10 Interview Questions to Find the Perfect Freelancer
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As an entrepreneur, you keep hiring. And when it comes to hiring the top freelancers for your business, you need to figure out how they can help your business grow and provide you with the best results.
Finding a freelancer that has the required skill sets, the right experience, and the available schedule takes some effort on your part. So, for hiring freelancers, you need to have a detailed interview and ask the right questions to ensure they meet your expectations.
Here is the list of interview questions that you can ask freelancers before hiring:
1)Why do you freelance?
Freelancing requires managing clients and projects with full dedication to your work. It is definitely not just another job. It comes with additional responsibilities of being a top with communication, resourcefulness, and collaboration. You want to look for a freelancer who is doing it because they want to work on projects they are passionate about or with people they enjoy working with.
May be a freelancer is working on a project for the first time, so in this case, ask the reasons behind choosing to freelance.
2) What was your most challenging project?
It is essential to know about the challenges freelancers have faced and how they overcome those challenges.Pay attention to how they are describing them. What are they focusing on and whether the results were achieved or not? Listen intently, you will come to know their decision-making skills and how well they manage a project/situation, and also you will come to know about their knowledge depth.
3) What have you done to improve yourself professionally or as a freelancer?
We encourage freelancers, who believe in continuous learning. So, it’s good to know about freelancers’ learning habits and willingness to grow and improve.
4) What was your past project(s)?
You have already reviewed freelancers’ portfolio and are familiar with what they have worked on, but it’s still important to know about their past projects. This will help you to know about their experience, capabilities, and skills and also helps in figuring out whether they are qualified for the position or not.
5) What skills do you possess that you think will be most relevant to this project?
Each technology has its own frameworks. Hence, it’s important to check whether the freelancer knows that specific skill or not, which is going to be used in your project. Of course, people learn and acquire new skill sets all the time so a ‘no’ should not be a dealbreaker. This question will help you set expectations with your freelancer.
6) What is your project’s success rate?
For most freelancers, the success rate is not very defined. But it’s always good to get an idea about how many of their projects have been successful. Success can be measured on whether the projects are live, or having active users, or the feedback that the end-users have given on those projects. Asking this question gives you even further ideas about the benchmark the developers have for their projects and whether they have been good in their past projects because the past is always a good benchmark to follow the future. This will help you gauge the freelancer’s quality assurance.
7) How would your previous client rate you as a freelancer?
Good freelancers who deliver high-quality work to their clients always have good ratings and testimonials to show, and hence, it is prudent that you should be asking about the customer references from the freelancers because good freelancers always have good work to back them up. Client rating is a great way to measure client satisfaction with freelancers’ work which also helps them to win new clients.
8) What would you do if you missed your deadline?
You all want to work with a freelancer who is honest about their timeline. This question is a good hook to find out how honest a freelancer is. Of course, we all miss a few deadlines ourselves. Hence, again your push should not be for finding a guy with 100% timelines always but it would be a good discussion to know about the freelancers’ past performance in terms of timelines. Of course, we do not want a late entrant everywhere, but this discussion can also help in setting up the benchmark in terms of timeline and what to expect in the coming days.
9) What are your hobbies?
Hobbies are a good reflection of personality traits. Every person has their hobbies so, asking freelancers, about their hobbies can help you know about their field of interest. You never know, when you strike an interesting conversation. This question is a nice ice breaker to get a relationship started as well.
10) What question(s) you want to ask regarding the project?
This is the standard way to close an interview process. This question is usually asked at the end but, I believe that ample time is spent on this question to make sure that the freelancer is clear about the project and doubts, if any, be cleared. Good questions are always a good reflection of a person’s understanding as well. Hence, by the quality of questions, you can judge whether the freelancer really understood the scope of the project or not.
Conclusion:
A portfolio review only helps you to know who is the best fit with your current requirements. But between the glossy samples and interview verbose, you have to always figure out who would be the best fit for your business. Following the above questions can help with clarity on the same.
