How Virtual Employees Score Over Freelancers In Three Broad Categories

Let this be made clear right at the outset itself: virtual employees and freelancers cater to very different segments of the market and there is enough 'food' to go around for everyone concerned. Both are significant players in the burgeoning outsourcing market and both have their own set of strengths. That said, what cannot be denied, however, is the fact that virtual employees (this new breed of outsourcing partners who work like local employees except that they do so from the remote vendor's office) can manage to steal a march over freelancers when both are fighting for the same share of the outsourcing pie. An hypothetical example can make this clear. Let's say that an online marketing company wishes to outsource some of its non-core business processes (content writing) and IT functions (website development) and office assistance work (payroll). It is looking to fill these three positions for a long-term basis. Obviously, the average freelancer cannot hope to fit the bill, can they? So who can? On the other hand, a remote or virtual employee, sourced from a well-established outsourcing service provider's office can prove to be just what the doctor ordered. India is indisputably the hub of the outsourcing industry, with US and Europe alone contributing to 60 percent and 30 percent of the overall volume of IT and BPO outsourced work, respectively. Leading outsourcing companies in India, such as VirtualEmployee, which has actually pioneered the term 'virtual employee', are capable of providing dedicated and highly skilled virtual employees that are expert in virtually every office field in every profession, but especially in the popular domains of IT, business processes and virtual assistance. The added advantages accompanying such a hiring are many: 1.The virtual employee works out of the well-maintained office of the service provider and so has an easy access to the best there is in terms of infrastructure, hardware, software and technology. This ease of working makes them the best candidates for specialized functions such as web development, graphic designing, engineering and even animation. A freelancer, working from home, can never really replicate an office environment in his own work area which is usually the home and neither can they match the efficiency of an office infrastructure. 2.For a client that needs to outsource long-term IT work or business processes that call for intensive levels of collaboration on an almost daily basis would again do well to consider outsourcing to a dedicated remote employee instead of a freelancer. As everyone knows, close collaboration with a freelancer is almost impossible, given the time zone differences between India and the western countries and the absence of any advanced communication technology at home. There might be few exceptions but these would be rare and far in between. 3.A freelancer, by their very style of functioning, are tailor-made for short-term work since they work independently, alone and usually handle more than one client at a time. This makes them a somewhat of a risky proposition as far as long-term work is concerned. The reason being that the freelancer simply cannot cope up with such demands on their time and limited resources and are better suited to work in 'short bursts' so to speak. 4.Companies or individuals usually suffer from the twin concerns of lack of control and data security whenever any work is outsourced. This concern understandably applies more to freelancers since this breed of outsourcing workers play the lone hand and work unsupervised. In addition, working on several varied assignments at the same time can also increase the error factor. Remote employees, on the other hand, operate from supervised and controlled offices of the vendor, which is equipped with all the fire fighting equipment as far as data safety is concerned. 5.A virtual employee can work for years with the same client whereas it is almost unthinkable that a freelancer can do the same. This in no way reflects upon the freelancer but rather on the very nature of the work that gets outsourced to freelancers on the whole. Rare is the case where anything more complex than low-end and short-term work gets outsourced to a freelancer. So, when it comes to the trio of virtual assistance, business support services and IT services, an average freelancer simply cannot compete with a virtual employee.