Creating The Optimal Freelancer Hiring Process

Listen to the audio version of this text.

We recently reached out to a number of freelancers for a very specific kind of visual design. The goal was to create a logo with a mascot that would successfully communicate our blend of minimalism and impressive horsepower in our software development projects.

We did our best to communicate very clearly how we would like these two extremes to come together. The job description emphasized the importance of a minimalist look and feel, and the thinking behind this was that it would automatically set clear boundaries for the complexity of the work and prevent visual overkill.

Unfortunately, the results of the job were not what we were looking for. Though we were able to extract small ingredients and ideas for the future, we had no readily usable material. It all seemed like a failure and a waste of time.

However, as we went over the process and thoughtfully picked apart our journey up to this point, we discovered a strong base on which to build a much better approach.

Making Use of Failure and Adapting

The martial arts legend Bruce Lee is often quoted on the topic of adapting:

“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot.”

The growth and success of an idea are wholly dependent on its ability to adapt.

This is why the success behind ambitious business ideas is never a straightforward sprint in one direction only. A strong direction will set you on your way, but as there will inevitably be unexpected twists to the process, the ability to react to them in constructive ways will make obstacles easier to cross.

In fact, it can even turn them into exciting opportunities for improving the way you work!

A Nurtured Process Yields The Biggest Growth

It is useful to think of methods and approaches as if they were living organisms: we want them to have their own legs to take us where we need to go, but in order to do this they require nutrition and care.

In our case, our dissatisfaction with our experience inspired us to compile a “pre-flight checklist” for posting jobs in the future. It consists of matters that will end up wasting our time and our energy if we don't take care of them before moving forward.

For example, we discovered that when drafting the initial brief for the job, we need to make sure to include in the brief what not to include in the work. This ensures that unnecessary material does not make its way into the work being turned in. This is important because a recurring problem for us during our project was that we saw tangible screen real-estate being taken up by things that we could have ordered to not be featured at all.

We also discovered that not all communication should happen in one modality. What this means is that some things are better explained via text, and others by carefully selected images, animation or video footage. Our experience showed us that any lack of clarity over which words hold which level of importance can take the work in a completely different direction than was originally intended. Images, however, present themselves as full works themselves right away, and can then be elaborated on by words to make sure that the relevant details are being highlighted.

Small details are vitally important in minimalist designs, and a designer won't be able to come up with the right solutions without some thoughtful feedback and input. Thus, we are adapting our communication to help transmit our message and make our vision understood.

The process of hiring freelancers, now nurtured and strengthened, serves us noticeably better than before because we react to the obstacles in our path in a way that retains our forward momentum.

These detail-oriented approaches all accumulate into a clear-headed direction towards efficiency, requiring less iteration, less time and less financial investment to produce a strong result. We strive to refine our approaches in service of making the smartest use of the resources we have, and our journey keeps proving that obstacles and failures always hide within themselves ingredients for grand improvement and exciting further development.