t mean you can outsource any task. Also, for the ones you can, you must be careful and ensure you don’t over outsource.

You can’t handle all the business’s operations and expect to thrive. Instead, focus on what makes your business excel, that is, the core of your business.

Then, you can delegate other responsibilities. This leads to what tasks you can outsource and those you can’t outsource no matter what, or else you lose ground.

Potential Disadvantages of Outsourcing

Outsourcing Mainly for Money

As mentioned above, one of the reasons a company may outsource is to save money. However, it’s not always a win-win situation. You sometimes must spend money to make money.

For instance, if you’re a social media agency, it might not be smart for you to outsource a team of social media managers just to save money in the short term. This decision may cost you a lot more in the long run, so you might have to hire the people that keep your business running smoothly on a full-time basis.

Lack of Control

By outsourcing a vital function of your business, you gain the advantage of having a skilled individual do it for you, which in turn allows you to focus on what you do best. It’s important to understand that, in certain cases, this could mean losing some control of that function to a certain extent.

However, if you trust the person you hired, this should not represent a huge issue – by communicating with the freelancer and monitoring the project in its initial stages, you are able to avoid an unsatisfactory outcome.

Confidentiality

Each time you involve a new person in your business – whether that’s a new employee, a business partner, or a supplier, you increase your confidentiality risk – outsourcing is not an exception.

As long as you do you due diligence to mitigate this risk, outsourcing should not represent a potential threat to your company’s confidential information.

Advantages of Outsourcing

Complete Common Tasks

You can only create a list of your common tasks if you know how you’ve been spending your time. Then, use the data to adjust accordingly.

You can use a time-tracking app such as RescueTime to track the time you spend on such tasks. Run the App on your computer for several months to get a list of common tasks to outsource. It will tell you the areas that normally take up much of your time.
The biggest part should be your core competencies. That’s the only way to be sure that you’ve been managing your time well since they are the areas where you thrive. You’ll also see tasks that take up much of your time, yet they give lower returns. Such diminishing tasks are the ones you should outsource.

Your Weak Points

There are tasks that you’re simply not good at. These are parts when you or your team don’t excel. You wouldn’t waste your company’s time and money pursuing courses that can make you excel in these areas, especially if they don’t give good returns.

Outsourcing such tasks gives you enough time to concentrate on your business’s core and the areas that require your maximum attention.

Some Commonly Outsourced Tasks

It’s true that each business out there has unique needs, and they run their operations differently due to different goals and objectives.

Even so, there are some tasks that you’ll find common for businesses to outsource instead of permanently hiring people to handle them. These include:

Accounting

As long as a business owner needs to understand its finances, it’s not common to find them doing accounting operations. Accounting itself requires time and dedication to learn and understand. Therefore, most companies usually outsource such accounting tasks.

Administrative Duties

Back-office tasks are normally demanding and can take up much of your time in the office if you’re not careful. It’s possible to forget about what matters in the company. For this reason, consider outsourcing tasks such as emailing, setting appointments, phone calls, scheduling, etc.

Technical Support

Most companies also outsource some technical jobs such as website development and maintenance. In the long run, outsourcing such tech jobs is not only time effective but also cost-effective. Also, you get better results.

Content Creation

Good content takes time to research, design, create and distribute. If you only want to publish a few social media posts a week or one to two articles a month, it may not be practical to hire someone on a full-time basis.

Here’s where outsourcing comes in handy – you get to outsource as much content as you need, or that your budget will allow.

Start Outsourcing Today!

If you want your company to thrive and remain in business, you should consider outsourcing some tasks as you concentrate on your core areas.

As mentioned in this article, you only need to do your research well and use the right techniques. Outsourcing ensures you receive nothing less than quality work, hence growing your business.

Luckily, you don’t have to sweat looking to outsource experts for our online business. At Udrafter, we have a wide variety of talents, each with a unique skillset. From copywriters to digital marketers, interns, graphic designers, and web developers, you can always find a skilled freelancer for the job.

Ready to outsource? Just hire talent and watch them do what they do best.