In the gaming industry, every project requires an extremely niche set of skills, whether you’re looking for VX designers, graphic artists, or dev talents. And because of this, contractors make a lot more sense for you than full-time workers, because you’re able to use the right person for each specific project, instead of employing full-time workers that are generalists.
But because the skill sets you need are so niche and hard to find, there’s typically more demand for them than there is supply. This leaves you competing with every other gaming company to land the freelancers you need. Which makes completing the projects that are critical to your business more difficult than it needs to be.
It’s frustrating, but there are strategies for creating a better freelancer experience so that your jobs are more appealing to them, as well as some ways you can more efficiently work with freelancers for your internal teams. This lets everyone — both your full-time and freelance workers — focus on the work they were hired to do.
A better experience for your contractors leads to higher contractor lifetime value
Giving a bad experience to your contractors is a bad idea for any business, but for an industry that relies on them this much it’s one of the worst mistakes you can make. You’re already working with a small talent pool, the worse the experience you give them the less likely they are to accept your projects in the future.
The flip side of that coin is because this large shift to freelance work is still — relatively — new, not very many companies have figured out how to provide them with an excellent working experience. If you’re able to do this, you’ll really stand out from your competitors to your contractors. And they’ll be likely to want to take future projects with you, increasing the lifetime value you get from each contractor and enabling you to continue to deliver stunning design and exceptional work.
A good freelancer experience comes down to having better processes and systems in place. Your freelancers want to focus on the work they were hired to do, ensure you’re happy with the work, and get paid. When onboarding takes weeks because of all the back and forth around contracting and worker classification, this just frustrates them and delays their start date. If you can automate the admin around onboarding and remove the back and forth between your contractors and your internal teams, you’re removing the barriers that come between your conrtactors and the work they were hired to do.
Once the job is completed, there’s even more frustration on their end. Freelancers often have to chase down payments from their clients and get very little clarity on when they’ll be paid. This creates a lot of busy work and often requires them to wait weeks or months to be paid. By paying them quickly once a job has been completed — and being clear from the get-go about how long that payment will take to be processed — you’re already setting yourself ahead of most of your competitors and solving one of the biggest frustrations that contractors typically have.
Smarter ways of managing your talent pool
Finding the specific talent you need for each job is a big challenge for gaming companies. And finding them on traditional freelance marketplaces is increasingly a struggle, because those sites are so over-saturated with generic and lower-level talent. Sourcing new freelancers for each project also ends up taking an enormous amount of time for your full-time employees. Imagine if everyone in your company used one system to manage and catalo the freelancers they’ve worked with.
With a better external workforce management system in place, you could continually build a pool of the freelancers that your organization has had a great experience with, so that the longer you were in the system the better the pool of talent would be. If one of your employees needs a graphic artist with a very specific style, they may spend many hours trying to source the correct artist for that job when someone else internally has worked with the perfect contractor. With a system in place, it’s easy for you to share great freelance talent across your organization.
Cut contingent workforce costs to increase efficiency
Because the external talent you need is in such high demand, their rates are rising quickly. This creates a big problem for companies who can’t afford to sacrifice quality and can’t conjure higher budgets out of thin air. The only option you’re left with is to cut costs elsewhere to accommodate. The bright side is that your current contingent workforce management process is probably littered with cost inefficiencies
If you’re handling things like contract creation, worker classification determinations, invoicing, and billing manually it’s creating a ton of admin for your internal teams. They’re also spending large amounts of time aligning with each other on all of the above, since different departments own different portions of contingent workforce management. And the more hours your teams spend on these things, the higher your operational costs rise.
Implementing a better external workforce management system automates a lot of these tasks and keeps each portion of freelance management in the same place. This takes a lot of the busywork off your internal teams’ plates and removes the need to go back and forth since everyone is always working off of the same information.
This can save you a lot in terms of costs by allowing your internal teams to focus on more strategic work that can help positively impact your bottom line, instead of spending all their time drowning in admin work that they don’t actually need to be doing.
A better experience for everyone involved
Worksome removes all of the unnecessary admin and back and forth around your contingent workforce, speeding up onboarding and letting your freelancers focus on the work they were hired to do. With automated payments, they’ll never have to wait to be paid or chase down their payments, and we’ll front the money for you so that your finance team still has time to process their billing.
And speaking of your internal teams, they’ll all be happier with the admin removed from their plates. They’ll spend less time on sourcing by utilizing their pool of Trusted Contacts in the system, and you’ll save money on operational costs by removing the inefficiencies. This will create a better experience for all of your workers — freelance and full-time — and remove the friction between them so everyone can work better together.
Ready to learn more about how Worksome can help your company specifically? Click here to request a demo today.