Freelancers aren’t the same as your traditional professionals. You’ll find them working at coffee shops instead of cubicles, having unconventional working hours instead of 9 am to 5 pm, and getting paid on a project basis instead of a fixed monthly salary. Similarly, they choose to work on projects that they like instead of being handed work by a senior executive, and select projects, whether short or long-term, depending on their willingness, and are open to working with clients directly from all over the world. Thus, freelancers are a completely different set of working professionals than your traditional employees. And their job searching requirements are different too from your average professional.
As a job aggregator, catering your website to freelancers is an entirely different ballgame. You can’t expect your job board to attend these free-spirits’ wishes and needs with regular operations. You need to adapt and tweak your website, to make it freelancer-friendly to attract the attention of these individuals. Job aggregators’ work becomes much more difficult when running their website for freelancers. But don’t you worry, we have compiled a list of tips that can help you make your website freelancer-friendly.
Tips to make your job aggregation site freelancer-friendly
As discussed earlier, a job aggregators’ work becomes much more difficult when making their site freelancer-friendly. But, the tasks involved can be managed easily if you employ the right solution and method. We have provided you with a list of five such actions that you can incorporate in your website to make it one of the top job search aggregators in UK and elsewhere.
Scrape jobs from multiple freelance job boards
You need to simplify the job or project search process for freelancers as they work on a contract basis and prefer short-term projects. Thus, they are on a constant lookout for new opportunities, more than traditional full-time employees. To draw a large volume of freelancers to your website, you need a large volume of high-quality job listings. To get your job feed populated with a large volume of high-quality job listings, you will need to scrape job postings from many job boards. You don’t have to limit your website with local job listings as freelancers are not constrained by boundaries. Thus, by having job listings from all over the world, you’ll attract freelancers from across the globe. So, if you’re a job aggregator from the UK, don’t scrape job postings from only the leading job boards in the UK dedicated to freelancers. Instead, gather listings from freelancer job boards across the world.
To scrape such a high volume of job listings, you would need the help of advanced job aggregation software, such as a job wrapper. A job wrapper is a tool that searches for job listings on various employer and job board websites. The jobs can then be collated and posted on your aggregation site. Propellum’s Mega Wrap is an automated job scraper that can scour jobs from across the internet to have your website filled with freelancer job listings. The tool is capable of scraping thousands of jobs from various job boards and posting them to your website in a predefined format.
Index job posting data
You need to provide detailed job descriptions to simplify the application process for freelancers. Incomplete listings can drive them away to other websites, causing you significant losses. Along with posting detailed job listings, you need to index the job posting data. Indexing is regarded as the process of describing and identifying documents in terms of their subject contents. By indexing data, you can tag and categorize job listings based on the keywords and other data contained within them—for example, information such as project type, duration, and payment. Indexing data helps in quick retrieval of data, and can also be used for sorting purposes. Thus, freelancers can easily search for jobs based on their preferences with data indexing, providing for satisfactory user experience and improving your website friendliness score.
Offer a portfolio-building platform
What resumes are for the traditional employees, portfolios are for freelancers. Freelancers don’t have a resume. Instead, they build portfolios. They take up a gig, complete it and add it to their portfolio, thereby increasing its scale and strengthening it. One way to attract freelancers and make your website freelancer-friendly is by offering a portfolio-building platform. With the right portfolio, freelancers don’t need to apply to jobs. Instead, employers find the right freelancers for their job requirements by searching for candidates with suitable portfolios. This reduces the time spent in searching for a project, applying for it, waiting for a response from the employer, and finally getting selected for the project. This time reduction can attract a swarm of freelancers as they will be provided with work opportunities without even searching. And this is made possible with portfolios. So, if you want to have your website attract freelancers, and in turn, provide employers with a large number of talented individuals to choose from for their next project, offering a portfolio-building platform is what you should consider.
Integrate project management tools
The employer-freelancer relationship is different from the traditional employer-employee relationship. There is usually no physical interaction between the two. The communication, work submission, feedback and reviews all happen through a digital platform, such as emails, online document sharing platforms, and video calls. And collaboration through multiple platforms can sometimes get tricky and messy. To make your website freelance-friendly, you can provide your website as the single platform for collaboration from start to finish. You can integrate tools that help freelancers to communicate with employers over calls, texts, and emails. Similarly, you can provide tools that allow freelancers to upload and share their work through your platform. Employers can edit, review, and offer suggestions and changes within the same framework. Thus, freelancers and employers, alike, are spared the hassle of using multiple mediums for collaboration and communication. Similarly, you can integrate payment gateways on your website to ease the process of payment for all the parties involved. You can develop these tools independently or integrate advanced third-party API’s on your website if needed.
Provide training and testing modules
Freelancers are open to learning new skills that can help improve their careers. Hence, you can provide training courses, such as related to digital marketing or content writing, to help freelancers improve their skills. Additionally, you can also have guides and tutorials that can help improve not only their hard skills but their soft skills as well. You can also arrange for webinars from industry experts and reputed employers that can help beginners a great deal. Providing a networking platform and other mediums such as forums that can help freelancers to increase their skills and knowledge can also help make your website freelancer-friendly.
In addition, you can also have skill assessment tests that can help freelancers get a better understanding of their skills. They can analyze their strengths and weaknesses by undertaking such testing modules. These are also beneficial for employers as they can narrow down on candidates based on their performance in such tests.
Running a freelancer-friendly job aggregation site is difficult, but not impossible. It isn’t as complicated as rocket science. You need to consider specific freelancer requirements to enhance your website to provide an unparalleled experience to every visitor. In the end, a freelancer-friendly job aggregators work is to help freelancers connect with employers and find new opportunities in the easiest way. Focus on the needs of freelancers and provide them with solutions tailored to their needs.
