This year’s PeoplePerHour.com Small Business Survey – released today – revealed that 2011 was the year in which hiring freelancers turned from an occasional activity to a regular necessity for a large proportion of the UK’s 4.5 million small businesses.
Of the 1300 small business owners polled in the survey, 80 percent felt freelancing had become more common in the UK small business community over the past year.
32 percent of respondents had started using freelancers for the first time in the past six months, with 33 percent reporting they now use freelancers on a weekly basis.
According to the report, the primary driver of this trend is technologies that give small businesses better access to reliable freelancers.
41 percent of respondents believed websites like PeoplePerHour.com had made finding various skills online easier than ever before, with 64 percent feeling that hiring freelancers had become ‘more reliable’ in the past year.
PeoplePerHour.com has seen its registered user numbers double from 120,000 to more than 240,000 over the past 12 months as result of this trend.
“For many years now, small business owners have been able to source freelancers online. As the survey findings suggest, hiring freelancers has become the recruitment strategy of choice for thousands of small businesses across the UK. And the trend is showing no signs of slowing down.” says PeoplePerHour.com Founder and CEO Xenios Thrasyvoulou.
However, it’s only in the past couple of years that you can hire freelancers across a wide range of skills with 100 percent confidence, thanks to platforms like PeoplePerHour.com which enable businesses to accurately assess freelancers reliably.
The suggestion that small businesses are increasingly choosing freelancers over in-house staff is supported by the Small Business Survey, which finds that 41 percent of respondents planned to increase freelance hiring over the next 12 months. In stark contrast, just 16 percent expected to hire in-house staff.
For further information, interviews and case studies, please contact:
Kirsty Jarvis
kirsty@ubiquitycomms.com
m: +44 (0) 79 6629 1216
t: +44 (0) 20 7099 6975
Editors’ notes
PeoplePerHour.com (http://www.peopleperhour.com) launched in 2007, with the simple idea of connecting small businesses with talented, independent service providers, in an environment that fosters accountability and trust.
The site initially began with one sector – administrative services – and following its success and popularity quickly expanded within three months alone to 10 service categories covering thousands of individual skills.
The website now has in excess of 180,000 service providers, across 150 countries, and serves over 61,000 small businesses clients.
88 percent of the work completed on PeoplePerHour.com gets a five-star rating by the client, validating the fundamental belief on which the business was founded: that talented professionals, when working for themselves, have both a cost advantage but are also more motivated, productive and accountable to the quality of their work, delivering better value to the client all round.
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