Everyone has their own associations with freelancing. Of course, the first picture that comes to your mind is a warm country, beach, hammock and happy person with a laptop. I will not say that it is impossible, but I haven’t taken any photos like this during two years of work ;)
As practice shows, the everyday life of a freelancer is completely different and there are many difficulties that you will encounter and which don’t appear while working for the company. I'll tell you more about them :)
Independent organization of your work
Perhaps this is the first difficulty that a freelancer faces. Yes, yes, we are all adults and self-organized people, but how difficult it is sometimes to force ourselves to start working! Especially when you are at home, and there are so many temptations around: wonderful weather outside, friends invite for a cup of coffee and new posts and photos on Facebook which are interesting to see :)
Here willpower, clear goals and prescribed tasks come to the rescue. Or, if the work is not progressing at all, allow yourself to do nothing for one day. As practice shows, then you can catch up very quickly.
Lack of stable income
I have often written my previous articles on this topic, so I will just repeat myself a little. It is important to have a financial cushion - the amount on which you can comfortably live for three months. With such an amount, you will feel comfortable and confident. You will not be visited by fears about money: "What should I live on tomorrow?", "How to pay for my flat?" etc.
Why is it important? We attract into our life what we think about. If you constantly think and worry about the lack of money, you most likely will not earn it.
Unscrupulous clients
Most of the clients came to me on recommendations, and I was confident in them. But with the growth of our team and activity on social networks, clients we haven’t been working with before began coming to us.
As a result, we have already faced some problems:
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The client still has not paid the full amount
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The client behaved dishonestly (he said that only we were working on the vacancy, but it turned out that many recruiters were working with us in parallel. As a result, the vacancy for all of us was cancelled)
Now we are even more selective when start working with new clients, immediately concluding an agreement and we stop working in case of any problems.
More difficult vacancies
To tell you the truth, for all five years of work as an it recruiter for IT companies, I haven’t used even half of what my team is currently using for recruiting.
Most often clients come to us if the vacancy is difficult and they couldn’t fill it on their own. Therefore, working as a freelancer or for an agency is much more difficult than working for a company. But on the other hand, this is a very fast professional growth;)
Parallel work with other recruiters
It’s your choice to work or not to work in parallel with other external recruiters. We often don't. There was only one case when we started working with two external recruiters in parallel, but for us it was more like a game, a competition. It was interesting to test our strength. As a result, we worked on the following vacancies only on our own.
Even if you take vacancies for work exclusively, then at least if your client is a large IT company, you will work in parallel with an internal recruiter.
In order to avoid overlapping of the candidates, you can conduct stop-lists (as we do).
Vacancies are cancelled or closed not by you
If there are other recruiters working on the job besides you, your chances to close positions decrease. And even with an exclusive job, changes can always occur: a vacancy was cancelled, the priority of vacancies was revised, it was closed by an internal transfer, etc.
I noticed that everything in life exists in balance. If you are currently working on a certain vacancy for a very long time, then it’s most likely that the other will be closed with one candidate. If you have a losing streak, then a series of offers will replace it soon.
The main thing is to be positive, not dwell on difficulties, continue to work hard and turn on your inner Zen when it is necessary.
In case you want to gain or deepen your knowledge of recruiting and find out more about looking for candidates, we invite you to our recruitment courses at EvoTalents.School.