Why an External Hire Might Benefit Your Company

Many hiring managers and business owners prefer to hire from within their company. Internal hires are perceived as having additional company insight and dedication. While this is true, it doesn't mean that external hires should be underestimated.

Hiring an external full-time staff member or freelancer has many benefits, including a fresh perspective, new ideas and mindsets, and additional niche skills. 

If you're considering new personnel, but you're unsure whether an internal or external hire is best for your company, this guide could benefit you.

Types of External Hires

The best type of external hire for your company depends on the type of work you have planned. Many businesses choose to hire freelancers when they have a very specific one-off project that needs to be completed.

For example, to boost your promotional output during your business's peak season, you might choose to hire a freelance video editor to complete the project. As the work is not ongoing, a freelance external hire may be the best option as it's a time and cost-effective method. You can find video editors through online job platforms. Other types of freelance external hires include:

• Photographers
• Copywriters
• Website developers

You may also want to consider hiring a permanent member of staff externally. Full-time external hires can add a new dimension to your company and can even help progression. If your team has fallen into a rut, a new external staff member could be the perfect solution.

Pros and Cons of an External Hire

One thing all types of external hires have in common is a fresh perspective on your company. It can be hard to accept that your team isn't performing at its optimal capacity; however, accepting this and responding accordingly is the most beneficial approach to prevent your business from becoming myopic, which may lead to failing marketing initiatives. That's where an external hire can help you.

Oevae Marketing Consultants, for example, can help put your marketing efforts on the right track. They can help you attract and retain customers via a host of marketing strategies and channels.

Whether it's a freelancer or a full-time employee, an external hire can help your growth, as it sometimes takes a fresh perspective to see the shortcomings of your strategy.

However, external hires don't come without drawbacks. External freelance and full-time staff don't have pre-existing knowledge about and dedication to your company, which is something to consider when hiring a new team member. 

Also, sometimes it makes sense to take advantage of off-the-shelf services for your business instead of hiring an employee or freelancer. For example, if you wanted to change your business structure, you could work with a formation service instead of paying up for an attorney. Or you could utilize accounting software like Sage or QuickBooks instead of bringing on an accountant.

Another option is to use a Facebook ad template, for instance, to jump-start your marketing efforts. This makes it easy to generate great-looking ad graphics quickly.

How to Hire an External Team Member that Suits Your Company

One of the most important things to look for in an external hire is differentiation. If there are already people in your company with all of the skills that your external hire possesses, why hire them? Find someone who has additional skills or experience from those who already work for you.

Other advice for hiring a new employee includes:

• Assess their critical judgment
• Determine if they have a genuine interest in the company
• Unearth their leadership potential

Hire Outside the Company Today

No company is perfect, and every business needs a fresh set of eyes every once in a while. That's why choosing to hire externally is sometimes the best route for growing firms.

Oevae Marketing Consultants can empower your business by clarifying the best business marketing and branding solutions with the potential to attract prospects and get them interested about your brand experience – loyal customers who look for relevant problem-solving information, services, and products. For more information about our services, please visit our website oevae.com

Make a brand difference.™

Tech Investments You Can’t Afford Not to Make: Advice for Small Businesses

It’s an exciting new age for small businesses. There’s a wealth of affordable technology on the market designed to help draw customers to your website, simplify the transacting of business, and keep those transactions safe and secure. If you’re a small business owner, you know that your success depends on being smart with every single investment. That makes it all the more important to find tech advances that can transform your business into a desirable, safe, and convenient way for your customers to shop. 

Security

There’s little doubt that data security technology is one of the most important tech investments you can make. It involves nothing less than gaining the confidence of your clientele and the protection of customers’ sensitive financial information. Small businesses that don’t secure themselves and their customers run the risk of being branded as irresponsible companies concerned only with maximizing profit by skimping on important technology. If you think data crime couldn’t happen to you, ask Target, Yahoo, and JP Morgan Chase — big companies that thought they had properly secured very sensitive data and information. 

Emphasize Mobility

Giving customers a responsive and engaging website is a must these days, but it’s still not enough. In fact, you also have to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly because more than 50 percent of web traffic comes from smartphones, which means your small business must be savvy about mobile technology, including websites, payment apps, and any details that make it easy for a mobile device to interact with your online storefront/website. Many content management systems provide mobile-compatible technology that businesses can use to construct customized websites that look great but don’t cost an arm and a leg. 

A Dynamic Website

Small businesses need to attract, impress and retain clients in order to succeed. Winning people over means you need a dynamic and captivating website. One of the best investments you’ll make is to hire a brilliant freelance JavaScript developer. As Upwork explains, skilled JS developers are fluent in different back-end technologies and have plenty of experience with build tools like Bower and Grunt. An effective application of JavaScript can make your website really pop. What’s more, your site will be much more mobile-friendly, which is an essential factor in pulling in customers who prefer to use their mobile devices to shop. JavaScript will keep customers coming back for a great shopping experience. 

Marketing Automation

Integrating your marketing outreach activities with your company’s technology is one of the most efficient ways to promote small businesses. Customer relationship management software allows you to communicate with customers and grow relationships without a lot of wasteful effort and, even better, without spending needlessly on tactics that might or might not work. 

As a small business owner, it’s important to maximize every investment you make in your company, and that’s where marketing automation can help. It’s a smart technology that makes it easy to reach the right prospects at the right time, as well as provide customers with what they want based on their purchase history and shopping habits. Chatbots and automated social media marketing are good examples of affordable, technologically advanced marketing tools. 

Tech-Based Team Collaboration

If you have a large team to manage or an entirely virtual workforce, a team collaboration tool can help you work more efficiently and effectively. Collaboration tools combine communication and project management and reduce the likelihood that an important task will fall through the cracks. Sococo, for example, is a powerful online collaboration platform for meeting, messaging, and coordinating work, and Adobe Connect is a great way to hold interactive virtual meetings that can even be played back if someone missed something important. 

Small businesses are under a lot of pressure to make the right decision at every turn. That’s very hard to do, but there are technology resources that can make everyone productive and position your company for success — and there are many that won’t stress your budget.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Best Stock Photography

How you find the best photograph for your print project or website doesn't have to be a grueling process. 

The amount of time it would take you to find the best photo at the best price, might leave you scratching your head wondering if there is a more efficient process to locate stock photography.

If you're familiar with keywords, which are the most important tool for finding your images. The key to using effective keywording is to use all the terms – and only the terms – that are clearly conveyed by the content and context of the image. When selecting your keywords to find your images, make sure you include terms that describe the main content, what it's doing, where it is, what concepts it conveys in the image you desire, and how the image is composed.

If you're not familiar with keywords, you would benefit from consulting with one or more of the following:

• Graphic Designer - a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who has the ability to assemble images, photography, typography, or motion graphics to create visual communication and communication design

• Marketing Consultant - a professional within the field of marketing who uses the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling products or services that suit new consumer tastes

• Creative Director - a professional leading the communication design, interactive design, and concept forward in any work assigned and ultimately responsible for the quality of the final creative work. These responsibilities are often useful in creative organizations such as web development and software development firms as well as advertising

• Art Director - a professional who defines the overall visual appearance and how it communicates visually, stimulates moods, contrasts features, and psychologically appeals to a target audience

All four, Graphic Designer, Marketing Consultant, Creative Director, and Art Director often work in unison to craft the best art piece or scene for clients.  It can take years of training and working with various clients to develop the talents that result in award winning magazine ads, motion graphics, film, television, posters, billboards, postcards, book covers, email promotions, websites and beyond.

If you decide to confront a problem of finding your own stock photography head-on and deal with it openly, you should know that photographers images are often sold by more than one vendor and you could end up paying more than you needed.

Take this for example, you are searching for a "businesswoman with laptop computer at work" using Google.  As of the date of this post there are about 885,000 results. This includes thousands of stock photography vendors who sell rights-managed (a copyright license which, if purchased by a user, allows the one time use of the photo as specified by the license. If the user wants to use the photo for other uses an additional license needs to be purchased) and royalty-free photos (the right to use copyrighted material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use or per volume sold, or some time period of use or sales) for different prices.

Figure 1 (above) is a photo of "businesswoman with laptop computer at work" from fotosearch.com that costs $19 for a 7" x 9.5" at 72dpi photo. Figure 2 (below) "businesswoman with laptop computer at work" from photodune.net cost only $5 for the same image, saving you $14.

A Graphic Designer, Marketing Consultant, Creative Director, or Art Director will often know where to purchase the best stock photographs at the lowest price, because they have done this hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of times.  The choice is yours, you can DIY or contact an agency like Oevae Marketing Consultants and save time and money to get exactly what you want - the best graphic design image.

Make a brand difference.™

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