How A Checklist Can Improve Your Freelancer Onboarding Process

Encouraging any group of employees to march in step is difficult. The process gets even harder when the team includes part-time members.

Many companies in marketing, media, or communications rely on freelance contributors, yet brands don’t always know how to effectively integrate these new teammates.

Whether you’re looking to find new freelancers or already have external contributors helping out, you’ll benefit from a freelance onboarding process. Providing freelancers the right resources from the beginning will help them create better work and ultimately make your job easier.

How to ace freelancer onboarding

To help you along the way, we’ve compiled a six-step freelancer onboarding checklist, a cheat sheet of sorts that you can use to onboard freelancers now and into the future.

1. Explain the company and business objectives

Full-time employees have a tendency to take company messaging for granted. They’re around it so often that it becomes second nature. When you work with freelancers, you can’t assume they’ll instantly know the nuances of your business. The first part of your freelancer onboarding process should focus on educating them on these core details.

Marketers typically think about lobbing their pitch at prospective clients, but the same exercise could help you onboard freelancers. To create and maintain a productive relationship, you need to be clear about what the company sells, who it wants to reach, and how it wants to accomplish its business goals.

You can repurpose existing HR content—brand videos, welcome packets, training quizzes, FAQs—to get freelancers thinking the way you do. But keep in mind that you should pay freelancers for this time.

2. Introduce the team

Be thoughtful about how you introduce freelancers to full-timers. Just because they won’t physically be in the office doesn’t mean you should rattle off names of people on a group email. If you anticipate freelancers working repeatedly with full-timers, set up brief one-on-one calls between those individuals as part of the freelancer onboarding process. If you have a content management platform like Contently, make sure they know how to use it.

3. Set rules for communication

Before you hire and onboard freelancers, decide on a system that includes how you’re going to communicate with them.

One option is to divide your freelancer team into tiers. I’m on several editors’ email lists where they blast out editorial calendars, but others message me directly to ask about my availability. A couple simply forward me press releases and offers for interviews, and I can choose whether to bite or not.

Of course, there’s also the question of instant messaging and communicating with your full-time creators. In some cases, brands give full Slack privileges to freelancers. In other cases, the part-time creators are confined to certain channels. Either way, I’ve seen enough evidence to know that it’s helpful when freelancers join company culture. They pick up on brand messaging faster if they can see internal discussions.

4. Style guide and pitch guide

What’s your stance on the Oxford comma? Are there any words or phrases that employees can’t use? Do visual assets need to include certain colors, or are there any off-limits shots a freelance photographer should know about? Sending a style guide to freelancers will give them answers to all the little creative questions that you already know in the back of your head. As your brand evolves, you should also update the style guide occasionally, answering any new inquiries received from freelancers as they go through their onboarding process.

Along with the style guide, you should also send your freelancers a pitch or brief guide, which can live as a PDF, Powerpoint deck, or Google doc. Format doesn’t matter as much as content. A freelancer can’t pitch you ideas effectively without knowing at a high-level what you’re looking for. Do you want to approve their intended sources ahead of time? Should the pitch be in narrative format or are bullet points okay? Do you want pitches delivered to you the same day each week, via email, or do you accept them on a rolling basis?

Tell them exactly how you prefer to be pitched, including the communication channel they should use and the structure their pitches should take.

5. Gather a portfolio of past success

There are a ton of reasons to file your biggest successes together, but onboarding freelancers is one of the biggest. If you tell 10 new freelance hires to “read the archives,” expect maybe two or three to walk away with the same vision you have in your head.

On the other hand, if you have a directory of standout articles, infographics, white papers, and case studies to choose from, they’ll have an easier time seeing things your way. If, for instance, you’re asking them to write a new version of a piece of content that always works for you, show them the original! Tell them why it worked, what you’d like them to repurpose, and where you’d like them to add in new material.

6. Ask for feedback

Routinely interview your freelancers the way you interview your clients and seek feedback from full-timers. If you’ve been working with a freelancer for a few months, ask them to reflect on the freelancer onboarding process. Did they understand the brand when they began? What do they know now that they wish you had told them back then?

Once you have the answers to some of those questions, make sure to update your internal freelancer onboarding checklist to address any adjustments you’ve made to the process. The goal here is to internalize feedback and adjust your system to better serve freelancers who join in the future.

The better you are at freelancer onboarding, the faster your team will benefit from their contributions.

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