Employing Free Agents

What role can free agents play in your company? A pretty good one, if you use them right.

Free agents are folks who are not employed by your company but instead work for themselves, taking on contracting or subcontracting gigs as the mood (and their rent payment) strikes them. Sometimes they choose to remain fully employed, in other cases they only work part-time or do this as a side job. Some leaders hesitate to use free agents, but they bring a lot of advantages and can be pretty useful if you manage them well…but managing them well is a discussion for another day.

One of the big advantages is that they can bring fresh ideas, or at least, a fresh set of eyes on a task. Your in-house employees can, through no fault of their own, start to get stale over time. A free agent not only brings new ideas to a project but can also spark renewed creativity among existing full-timers. They can also make your full-timers mad, which means good leadership from you is needed…but again, that is a topic for another day.

Free agents also provide you a lower-cost employee, allowing you to bring in talent when you need it but not be paying for it when you do not. With free agents you do not have to deal with health benefits, retirement fund contributions, paid vacation time, etc. You may not want to be paying for workers that are not 100% employed, so you can use free agents when you need them but let them go when you don’t.

Along these lines, free agents might be especially useful when you need a special skill for a current project but it is not something you want to pay for on a regular basis. If you need a specialist in a particular programming language or database design, or if your salon is getting ready for prom and you know you will be doing a lot of up-dos over a weekend, you might want to bring in a specialist temporarily.

You may be in a situation where paying for full-time employees simply is not an option. If you are starting a new business you may not have the resources to commit to paying people for full-time work, and you might even still be figuring out exactly what kinds of employees you need. Using free agents to help you get off the ground allows you to right-size your business and build up some cash before you take on the obligations of full-time employees.

You could also use free agents as a “tryout” for full-time positions. Lots of free agents go back and forth between free agency and regular employment. Rather than hiring an unknown person, you may want to bring someone in for a project as a way to see how they would fit in with your company. In this case, it is probably best if you let them know what you are thinking and see if they are interested…if not, you can still use them, or you might check out someone else instead.

For many firms, free agents will be one part of your employee picture but not the whole thing. For others, hiring only free agents may be the best way to go. If you understand the needs of your business and the roles that free agents can play, you will be in a good position to strike the right balance.