6 questions to ask a freelancer during an interview

You have pre-selected three freelancers who you think are the best candidates to assist you with your needs. They are available over the period envisaged for the mission and their TMR corresponds to the planned budget. Everyone masters the skills required, rich experiences that can be useful for your problems, and engaging results that you can already imagine transposing to your company's project.

But how do you decide between them? The interview is precisely used to identify the strengths and weaknesses that do not appear on their resume and to project yourself concretely with one of them.

Having accompanied more than 500 successful collaborations, Beager knows how to recognize the signs of a successful professional relationship right from the interview phase.

Discover the 8 key questions that will allow you to identify the ideal talent for your project.

Know the candidate

Can you retrace your career path?

At first glance, this question is no different from a traditional interview. All recruiters or project managers want to know the previous professional experiences of a candidate, in order to identify the similarities between past projects and the proposed offer. It is also an opportunity to learn about the reality on the ground, by collecting examples of situations where candidates have proven themselves. How will they rely on their background to meet your challenges?

As freelancers position themselves as experts in their field, they have the advantage of being quickly operational on a project. So make sure that there is no need for a strong increase in skills, on the expertise required for your needs or even your sector of activity. Your objective is to save time with a talent that is already autonomous.

What is the balance of your previous missions?

Unlike the first question, asking about the successes and failures of candidates has the advantage of offering you several clarifications about your own needs:

• take stock of the results obtained, in order to challenge your own indicators of success on the project;
• understand the means put in place, in order to offer you a clear vision of their ability to adapt and their degree of investment on a project;
• draw a more accurate portrait of their personality, in order to measure the degree of connection between candidates and your values, as well as your corporate culture
• gather their impressions of their former customers, in order to understand the impact they may have had on other structures.

This can already give you a good overview of what you can expect, in terms of the results at the end of the mission.

What are your favorite tools and ways of working?

In order to better analyze their expertise, you can also ask freelance candidates more closely about their working methods and/or the tools they master. The mission to be filled may require technical expertise (e.g. Azure) or knowledge of a particular methodology (e.g.: Agile). You will need to identify how familiar they are with your own working methods. Again, this facilitates the development of skills but you will also capitalize on their expertise to challenge your own operations.

Calling on external talent allows, among other things, to benefit from their neutrality and their knowledge of market practices to integrate more innovation within your company. The interview is therefore the ideal time to compare your methods with the realities of the field.

Project yourself into collaboration

What are your motivations for the mission?

If the freelance candidate has agreed to hold the interview, you will nevertheless have to make sure that his motivations match your expectations. Whether you plan to continue this collaboration over several months or to use this same expertise again in the long term, it is better to choose an expert who inspires you trust, and vice versa. To vary from the question mentioned above, you can ask them:

• What is your dream mission?
• What are the aspects that will make you choose this mission over another?
• What are your expectations about the mission?
• what are your doubts?

These questions also have the advantage of ensuring that the challenges of the mission are sufficiently clear, and if this is not the case, of explaining certain points. But it can also tell you about their ability to get out of their comfort zone. Without this capacity to question, the mission may not be sufficiently challenged. The role of the consultant is to make the company grow, whether it is a question of gaining competitiveness, integrating more innovation or participating more directly in commercial growth. It is therefore in the interests of freelancers and businesses to challenge each other.

How do you visualize our collaboration?

Beyond ensuring that these independent talents are actually interested in your offer, the interview is a timely exchange to establish a connivance on your respective expectations. The challenge is therefore to create a connection where you will agree on what each party plans for collaboration. How do they plan to communicate about the progress during the mission? What are their project monitoring processes? What posture do they generally adopt during an accompaniment?

These additional questions are all points that they will probably have to share with you during the interview. If they project themselves within the mission, they probably already have an action plan in mind to achieve the mission. Ask them what they plan to implement over the next few weeks, for example. The more concretely you enter into their work habits, the better you are sure to be aligned with their intervention during the mission.

What are your needs to carry out the mission?

Last but not the least important question: be transparent about what you can provide them to ensure the execution of the mission. It is a question of answering all their questions, in particular about the resources that will be made available to them, about your current tools and methods, or about your contracting processes.

The absence of an onboarding process is often mentioned by freelancers, although it is a way to ensure their rapid increase in competence on the mission. Likewise, inform them about your payment terms, the internal organization chart, the preferred contacts for the project, etc. The more fully they know your challenges, the more they will be able to intervene effectively in the company.

Interviewing freelance candidates is an opportunity to better know their expertise and project yourself with the profile that best fits your expectations. This exchange provides the basis for a successful future collaboration, based on an open and transparent exchange. But if you want a trusted partner to identify the right profiles to save time on your next interviews, send us your needs via this form.