19 reasons why employers need to hire candidates who are early in their gig and freelance careers

There are important short- and long-term benefits for employers to hire students, recent graduates, and others early in their careers for gig and freelance roles. We reached out to 19 hiring experts to get their thoughts:

• Build a Branded Talent Community
• Implement Skill Assessments for Candidates
• Create a Quick Self-Selection Process
• Offer Paid Trial Projects
• Design Task-Based Interviews
• Streamline Application with Targeted Ads
• Engage Through Niche Online Communities
• Emphasize Flexibility and Work-Life Balance
• Develop an Inbound Recruiting Funnel
• Partner with Educational Institutions
• Recalibrate ATS for Skills-Based Hiring
• Pre-Build Role-Specific Talent Pools
• Leverage Social Media and Job Boards
• Collaborate with Online Community Moderators
• Use Performance-Based Micro-Internship Platforms
• Establish Campus-to-Gig Pipelines
• Launch Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
• Create Authentic Content on Social Platforms
• Show Up Where Early Talent Spends Time

Build a Branded Talent Community

When employers set out to hire dozens or even hundreds of early-career professionals into gig or freelance roles, the challenge isn’t just about volume — it’s about connection, speed, and sustainability. Traditional job postings and cold outreach tactics often fail in this context because they lack personalization, efficiency, and long-term engagement. The one recruiting strategy I strongly recommend for this scenario is to build a branded, scalable talent community designed specifically for early-career freelance talent.

Most gig-based hiring strategies focus too heavily on the transaction — post a job, receive applications, onboard the hire, move on. But when you’re dealing with high volumes of early-career freelancers, that method becomes resource-heavy, inconsistent, and inefficient.

What companies often overlook is the power of community in attracting and retaining freelance talent. A branded talent community turns your hiring model from reactive to proactive. Instead of reaching out every time there’s a new need, employers should be nurturing an always-on space where early-career professionals can stay in the loop — whether or not there’s an active opening. This space might be a digital platform, a standalone website, or a dedicated social group, but the critical ingredient is consistent value. Sharing gig opportunities is only one part of it.

Additionally, engagement in this kind of community isn’t one-sided. Candidates get to know the company just as much as the company gets to know them. Over time, a sense of mutual familiarity and trust builds up, making it far easier to match the right candidate with the right opportunity when the time comes. Think of it less as a hiring sprint and more as a growing pipeline that supports both parties — offering flexibility for the company and career growth for the freelancer.

For employers looking to recruit large numbers of early-career freelancers or gig workers, the goal shouldn’t be to fill every open spot individually. It should be to create a living, breathing community where talent finds its place naturally over time. A branded talent community gives you speed without sacrificing quality, offers scalability without diluting your culture, and builds long-term relationships instead of transactional pipelines. By investing in this model, you position your company not just as a client looking for help — but as a career-launching platform that freelancers are excited to return to.

Miriam Groom, CEO, Mindful Career Inc., Mindful Career Counselling

Implement Skill Assessments for Candidates

Here’s one strategy I’ve seen consistently work for companies hiring freelancers (including my own): Use skill assessments.

When hiring several early-career freelancers or gig workers, you’ll be flooded with applicants. The majority of aspiring freelancers are only looking for quick ways to earn. That means you’ll attract a mix of motivated learners and people who do not have the right skills for your work.

I recommend sending candidates a short, relevant skill test. This helps you:

1. Identify true capability, not just confidence

2. Save time on interviews that go nowhere

3. Build a higher-quality, more reliable freelance team

You don’t need to over-engineer it. A simple one-hour task that mimics the actual work often tells you everything you need to know. It’s one of the fastest ways to separate great fits from hopeful clicks.

Stephen Greet, CEO & Co-Founder, BeamJobs

Create a Quick Self-Selection Process

If you’re trying to hire 200+ early-career freelancers quickly, skip the resume pile. Instead, build a two-minute self-selection process. You want to know who is ready, not who looks good on paper. I recommend using a short video challenge or timed task that simulates the actual gig. Make it mobile-first. You’ll weed out unqualified applicants before you even speak to them, and those who finish are already halfway trained.

Early-career workers respond to frictionless processes. They dislike paperwork, long forms, and vague job descriptions. If your pitch looks like a tax form, you’ve already lost them. So keep it visual, set clear expectations, and respond quickly. If it takes you more than 48 hours to reply, someone else has likely already hired them.

Guillermo Triana, Founder and CEO, PEO-Marketplace.com

Offer Paid Trial Projects

We use short, paid projects to evaluate and hire early-career freelancers. These tasks typically take 10-40 hours and reflect the real work we assign on client projects.

Instead of lengthy interviews or resumes, we offer a clear brief, a deadline, and a point of contact. This approach gives candidates a genuine opportunity to demonstrate how they work, not just how they write about it.

To find talent, we connect directly with online student communities, Discord groups, and bootcamp forums. We don’t wait for applications — we go where motivated candidates already are.

This approach helps in three ways:

1. We see actual output before offering long-term work.

2. Candidates gain experience and get paid fairly.

3. It builds a talent pool we can tap into again when needed.

Most early-career hiring breaks down because companies add too many steps. We keep it simple, paid, and real. That’s what gets results.

Vikrant Bhalodia, Head of Marketing & People Ops, WeblineIndia

Design Task-Based Interviews

Offer a 15-minute small task to test out candidates rather than collect resumes.

If you’re looking to hire dozens of early candidates for a freelance role, instead of wasting time collecting and looking through resumes or even undergoing interviews that will consume a large amount of time and might not be beneficial, it is much smarter, efficient, and less time-consuming to offer a task-based interview instead. This will allow you to immediately highlight who has the necessary skills to perform the tasks for your project and instantly hire them to get started as their skills show they can handle the job. It doesn’t really matter what their background or experience is as long as they can perform the task needed. By offering a task that is similar to real-life needed tasks for the actual job, it will help you weed through the applications and easily find dozens or hundreds of eligible candidates quickly.

Ari Bleemer, Co-Founder & CEO, OneCrew

Streamline Application with Targeted Ads

Treat your recruitment funnel like a customer acquisition funnel. While you may be technically “hiring,” you are presenting an opportunity. Our company built a lightweight landing page that articulated the role, pay, schedule flexibility, and what a day in the life looks like. We then ran targeted LinkedIn and Instagram ads tailored to early-career talent. These ads were incredibly short, punchy, and authentic. We also created a one-minute, easy application form. The key is articulating how easy and relatable the role is and making it dead simple to apply for it. Companies tend to overcomplicate early-career recruiting. However, if you speak candidates’ language and reduce friction, high-volume hiring becomes scalable and quick.

We also created short, attention-grabbing LinkedIn ads for students, bootcamp graduates, and followers of relevant hashtags.

One thing that has been surprisingly effective for us on LinkedIn is the opportunity to show, not just tell, what the role looks like. We crafted short posts with screenshots of actual work outputs (with permission), a snapshot of what someone made that week, or a quick rundown of the tools used. No branding, no hard sell — just small, honest peeks into what the job entails. That sort of transparency is particularly appealing to early-career talent who are often unsure about what freelance work entails.

Gianluca Ferruggia, General Manager, DesignRush

Engage Through Niche Online Communities

Use communities. When we were hiring freelance developers, we used Exercism. Niche communities contain impressive talent. Even better, you can review their work and contributions. Based on their history, you can easily gauge their real-world thinking and how they respond to feedback.

During the hiring period, we dropped weekly challenges into GitHub threads. The challenges were tied to the skills we needed, such as fixing a bug in a script and generating test data. Candidates opted in, submitted code, and earned freelance gigs based on their work.

There is no worry about who is faking a portfolio or overselling their skills when you hire through a community. You see how they think and how they work, aspects that no resume or interview will show. Besides, only genuinely interested freelancers will engage. Therefore, you get rid of fluff applications.

Jay Speakman, Chief Technical Officer, CustomWritings.com

Emphasize Flexibility and Work-Life Balance

Flexibility and work-life balance are two of the most important features for any job hoping to attract early-career talent. The best part about gig or freelance roles is that candidates can perform them on their own schedule, without a micromanager lording over their every waking moment. Emphasize the freedom and lifestyle benefits that candidates can expect with your freelance or gig roles – and maybe even consider promoting “work while traveling” as a fringe benefit if it’s possible for the role.

Colin McIntosh, Founder, Sheets AI Resume Builder

Develop an Inbound Recruiting Funnel

A large recruiting strategy that I highly recommend is building a dedicated inbound funnel that speaks directly to early career talent looking for flexibility, autonomy, and skill growth. This is especially important for gig and freelancer roles, which are quite common in the SaaS world.

We have seen really good success by creating content and job descriptions that clearly outline the real benefits of these roles — commission potential, schedule control, sales training — while setting transparent expectations. Rather than relying solely on outbound recruiting, we use SEO, social content, and targeted ads to drive traffic from platforms where this talent already spends time.

The real key, to me, is speed and responsiveness. When someone raises their hand, you have to engage fast and personally, ideally within minutes. We’ve used our own platform to create automated but human-feeling email + call workflows that keep candidates warm, informed, and excited.

Chris Sorensen, CEO, PhoneBurner

Partner with Educational Institutions

One recruiting strategy I strongly recommend for hiring dozens or even hundreds of early-career gig and freelance professionals is to build a curated talent funnel through strategic partnerships with coding bootcamps, QA training institutes, and university programs.

We’ve seen tremendous success by aligning ourselves with upskilling platforms and educational partners that already nurture motivated, technically trained talent. Rather than starting from scratch or relying solely on job boards, we work with these institutions to pre-screen candidates, conduct assessment-based trials, and create a dynamic bench of ready-to-engage testers. It saves us onboarding time, and more importantly, we get access to talent that’s both hungry and quality-oriented.

Another important layer is building a scalable digital infrastructure that supports freelancers from onboarding to training to quality management. We use lightweight tools that let us deploy assignments, track KPIs, and offer micro-feedback loops. It keeps the workforce agile without losing control over standards.

When your model is remote-first and automation-driven, the way you recruit has to reflect that same speed and precision. It’s not just about hiring fast; it’s about hiring people who can deliver value from day one in a plug-and-play ecosystem.

Shishir Dubey, Founder & CEO, Chrome QA Lab

Recalibrate ATS for Skills-Based Hiring

Rethink your approach with skills-based hiring and begin with recalibrating your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Ditch the obsession with degrees and focus on what matters: real skills like coding in Python or adaptability, which 80% of employers value in gig workers. 

Stop letting your ATS reject talent — 88% of qualified candidates get filtered out by outdated settings. Instead, set it to spot affirmative signs like project experience or certifications, using AI to score resumes for actual ability, not just credentials. 

Post jobs where Gen Z hangs out — 68% are on LinkedIn, 51% on Indeed — and make the process mobile-friendly, since 69% expect quick, easy applications. 

Keep tweaking your ATS with feedback from top hires to catch what it misses. Use blind hiring to cut bias and test your setup to ensure it sees what candidates see. 

This isn’t just faster hiring; it’s smarter. Use this approach and you’ll be able to quickly build a diverse, capable team that fits gig work perfectly, and it’ll make you the go-to employer for young talent too!

Andrei Kurtuy, Co-Founder & CMO, Novorésumé

Pre-Build Role-Specific Talent Pools

If you’re scaling gig or freelance hiring, one strategy I recommend is building role-specific talent pools before you need them, not when you’re already short-staffed.

We’ve done this by creating niche landing pages or opt-in forms for each skill set (writers, designers, outreach specialists, etc.), paired with short asynchronous challenges or portfolio prompts. This helps us pre-vet for quality and intent, not just availability.

What makes it work is the ongoing nurturing: a light-touch email sequence that keeps potential hires warm — project updates, success stories, reminders that we’re growing. So when the workload spikes, we already have 50-100 semi-warm, pre-filtered candidates to tap into.

Gig hiring is about speed and trust. This method gives you both without sacrificing quality.

Rameez Usmani, Founder & Director of Link Building, HARO Services

Leverage Social Media and Job Boards

A highly effective strategy for hiring dozens or even hundreds of early-career candidates into gig or freelance roles is to leverage social media platforms and job-specific communities like LinkedIn, Twitter, and niche job boards such as College Recruiter We Work Remotely or AngelList. These platforms give you access to large, highly engaged audiences of early-career professionals. Create targeted content that emphasizes the flexibility, autonomy, and growth opportunities within gig and freelance roles.

Additionally, incorporating skills-based challenges or small projects as part of your hiring process can help you assess a candidate’s capabilities and motivation right away. This approach not only identifies top talent but also ensures candidates are genuinely interested in the work rather than just seeking any job.

You can also partner with career-focused online communities or boot camps that cater specifically to early-career professionals. These partnerships provide direct access to a pre-vetted talent pool, streamlining the hiring process. By combining social media outreach, project-based assessments, and community partnerships, you can scale your recruiting efforts efficiently while ensuring you attract highly motivated candidates.

Kristiyan Yankov, Growth Marketer, Co-Founder, AboveApex

Collaborate with Online Community Moderators

I once had to recruit over 100 freelance writers for a fast-scaling content project, and what worked best wasn’t job boards; it was partnerships with niche online communities. I reached out to moderators of a few targeted subreddits and Discord groups, offering value-first posts and clear freelance opportunities. Within a week, we had over 250 qualified applicants and built a bench we could pull from for months.

The key was meeting early-career freelancers where they already hang out, rather than expecting them to find us. It also helped us find people genuinely interested in the work, not just applying blindly. 

My advice is: don’t overlook community-driven spaces; they build trust fast and bring in people who are already engaged with your niche.

Jack Johnson, Director, Rhino Rank

Use Performance-Based Micro-Internship Platforms

I suggest using performance-based micro-internship platforms with targeted advertising to recruit many early-career gig workers and freelancers.

We’ve noticed that real-time data and smart advertising can improve targeting and return on investment. These ideas also work for recruiting. Use ad networks and social media to show specific job ads to early-career individuals based on their online activities, preferences, and education. Combine this with micro-internship platforms such as Parker Dewey or Forage, where people can complete short, paid projects as a tryout. This transforms recruiting into an efficient method for finding quality talent.

This plan increases the number of people you reach and engages them effectively. It also aligns with how Gen Z prefers to find jobs: flexible, online, and without requiring immediate long-term commitment. You can grow your talent pool without sacrificing quality.

Hiren Shah, Owner, Anstrex

Establish Campus-to-Gig Pipelines

One recruiting strategy I recommend to employers who want to hire dozens or even hundreds of early-career candidates into gig and freelance roles is to build a structured campus-to-gig pipeline through partnerships with colleges, coding bootcamps, and vocational institutes.

Here’s why it works: early-career candidates are actively looking for flexible, skill-building opportunities, and many educational institutions are eager to provide their students with real-world experience. By creating a repeatable onboarding process that starts with virtual workshops or project-based internships, you can quickly identify high-potential talent, train them in the basics of your platform or project style, and transition them into freelance roles.

What makes this strategy scalable is automation — use ATS systems with freelancer tagging, integrate skill assessments early in the funnel, and keep communication clear with onboarding playbooks and gig templates. Also, build a community around these freelancers to encourage knowledge-sharing and long-term retention.

It’s not just about hiring quickly — it’s about hiring smart and building a brand that early-career professionals want to grow with.

Sanjay Prajapat, Tech Content Writer, igmGuru

Launch Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns

I work for a company that develops software and mobile applications. Our company has a hybrid and remote work format for freelancers and project workers to choose from.

If you want to hire dozens or hundreds of employees for gig and freelance roles, you need to ensure that candidates see you. In this case, I recommend approaching the search for new employees from the perspective of a marketing sales funnel. Launch campaigns where you think potential candidates spend their time: on Behance (if you are looking for designers), on social media, post job offers on job search sites, etc. Attach links leading to landing pages with a job description and the opportunity to leave their CV, portfolio, and contact information. Review the applications, and then follow the regular steps: offer to complete a test task, invite them to interviews, and offer a trial period.

Vitalina Husak, CMO, Overcode

Create Authentic Content on Social Platforms

In my opinion, a great recruiting strategy is to show up where early career talent already spends their time, like TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These platforms are full of students and recent graduates looking for flexible, meaningful work. Share short, honest content that gives a real look into the role, highlights stories from current freelancers, and feels relatable and easy to connect with.

Be transparent from start to finish. Let applicants know what to expect, and always follow up, whether they’re moving forward or not. A simple message shows you respect their time and effort. Gen Z values real communication, quick updates, and feeling seen throughout the process.

Grace Allen, Marketing Assistant, Argon Agency

Show Up Where Early Talent Spends Time

Building and maintaining a strong talent community is one of the best ways to recruit gig and freelance workers at scale. It means you always have a pool of candidates who know your brand and the kind of work you offer. You don’t have to spend extra money on advertising.

You can grow your talent community by sending regular updates using social media groups like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as websites or newsletters.  This keeps potential candidates interested and ready to work with you. It pays dividends because, when new work comes up, you can reach qualified leads who are familiar with your brand.

It saves time in recruitment, enhances the qualification of the candidate, and builds your employer brand among the freelance population.

Tamsin Gable, Ambassador, Comfax