HR Freelance Management

hive_module_hr

(Please click on the hexagons for more information)

Freelance management / management of external consultants refers to a group of processes from HR and other functional areas, which are specifically enabled for dealing with freelancers and external consultants.

The management of external resources is particularly important in knowledge intensive sectors including consulting and translation. In these sectors, specialists in certain areas have created small companies themselves. In order to contract these specialists, you need to check the skill sets and the availability of sometimes large numbers of specialists, in order to find somebody with the right skills and the right price available for your project.

Process Activities/Sub-Processes

Maintenance activities (performed at any time):

• Recruiting Pipeline and (self-) registration:
  The ]po[ recruiting process includes a recruiting and review pipeline, support for online self-registration and self-service. Custom surveys can be implemented via [simple surveys].
  
  
• Skill Management:
  ]po[ provides a self-service portal allowing freelancer to "claim" their skills. HR staff is informed about skill changes and can confirm/reject the claims by the freelancers. Skill types and skills are configurable.
  
  
• Price negotiation:
  The negotiation process is supported by ]po[ via the consulting and [translation] specific price list packages.
  
  
• Billing delivered services:
  ]po[ supports the billing of external invoices via the financial module with custom definable workflows.
  

Activities during the execution of a project:

• Availability Checking and RFQs:
  ]po[ includes a [Freelance RFQ] package in order to automate the availability checking of large numbers of freelancers. The package provides the PM with a list of suitable freelancers based on a list of necessary skills and allows the PM to invite/discard freelancers efficiently. Customizable fields in the package allow to ask for provider price (RFQ) or even reverse auctions. The PM can check the results of the availability check/RFQ in real-time.
  
  
• Freelance Project Configuratmion:
  Freelancers can be notified about project participation sending and email message when adding the freelancer as a project member.
  
  
• Generating and Sending Purchase Orders:
  More formallized communication with freelancers can be achieved by sending purchase orders, particularly in the case of translation freelancers.
  
  
• Feedback and Evaluation of the Delivered Services:
  The [simple survey] package allows to define evaluation surveys for project managers, team members and other stake holders to evaluate the performance of freelancers.
  
  
• Freelancer Communication:
  A forum package allows PMs to communicate with potentially large groups of resources via 1:N communication ("Notes"), N:M communication ("Discussions") and structured communication ("Tasks" and "Incidents").
  

Non-Functional Requirements

• Large Mumbers of Freelancers:
  All of the above activities have been designed to work efficiently with potentially large numbers of freelancers.
  
  
• Self-service Portal:
  ]po[ offers a freelancer self-service portal to reduce the administrative overhead to manage large numbers of sparcely contracted freelancers.
  
  
• Internet Security:
  Most of the features above require freelance resources to be integrated into projects just like internal resources. This type of integration requires a very high level of permission control and security. ]po[ can provide these features because it has been designed from the beginning to operate in the "hostile" Internet environment. Security has been tested and audited by several ]po[ customers via formal methodologies.