Finding More Freelance Work – Alerts Feature

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One of the issues with most freelance marketplaces is that only a small number of freelancers actually find work on the platform. Of the thousands of people signed up, perhaps 5-10% of people actually win work.

We want all our users to be able to use 3Desk to help them find something, even if it’s not directly through the platform.

As such, we’ve introduced a new email alert feature, to help people find work:

http://www.3desk.com/email-alerts

You can now search by title, sector or location and find roles, whether on 3Desk directly or with our partner Indeed.

You can also set up email alerts, which will send you those opportunities via email daily or weekly, so that it’s even easier to ensure opportunities find you.

Good luck!

 

Tips, Feedback and Freelance Help

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Here at 3Desk, we always love feedback. Problems, issues, ideas, thoughts or constructive criticism are graciously received, because it helps us make the site even better.

To help you, here are some of the most common questions or requests:

How do I find more work?

That’s the million dollar/pound/shilling etc. question and the most common thing freelancers want to know. If we could click our fingers and solve this for you, we would.

We set up 3Desk to help connect employers and freelancers way more easily and rest assured, we’re doing all we can. This article explaining how to increase your rate is very relevant to finding more work and also the second article in the series. I’ll post some more shortly. Good luck, keep your profile as complete as possible and make sure to share it.

I’m an employer and a freelancer, or I’ve set up the wrong account

No worries, go to – www.3desk.com/account and toggle between the two. Employers don’t currently have a profile (it’s coming). By the way, if you’d prefer a bit of ecological hardwood or a desk made out of solid Incan silver (you’re only limited by your imagination) – you can choose your desk from our 3Desk choices.

I’m not getting the right or enough candidates

We’re unable to ‘control’ who shows interest, although we do try to filter spam (i.e. wholly unsuitable candidates) as best we can. You can also mark people as spam, which helps us improve our matching. We try not to prevent people applying altogether, if we can.

If you’re still not getting the right or enough people: 1) Make sure your job description is specific enough, or is it too specific? 2) Have you added the right keywords? Let us know if you need any help or to look at your profile, we’ll do what we can. 

The matching isn’t working well or I’m too busy to receive new opportunities

We introduced the matching service, matching freelancers to employers, because we wanted to try to help save you time. It does work, but getting it spot on is very, very difficult and is related to the number of jobs we have, how people input them (which we try to edit), keyword variations, location names and the way information in your profile is added.

Trust me, Raz has two mathematical Olympic medals and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence – it’s not at all easy but it’s improving all the time. The better your profile and the job information, the better the matches will be… but we do sometimes get them wrong. If you don’t want to receive notifications, you can always change these here – www.3desk.com/account – But be warned, we may then miss you if an amazing job comes in, or we have news for you.

I can’t see jobs outside of my country, or I’m in the wrong country

We’re focused on face-to-face freelancing. Which means that we generally try to limit people to their ‘area’ to prevent people from far, far away applying for local jobs.

We’re working to allow people to apply to different areas at present – hopefully this will be solved shortly.

Why wasn’t my job posted?

We have very strict criteria, ensuring the quality of the platform remains high. We don’t allow freelance opportunities that are; commission based, beneath a minimum wage, permanent or roles that sound too vague or not suite right. If you’ve spotted one you think isn’t suitable, let us know.

Why are you called 3Desk?

We are focused on freelancers that work ‘in person’. Those freelancers will likely have a number of different places of work, or multiple desks. We’d like people not to be tied to one position, we think that would make the world of work a bit better.

Anything else I should know?

Yep. We’re doing all we can to build something amazing. It takes time. It will never be absolutely flawless for everyone, but we think it’s already really cool and we receive wonderful feedback (which we love to get) every single day.

There will be little niggles. Please be patient. We’re a tiny team in comparison with companies like Airbnb, eBay, Elance etc (companies we look up to) so bear that in mind when comparing. Even they were like us, once. Plus we do some things better.

If you like what we’re doing, follow us on Twitter, and join us on LinkedIn, Facebook.

Best Example Freelance Profiles

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We’re loving the way people are playing with our new freelance profile. Our aim was to enable people to design the profiles the way they wanted, to showcase their skills and talents as a freelancer, as well as winning endorsements – here’s more about our reasoning for building the new profile.

More and more people spreading the love. Raz has also built some really cool features that enable you to fill your profile automatically from Twitter, your personal URL and by uploading your CV.

Here are some best examples of our fabulous freelancers from across the globe, including a couple of D-list celebrities – click on the photos to see their profiles:

1. Matthew, an illustrator from London, UK

2. Mohamed, a marketing professional from Egypt

3. Joel, an Art Director from New York, USA.

4. Samantha, an actress from Australia

5. Our own resident super-hero, Raz, France

6. Paula, a designer from LA, USA

7. Yours truly, because 7 is my lucky number – Bristol, UK

8. Helen a Jill of all (wonderful) trades from Sacramento, California

If you’ve got a profile you’d like us to see and share, or anything changes you’d like, please send us a Tweet or leave us a note in our LinkedIn group.

We’ve lots more to add, so keep your eyes peeled for the new features we’ll be rolling out over the coming weeks.

PS – why the different backgrounds? We wanted to make it ‘look’ like a desk. You can choose the desk you want to work at from your account page. You’ve got 3Desks to choose from, obviously.

The Ultimate Freelance Profile & Birthdays

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The New Freelance Profile

I’m thrilled to announce that we’re launching your NEW PROFILE (coincidentally on, 3Desk’s 1st Birthday).

We built this profile using feedback from thousands of our users to help freelancers win more work and share your unique skills. Here are some of the highlights:

1) The profile is now built from ‘cards’ that can be added, deleted, moved, resized and edited. Freelancers can add projects, skills and images. Use the ‘improve your profile’ button for suggestions. The better the profile, the more likely freelancers will be found, and hired.

2) Freelancers can SHARE THEIR PROFILE and people can now find, contact and hire them directly, (as well as applying to the opportunities we have listed, like before).

3) Freelancers can ask for endorsements – the more they have, the better chance the of winning work. Perhaps more importantly, it is also a clever way of letting people know what a freelancer is up to without explicitly having to asking for work.

4) Connect a personal website, blog, CV/resume, and other profiles and we’ll auto-magically use them to populate a profile.

Voila, if you’re a user here’s your profile – make sure it looks great.

This is obviously just the beginning and there may be a few (hopefully small) issues – Raz is only human after all (although he deserves a cape, here’s his profile). We’ll be improving the profile, listening to further feedback and adding new features over the coming weeks. Please do get in touch on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook if you’ve any comments, thoughts or ideas.

I’ll also be sharing the best, so if you think your profile looks great, let us know on Twitter 

10 Ways to Increase Your Freelance Rate

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So you’re well on the way.

In the last article we looked at 9.5 ways to increase your daily freelance rate. In this, we continue the hunt for the best tips for freelancers. If you’ve not read the previous, start there, these build on those.

10 more tips to increase your freelance rate. 

  • Become an influencer. Use social media. Contribute to LinkedIn groups (especially ours - if you use the share button at the top of this post, you can contribute to multiple groups at the same time, it’s a REALLY good tool, try it now). Spend time focusing on your network. Better still, start a LinkedIn group. Don’t bother editing and tweaking your personal website unless you have at least 50 visitors a day, preferably a few hundred. Set aside 10 minutes a day to contribute to these groups. Don’t spread yourself too thing – a blog, twitter account, tumblr, personal website, Linkedin and other networks can eat up your day and provide excused for procrastination. Use StayFocusd if you have a problem keeping it to a minimum. Also, have a read of our article of Twitter tips and also our article from Bill, who has a PhD in Twitter (kind of).
  • When you pitch for work, focus your pitch on your client’s needs, not yours. This might sound obvious, but is so often ignored. Someone is hiring you not to give you a job, but to solve a problem THEY have. Focus on that. Make sure that they understand how you will make their life easier and will deliver what THEY need. Make it obvious. I am a great product designer and can help increase your traffic is so much less effective than, “the most recent redesign I completed has resulted in an increase in traffic from 1k visits to 3k visits a day in the last 3 months, bringing in an additional £/$2k a month with no other additional advertising”. The more quantitative you can make it the better. You want to be saying, “here is the problem (numbers) I can solve for you, and here are the results (numbers) you can expect in (the time you will spend)”. That will get you the job way faster and enable you to justify your now-inflated fee ;)
  • Ask for feedback. A lot. In your first pitch meeting, ask, “was there anything that you felt less sure about from my presentation”. That way you understand what you need to work on and can come back (best not immediately but in the next session) with some counters that directly focus on those concerns. You want to be a better freelancer, right? If you’re too scared to ask how you’re doing, then you’re not going to see outside of your blind spots. If they say you’re doing amazingly, maybe you can charge a bit more. If you’re not doing that well, you have a chance to improve.
  • When you pitch, set your rates slightly higher than you want. That way you can always drop them (giving a discount) and also that way the client feels like they’re getting more for less. Also, get the client to ‘like’ you first and commit to using you before you’re too firm about fixed rates. Wait if you can. Once you have their tacit approval, you’ll likely have the confidence to argue for a higher rate.
  • Choose your clients carefully. Some clients will offer much more follow-on work and also higher value work. However, be careful not to rely too heavily on one client. Think through the market cycle. We’re currently in recession – which sectors pull out of recession quickest? Try to target people at the right time in the economic cycle.
  • Register with recruiters, but do so carefully and explain your terms. A good recruiter can be a great help. A bad one a pain in the neck. There are a lot more of the latter than the former. You want to be kept up to date only for jobs that fit your requirements. Look after them and never be rude, you want them on side, but be firm and professional. Here’s a poll we ran asking if recruiters were worth including in 3Desk. Make sure you are clear that if you start to get sent poor jobs or are hassled then you will remove your details from their database.

That’s a lot of tips 19.5 in all. Start with one. Get it right, add another. Rinse and repeat. If you want even more help, try our one-on-one coaching session, where I’ll coach you to be a better freelancer. It’s 100% guaranteed, so if you don’t feel it’s valuable, I’ll give you your money back.

What matters most in this crazy world is being happy. Remember why you started freelancing, try to stay true to yourself. Easier said than done.

Good luck!

Tom

9.5 Realistic Ways to a Higher Freelance Rate

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A freelancer’s rate is sacred thing. It will often determine your sense of worth, in addition to your actual worth. Yet despite how integral it is to the freelancer’s life there are often two big problems with the way freelancers approach their work:

  • Many freelancers are nervous… really nervous when it comes to setting and discussing their rates and they don’t do so with confidence or the right attitude.
  • There is a lot of poor advice on many of the freelance blogs and guides. Be careful what you read and implement. Your job is to point us in the direction of the good stuff when you do find it, so we can share it.

In this article, I want to get realistic and explore a mere 9.5 realistic and simple(!) ways to you and other freelancers increase your daily rate. I also do very special one-to-one coaching for freelancers, sign up here. 

Before we start, let’s be clear what this is not. You could sell advertising on your site, write an ebook, hire a thousand contractors from abroad to do your work for you, or decide to auction off your kidneys – however, what I want to do is help the ‘normal’ freelancer increase their rates in the ‘normal’ course of their work, using tips that actually help, rather than suggest you become an internet marketing sensation, or start a thousand blogs before the weeks end.

Get realistic.

There are two methods for increasing your rate – one is to get more work (more hours) and the other, a higher rate for the same amount of time. They are interconnected. The more work you have, the more you are able to pick and choose and be confident enough to ask for more. However, this article is mainly about the latter.

  • First, we’re presuming you have clients. If not, forget starting a blog/website or setting up a clever SEO or Adsense strategy, just go out into the big wide world and find 3 clients willing to pay for your services. That will teach you more about freelancing and finding and winning work than anything else (i.e. stop reading now, only continue to 2. when you’re done with this). This is a great, realistic article that suggests this. We’ll talk about how to find new clients in subsequent articles. If you’ve not read the Lean Startup (or the Learn Startup, as it could be called), it suggests doing the bare minimum to prove what you’re thinking is realistic BEFORE you get all complex and zingy. Start small, start lean. Hence, this is a half-tip.
  • So you’ve got clients. Nice. Now to increase your rate. The first tip is to be aware of your value, and your time. Use a time tracker (I use RescueTime), to better understand how you work. Try to reduce tasks which are a time-suck and to find out where you can release more time, as well as measuring your most active times of the day/week, in order to get your important work done. The Pareto Principle is alive and well, if you choose to use it (and you should). For me, I have decided to try to reduce email after learning that I spent on average 20+ hours a week tapping out messages. Also because I’d rather have ‘real’ contact with people on the phone or in person – I find email a bit dead. This new strategy has freed me up to be much more focused on 3Desk and therefore provide higher value work, even though I don’t bill for it! Once you track your time, you’re also able to show a client what you’ve been up to and how long things really take. It ensures transparency and enables better negotiation and understanding.
  • Don’t bend over backwards to do overtime if it’s because the client has changed their mind, or it wasn’t quite what they thought. Be firm, stick to your original proposal, where you were very strict, right? Explain early on in the process that you charge by the hour/day. You want to be very clear about expectations and that you’ll track your time explaining that a client needs to pay for extra if they want extra. Simple. They would ask the same of their clients if they bought an extra widget from your client. Fair’s fair.
  • Offer to do a portion of your work ‘in person’ or face-to-face if you can (it doesn’t have to be all of it). The reason – people tend to hire, keep and pay higher rates for people that they have a closer relationship with. If you’re in the office, people recognize you as a human being. If you’re only willing to work remotely, then what’s to stop someone from abroad on sites like Elance or Odesk from undercutting you? That’s one of the main reason why we focus on face-to-face freelancing here at 3Desk.
  • Get your client to set a budget themselves and understand the various components they are asking you to achieve. Friend of 3Desk, Brennan Dunn, has built an awesome tool called Planscope that enables clients to predict budgets and we discover that if they do it themselves, they have a much greater understanding of the machinations of the project you’re working on.
  • Manage your new business pipeline, always. Unless you have 100 hours freelance work offered each week at your current rate (in which case increase your rate and stop reading this article) one of the principle reasons why freelancers have a lower rate than they would like is because they neglect new business. Keep it going, in good times as well as bad. Here are some tips within this tip.
  1. Call, don’t email. See point 2. above – similar reasons apply.
  2. Schedule in time each day to do business development. Be disciplined.
  3. Use twitter to look for new work. Use TweetDeck or Hootsuite to follow keyword searches. Say hello to folks. Make connections that can help you find work (other freelancers, influencers).
  4. For job boards where you know freelance roles get posted, set up an RSS feed or email alert to bring leads to you. Use them to grow a list of companies or people that look interesting and save their emails/phone numbers. Often contacting people when they don’t need help is better than when they do (and you’re one of 20 freelancers squeezing to get in).
  5. Cold call. If you’re scared of cold-calling, remember that if it’s a bad call, no-one will remember and a good call could result in work. People are generally friendly. Be bold, it not that bad.
  6. Don’t give up after your first attempt, better to stay in touch with 20 people than to contact 100 once.
  • Upsell things to existing clients, or sell things twice. If you’ve got a good relationship, there are usually ways to add extra value. As you know them already, this is often easier than integrating with new clients. If you’ve built something that doesn’t have IP constraints, there are sometimes ways to sell it twice, or more.
  • Track the value of your skills and then try to learn new ones. For example, see this site for IT workers. I’m not suggesting that a copywriter learn iOS development skills, but often there are ways of enhancing your skills by learning another that’s close to yours, which would add a string to your bow. Take 10 minutes each day to focus on learning a new skill, not least because it’s fun.
  • Partner with another freelancer. Related to the above two point, you can complement one another providing a symbiotic relationship with regards to services offered. Post a role on 3Desk to find the ying to your yang. Also, they’ll help you find work through their channels, and give you confidence during your inevitable wobbles.
  • Say no. Lots. One of the most important things of all as a freelancer is to know your limits. Where to stop. This ties back into the Pareto principle. Focus on what you’re best at. If you’re eager to please, you can take on more than you’re capable of delivering. That hurts you and the client. Do what you’re best at, you’ll find you get your work done more quickly and you’ll be better at it.

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That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll have a look at 10 additional tips to help you increase your daily rate. If you’ve any tips you want to share, please comment below, or shoot us a tweet or leave a note on Facebook or our vibrant LinkedIn group.

Using Social Media To Carve Out Your Freelance Niche

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A guest post from Tony Restell:

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Let’s start with something I think we can all agree upon – strong business networks are a valuable asset for a freelancer! Having work referred to us, having people testify to our skills and credentials, having contacts make helpful introductions – these are all things that can be invaluable when it comes time to win that next assignment. Agreed?

Given that’s the case, you would think that becoming effective at modern day networking – social networking – would be critical to the success of a freelancer. Yet many professionals I interact with still struggle to make headway in their social media efforts.

A strong business network requires two key things. Firstly, being connected to the right people; and secondly engaging with those connections on a regular enough basis that they would consider you to be a warm contact.

In terms of social networking, most professionals in my experience have the first of these two points reasonably covered. They’ve built a decent sized network on LinkedIn, following on Twitter or circle of contacts on Google+… and made sure that it’s a quality network rather than just going after sheer numbers. It’s finding a way of staying front of mind with these individuals that seems to be the thing that most professionals struggle with. How to fit this into the time constraints of a working week and the demands of your existing client work?

The Key To Keeping Your Network Engaged

The key to keeping your network engaged is firstly, to ensure that your social media streams are regularly and consistently populated – so that weeks don’t pass by without there having been some reason you’ve appeared on people’s radar. It’s also key to fill your social media streams with far fewer promotional posts, requests for help, etc. and to focus instead on sharing helpful insights and finding ways of helping others in your network. This is what makes them remember you and think highly of you; it’s also what will make them want to reciprocate and help you in turn.

I recommend two elements in this strategy. Firstly, you need to build up an archive of “evergreen” material that will be helpful to business people in your sector. I recommend keeping a simple spreadsheet of tweets / LinkedIn messages to share, whose content you know will be valuable for months and months to come. You might include:

  • Tips to help businesspeople work effectively with freelancers, get the most from the relationship, ensure projects are delivered on time, etc.
  • Shares of links to all the great downloadable reports, web tools, video interviews, etc. that you’ve come across that would be useful to your target audience (so that you are valued as a curator of content that it’s worth them taking time to read).
  • Answers to FAQs you often hear from clients. What are the pain points in your industry at the moment, what are the challenges you frequently see clients trying to address? What insights can you provide and what questions are you well positioned to answer?
  • Links to any articles / white papers you’ve had published or to any web pages on which you’re quoted (provided each of these resources will be of value to your audience)
  • Links to any timeless articles you’ve found – interviews with great business leaders, Top 10 list type articles, etc.

Once created, this spreadsheet provides you with material you can sporadically reshare on your networks – and provides an archive of links you can use whenever you’re short of new material to share. Don’t worry about having shared the same thing multiple times. I promise most people will only see a fraction of what you share on social media and so will find it beneficial that you repeat your posts several times over. Even for those who do notice eg. a repeat tweet, you will find actually retweet it for you rather than complain about the repetition. So don’t worry.

Finding New Content

There are various ways of ensuring you have a new stream of relevant content to share. The key is to invest a bit of time up front (1-2 hours) so that your daily or weekly task of finding new content to share is literally something that takes just a couple of minutes. The two methods I suggest (choose one or the other) would be to use RSS feeds or to use a Twitter search string. To use RSS feeds, you’ll need to have an RSS reader. Personally I use Google Reader. It’s free and very easy to use. Put simply, as you visit websites that have content that you think is worthy of sharing, subscribe to their RSS feed with Google Reader. Set this Google Reader page as a homepage on your web browser and then every day when you start up, Google Reader will present you with details of all the new articles that have been published by the sites you think are worthy of sharing with your followers. It’s a simple job each day to pick out which ones you’d like to share as all the contenders are there for you in one place to choose from! Personally, I prefer to use a Twitter search string to achieve the same goal. The two reasons for this are i) not every site has an RSS feed, so a Twitter search will produce more comprehensive results and ii) one great way of engaging with more people is to retweet their tweets. So rather than simply tweeting content you’ve found in your RSS reader, why not send out the exact same content but by retweeting the tweets of others. Over time you will see this build up considerable goodwill and also see it being reciprocated in turn – further increasing your reach.

To go down the Twitter search route, simply make a list of the site URLs that produce content you think is worthy of sharing. Then go to Twitter and in the search field list out all these URLs with OR inserted between each of them. You’ll then find your screen filled with new content from all your favourite content authors, but in a form that also readily allows you to share by retweeting. Now simply bookmark the page with these search results showing – and every time you return to that bookmarked page you’ll see the latest tweets of content from those sites (tip: select to see “All” tweets not just “Top” to get maximum results). Of course some of the content you find this way you’ll also think is “evergreen” material, so over the following weeks your spreadsheet of repeatable material will grow and grow. Soon you’ll have a repository that means you’re sharing content that your network really appreciate and that has them increasingly hooked on your stream. You’ll also find them commenting on your content and thereby opening up new dialogues that can lead to future business leads. That’s the end goal you want to achieve, alongside having a network that’s really engaged and that feel indebted to you and eager to help you when they can. If you get there, then any promotional messages you do send will be far more powerful – more likely to be read and more likely to be shared. That’s the network strength you want to have when you’re next approaching the stage of needing a new assignment!

Last But Not Least

Having found lots of content to share, the only thing you now need to do is to spread your messages out over the course of the day – and the coming weeks (in the case of LinkedIn). You can use HootSuite or Buffer to schedule messages to be sent out on your accounts even when you are busy working on client site. Schedule days, weeks or even months in advance – according to the demands of your schedule. Free versions of both are available – and once set up, all you need to do is check into your accounts each day so that real enquiries, comments and requests are seen and acted upon in a timely manner.

I hope I’ve given you some good food for thought and made your social networking seem like a much less onerous task.

About the Author: Tony is the Founder of talent networking site Social-Hire.com and a respected commentator in the online recruitment and social media sectors. A published author and Cambridge graduate, Tony spent his early career in strategy consulting before going on to build and sell a job board business. He is focused on helping candidates and recruiters use social media to find their next career or their next hire. To view Tony’s blog click here or follow @tonyrestell on Twitter.

Your New Profile on 3Desk

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An example new profile

Over the last 5 weeks, we’ve had an amazing time trying to build the ultimate profile for freelancers. In order to understand what people wanted, we listened to over a thousand freelancers who sent us ideas. We amalgamated these opinions and thought deep on the responses.

We’re excited to say we’re almost there. Although there are many more features to add, we’re proud to offer you a chance to test-drive the new look. To see your profile, click here: www.3desk.com/profile 

Here’s a cheeky example for you, so you can see how a normal profile can look:

Here are some of the many features we think you’ll love:

-       Fill your profile in just a few clicks using your other profiles on the web. We auto-magically use Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and your personal website/blog to build your profile for you in seconds.

-       Your profile is split into cards, each of which is moveable, re-sizable and customizable. You don’t have to conform to the restrictions of the static layout of other sites any more! Enjoy moving them and watching them snap into place.

-       SO many people asked for endorsements. These allow you to – a) to get other people to endorse and recommend your work, adding weight to your profile and demonstrating how good you are and b) it allows you to share your work/profile with others and get hired directly through your network.

-       You can create any cards you want to, to ensure your particular services are represented. Use images, text and markup to make your profile shine.

-       Project cards enable you to showcase work you’ve done for clients.

-       Skills are a vital part of a freelancer’s offering. We enable you to link them to projects and endorse them individually.

-       A ‘profile completeness’ counter, so you don’t have to guess what to add – we’ll suggest things to do next, starting with the easiest/most important first.

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As ever, we’d love your thoughts so please let us know what you think. We’re also looking for some best example profiles, please send us yours on twitter (www.twitter.com/3desk) and we’ll share the best.

Finding a Freelancer Shouldn’t Be Difficult

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This was originally posted here

The life of a freelancer is often envied. Being free to work when you want and with the clients you choose certainly sounds seductive.

Full-time employees long for the freedom that freelancers seemingly possess. A common perception is that freelancers mostly work from home (infamously in their pyjamas) and dive into client offices as and when needed without getting snared up in office politics and meetings. All for a higher day rate than the full-timers get, even though the permanent folks are chained to their cubicles and office hours.

Yet as any experienced freelancer knows, the truth is rather different. As our freelancers on 3Desk tell us, you have to run your own business – be a mini-entrepreneur, subjected to all the strains and stresses that accompany this journey (and perhaps, without the potential upsides if your business won’t scale, or run itself).

Freelancing success is often dependent on business skill

Freelancers often take big financial risks to go out alone. It can be isolating and very, very hard at times. Many of the people who I’ve spoken to, talk about periods with little work where stress is high, when they are forced to do intensive business development to find new work. Few suggest it is easy. For most, the freedom is definitely worth the risk, but some fall back into full-time work because of the security it provides (think sick days, healthcare and the community a team brings,).

Picture the designer – a savant when it comes to colours, pixels, user experience and the look and feel. A highly-skilled being. Yet this personality type doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with the marketer, and yet almost every freelancers has to ‘sell’ their own work in order to win new clients. Meaning that the most skilled is least able to find work unless people recognize their talent. Freelancers rely on their own networks through word-of-mouth and use recruiters – each of which is fraught with pitfalls and especially in the case of recruiters, is very costly.

Apply for a mortgage as a successful freelancer, with multiple high-paying clients and typically a bank will not lend you as much money as if you earned the same salary from a single employer. Despite the fact that a single employer might mean a more precarious income stream.

All of which seems rather strange…

What if you were hired because you’re a talented freelancer, not a great salesman?

For many skilled freelancers, like web developers, designers and marketers, there are often a plethora of opportunities in one’s local area. The problem is not so much that the opportunities don’t exist, but that the current methods do not provide the market with the kind of liquidity that ensures security. At 3Desk, we dream of a market where everyone value is based on their actual skill, rather than their marketing skill.

Many freelancers are unaware of opportunities that come up because they never hear about them. Tracking job boards and other sites for opportunities is time-consuming and hard to navigate.

Employers are also affected. Because it’s difficult to find freelancers, as and when they’re needed, many see the process as being much like hiring someone full time. That shouldn’t be the case. Bringing a freelancer in for a day is so mindbogglingly easy that many talent ‘issues’ could be solved by giving it a go.

We think freelancing can help change the world for the better

If it were easier to find work and easier to hire freelancers, the advantages of both being and hiring temporary workers would markedly improve. It’s not just ‘traditional’ freelancers that would benefit, but also mothers who’ve recently given birth might have the capacity to work a few hours a day, or a few days a week. We think that freelancing could actually change the world and I was inspired to start 3Desk by two friends who work in international development.

In most markets, the supply and the demand exist but the current connective mechanisms prevent the two finding one another easily and cheaply.

At 3Desk, we’re making little steps to address that. By enabling freelancers to create customizable profiles that do the marketing for them (here’s a sneak peek of our new design, a work in progress.) We also match people to jobs using a special algorithm and ensure freelancers know where they stand, even if they don’t win the work.

We want to make the full-time workers of the world jealous of the reality, not of the perception.

Freelancers Are Entrepreneurs & Escaping The City

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This post originally appeared here.

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I used to work in the city, in the belly of the beast – an investment bank. There were a mere 1000 unlucky souls on the floor of our corporate prison office.

I lasted just 3 months. The banking world was too disconnected from ‘life’ and what it means to be a passionate and creative human being. For me, it was a like a battery farm of bright people, all slowly dying at their desks.

So, I escaped the city and have never looked back ‘becoming’ an entrepreneur.

At first, it seemed lonely. Yet as I explore, I’m rewarded to find there are many more of us chasing this freedom than first meets the eye. Freelancers, consultants and contractors all run their own small businesses with the highs and lows that accompany. Each have taken the leap to escape to a working world that befits them.

The Startup of You

Reid Hoffman wrote a book recently entitled ‘The Startup of You’. As the founder of LinkedIn, and an investor in Facebook, Zynga, Path and many others, he should know a thing or two about the world of work.

What is clear is that work is changing. Employers cannot guarantee job security and so people are less willing to sacrifice themselves. Most interestingly, more and more people are recognizing that they need to be in control of their work, rather than leaving it to the ‘cultures’ of businesses and at the mercy of their managers. Some are sounding the death knell of the traditional job – like this TechCrunch article outlines.

Certain commentators believe that by 2020 over 50% of the US workforce will be temporarily employed – meaning, amazingly that over half of those working will have part-time jobs. More people will be running their own businesses (read careers), even if they don’t always see themselves as entrepreneurs, or having ‘escaped’ full time work.

These don’t have to mean working in Starbucks, but it could also be as a ‘super-temp’ (as this Harvard Business Review article explains).

My Story

My peripatetic escape from the city led me to start a marine conservation charity (www.blueventures.org), to build a sustainability-focused recruitment business in London and San Francisco and to build a house in Kenya (https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/173098).

Each also enabled other people to escape from the city for a little while (Blue Ventures ran expeditions for volunteers in Madagascar) or to change the city from with in. The recruitment business I started helped people switch to environmental careers until the recession dragged us slowly under (escaping isn’t always a blessing). Yet my current business 3Desk (www.3desk.com) feels like the strongest contributor helping change the workforce and enabling escape.

Yet for all that will to escape, there is a problem – with more and more people wanting to be self-employed, there need to be new and better solutions to enable these people to find work that suits them and their skills. A graphic designer might be absolutely amazing, but the nature of their work means they’re often not natural marketers, or business developers. Escaping is often easy, finding a rewarding, relaxing spot on the far side can be more challenging.

Our Aim

As we mentioned in a previous blog post, we want to build a liquid marketplace for freelancers who work face-to-face. Although marketplaces for freelancers exist, the focus is on remote work, from one cubicle to another, without human interaction.

We want to help people with skills find the work they need, when they need it, and enable employers to tap into talent locally without forcing people to become permanent workers. Although a great, cohesive permanent team is truly wonderful, there are too many people who hate their jobs but have valuable skills. We want to enable those who want to escape, escape. Not just from one job to another, but from unemployment into employment, and from motherhood to a work routine that is symbiotic with childcare. We want to prevent the United Nations and Governments wasting billions on besuited city-based consulting firms because they can’t find the people they need individually.

I escaped the city, yet work harder than I did there for a fraction of the pay. But I am free, and making a difference to other peoples’ lives. Every day I thank my lucky stars that I had the means to escape. Now I feel like a liberator from the jail of conformity, helping others escape too to the wild and wonderful pastures of working the way you want to, when you want to and still earning what you need to, to be happy and live a simple life.