It’s every business owner’s dilemma: should you hire permanent in-house employees or look to outsource certain tasks? Both has its pros and cons, of course. When you recruit in-house, you would usually offer them a fixed monthly salary, health and insurance benefits, and training and development. This is attractive to most employees as it gives them job security, and they’re less likely to leave.
One the major disadvantages to hiring for in-house recruitment is that it’s expensive. From their onboarding to the training to the government-mandated benefits, it would seem like the bulk of what you’re earning goes to salaries and benefits.
Pros and Cons of Outsourcing
For many small to medium businesses, outsourcing is sometimes the only route to take to keep the company running and would require minimal start-up fees.
Advantages
- It costs less on overhead. This is especially true if you have an entirely remote workforce since you won’t have to rent an office space at all and it’s highly likely that you won’t have to invest in special equipment.
- You hire companies or freelancers that are experts in their field. Commonly, you’d be outsourcing either highly technical or tedious jobs. These are usually in the fields of content writing, IT, manufacturing, or project managements. But you could also look into outsourcing work with finance companies with monthly bookkeeping services or accounting and business-tax preparation services.
- Practically zero downtime. When you hire in-house, there’s a chance that workflows could fail, and projects could be delayed because of human error (or laziness). Hiring an outsourced company means that this is a business that will take care of you as a client. And when a company has a client-centric culture, you can be sure that you’ll be getting high-quality service.
- You can increase your profitability. With the money you save on overhead costs and on the time you need to do certain tasks, you can focus on strategizing ways you can sell to your market more effectively (though, you could also outsource this task to seasoned digital marketers).
Disadvantages
- You need a more rigorous vetting process. Weeding out candidates for in-house positions can be challenging but applicants are easier to vouch for. There is still something to be said about in-person interviews that makes it easy to decipher body language and figure out falsehoods. With outsourcing, most of the time you only have the freelancer’s bio to base on. Unless you go with an experienced company, vetting a freelance candidate would mean you’d have to dig a little deeper.
- You’d need better protections on your intellectual property. This is particularly important if you’re in publishing. Hiring ghost writers to write your eBook is already risky enough, but now there’s the added layer of them possibly stealing your idea and your work. Make sure you have an iron-clad contract when you outsource to professionals in the creative and IT field.
- You would need to be a good communicator. As a businessperson, you would know how challenging it is to please a client who can’t tell you what they want. These clients would normally just say they don’t like something but would not be able to tell you how they would want it to be improved. Similarly, you would need to be able to tell your outsourced hire exactly what it is that you want to lessen your back and forth exchanges.
As a business owner, your primary goal is to ensure that you keep your expenses low and your profits high. Using the right combination of in-house employees and outsourced freelancers would guarantee that you reach your goals.
