Tag Archives: freelance recruitment

Working for overseas clients

It’s twenty years since I first came up with the idea of setting up a small copywriting agency. I was working as a property journalist on a local weekly, while my then-boss attempted to find freelance contributors to augment my own daily output. He consistently chose people within a twenty-mile radius of our office in Glasgow, and they were consistently poor. Before long, inspiration struck – I could be the dependable, high-calibre local freelance writer the market clearly needed.

Two years later, I founded G75 Media, naming it after the suburb of East Kilbride where I was living at the time to emphasise our Lanarkshire origins. I chose an accountant in Helensburgh, hired a Renfrewshire-based web design company to build the first-generation G75 Media website, and imagined being a local writer for local people across Lanarkshire – or maybe Glasgow if I was feeling adventurous.

A local business with a global profile

As it transpired, Lanarkshire did not embrace the new copywriting agency at its heart, and Glasgow didn’t rush to engage my services, either. Instead, I worked with companies in Edinburgh and across England, before recruiting my first foreign client in 2015. Since then, I’ve been taken on by overseas clients in the Netherlands, Singapore, Ireland, Australia and America – where a third of today’s G75 Media client roster is headquartered.

Working for overseas clients can be rewarding and inspiring, introducing you to new cultures and offering the prestige of being chosen ahead of that nation’s indigenous freelancers. However, it requires some lateral thinking, a relaxed approach to working hours and an exhaustive knowledge of linguistic idioms in foreign countries. For any freelancers considering the merits of seeking international custom, these are some of the key things to be aware of…

  • 1. Time zones

If you believe work should end at 5pm GMT (or BST), working for overseas clients is not for you. By that time, it’s lunchtime on America’s east coast and Californians are only just firing up their MacBooks. I have emails arriving throughout the evening from my Stateside clients, which I feel obligated to respond to, so they don’t have to wait until the following day to get a reply.

Conversely, Singapore is seven hours ahead of the UK, so if a client emailed me during their working day, it’d be in my inbox as soon as I started work. I’d then feel duty bound to respond straight away to avoid making them wait overnight for a reply. You have to be on constant inbox alert when working for overseas clients, as well as being willing to hold video calls at relatively unsociable hours.

  • 2. Languages

Having grown up in Scotland, I know what words like dreich, scunnered and bampot mean. Having not grown up in Australia, I don’t know their equivalents. Yet working for overseas clients means learning each nation’s slang, syntax and jargon. I write for an American car website every week, where I have to incorporate their nouns, measurement systems and cultural references.

As a freelancer, you’re unlikely to need to know the distinctions between the Portuguese language and its Brazilian counterpart, but an awareness that they’re not the same is beneficial – as is knowing that Brazil speaks Portuguese while the rest of South America uses Spanish. Why? To do with history and empire, which is a whole other kettle of fish from contested waters.

  • 3. Etiquette

I mentioned cultural references in the last section, but working for overseas clients involves far more than respecting their language and not mentioning Gibraltar. It means acknowledging local customs and religious practices/holidays/traditions, right down to adjusting stock email introductions to reflect indigenous habits. It could even mean working over Christmas but not during Eid-al-Fitr.

Cultural awareness of target markets might involve knowing that Americans call football soccer, Israeli clients won’t respond to you on a Saturday or that Chinese customers regard red as a lucky colour. As with language, there’s no need to scour encyclopaedias about the markets you’re potentially operating in, but you do need to know a few basics to avoid any unnecessary faux pas.

  • 4. Billing

When the work is done, and it’s time to request payment, invoicing foreign clients can be fraught. Some will want to pay using platforms like Wise, Stripe or PayPal, which all incur fees and may have varying levels of compatibility with your existing website/bank/accounting software. Before agreeing to work with a foreign company, ensure you’re amenable to its stipulated payment terms.

Many businesses pay via international bank transfer, so put your IBAN number on your default invoice template. Foreign firms might need more information to process payments to overseas contractors. Also, debt recovery becomes exponentially more difficult internationally, with a higher risk of bad debts being incurred, so undertake due diligence before working for overseas clients…

A decade of international copywriting excellence

This article has been written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of G75 Media’s first foreign foray, to advise and support other entrepreneurs and freelancers who are thinking about working for overseas clients. However, if you’re looking for a UK-based writer to undertake English-language content production or journalism, you’re in the right place. Contact us for more information on how G75 Media can bring the world to your website, app or business.

The benefits of employing a freelancer

It’s not been a good year for the UK’s employers. In truth, it’s not been a good decade. The 2020s will be remembered for many things, none of which have helped the private sector. From multiple state-mandated lockdowns (and the subsequent growth in online shopping at the expense of our high streets) through to Rachel Reeves’ misguided assault on employers through increased NI contributions and minimum wage increases, it’s been an abysmal decade for companies across the country.

Managers and directors could be forgiven for despairing at the hostile climate they find themselves attempting to navigate. Yet necessity is the mother of invention, and there is still one way to ensure major projects or elevated workloads are effectively managed without long-term costs or consequences. It involves employing a freelancer instead of a salaried employee, which brings a wealth of advantages – and very few of the drawbacks listed below…

Workers of the world unite

Salaried employees are, and will always be, the lifeblood of most businesses around the world. Yet the regulatory and financial obstacles facing companies wishing to recruit new workers have never been more challenging:

  1. From April this year, employers have to pay National Insurance at 15 per cent from a far lower threshold than was previously the case.
  2. The minimum wage has gone up by almost £4 in the last five years and now stands at £12.21 per hour.
  3. From autumn next year, employees will receive day one rights to sick pay and paid leave, while sacking incompetent staff will be much harder due to revised unfair dismissal rules.
  4. The Employment Rights Bill will reduce the viability of zero hours contracts by implementing anti-avoidance measures.
  5. Agency workers will also be affected by this, since they’ll be entitled to a contract reflecting regular working hours and greater notice rights.

In tandem with all the existing costs and legal obligations involved in employing someone, it’s easy to see why there has been a dramatic slump in recruitment in recent months, as employer confidence hits lows not seen since the depths of the pandemic. Yet this doesn’t have to preclude all forms of recruitment. Indeed, employing a freelancer on a contract basis negates all the bullet points listed above, while enabling a fixed price to be agreed at the outset in exchange for a particular piece of work being completed. Freelancers tend to be flexible about pay structures – per hour, per day, per word or per project – and the prospect of repeat business provides all the incentive they need to deliver high-quality work on time and on budget.

It’s what we do best

At G75 Media, we’ve spent almost twenty years helping businesses of all sizes with content production, freelance copywriting, ad hoc journalism and wider marketing support. We’ve worked on one-off projects for sports clubs on the same day as ongoing blog production for price comparison websites. We’ve produced scientific magazine articles, white label reports, customer newsletters and sales literature, usually at fixed prices agreed in advance. While many companies are ramping up the rates and fees they charge their customers, we’ve done our best to avoid price rises, giving existing and prospective clients alike a sense of receiving value for money.

The benefits of employing a freelancer run deeper than monetary advantages, however. Choosing to work with G75 Media unlocks access to huge reserves of industry-specific knowledge, which a newly recruited employee couldn’t be expected to match. We have contacts lists to make even industry veterans jealous, allied to the inherent efficiency which comes from almost 20 years of always meeting deadlines – and never losing focus of what our clients expect.

Above all, G75 Media can generate outstanding written content for any scenario, brief, requirement or project. We can tailor and adapt our work to meet the evolving requirements of companies as they grow, diversify and compete in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace. Yet we can also produce quickfire content at short notice to meet onerous deadlines, without lowering our quality of output. As such, employing a freelancer can represent the ideal outcome – we’re there whenever you need us, without incurring any costs or responsibilities at other times. Get in touch with us for more information on G75 Media’s content production pricing, copywriting services and turnaround times.

How to make freelance applications stand out   

Freelancers and creatives work in a constant state of volatility. You’re only ever one phone call or email away from gaining a new project – or losing an established client. I lost five clients last year to a combination of Google algorithm changes, cancelled projects and financial hardship. As a result, I found myself submitting more freelance applications than I had done in previous years.

For anyone used to working in the public sector, or a steady salaried role, the cut-throat freelance industry can be truly shocking. Almost every copywriting, editing, proofreading or communications role advertised on LinkedIn will have over 100 applications within days – sometimes hours – of going live. Employers no longer have the resources to reply to the hordes of people applying for every role they advertise. When I undertook recruitment for G75 Media, I received hundreds of freelance applications every time, yet most of them were purely speculative. Many candidates exhibited poor knowledge of the English language, lacked relevant experience or simply hadn’t read the job description.

With this in mind, and to help people who are still at a formative stage of their freelancing career, I’ve compiled five recommendations on how to make freelance applications stand out.

Tip #1: Research and incorporate keywords into your freelance applications.

Swamped by a tidal wave of (often unrealistic) enquiries, employers and recruitment agencies are increasingly resorting to algorithms to weed out opportunists. Applicant Tracking Systems scan covering letters and CVs for keywords and phrases, sifting out weaker applicants; in the public sector, sifting is often a key stage of the recruitment process. You need to tailor a covering letter to each vacancy, studying the job description and crafting a response which touches on as many themes as possible. Without this crucial step, your application may never be seen by a human.

Tip #2: Give your CV some love.

Back in the 1990s, my CV contained Clipart. Hey, it was a different time. Today, my CV has been endlessly fettled and revised, focusing on soft skills and achievements rather than dates and qualifications. Your CV may also benefit from revision if any of the following apply: it’s over two pages long, it contains your school qualifications, there are unexplained gaps in your employment history, it lists references (these are usually requested later in the recruitment process), or it starts with a word-salad introduction full of meaningless buzzwords. Or it features Clipart.

Tip #3: Ensure your social media accounts aren’t contradictory.

If you’re looking to diversify into non-executive roles, does your LinkedIn profile still suggest you’re a photographer first and foremost? If you claim to be empathic and considerate, have you recently gone on social media rants about Audi drivers, politicians, Just Stop Oil or other enemies of the state? If you puff yourself up as a talented editor with a forensic eye for detail, did you drunkenly update your status in a message containing typos, and inappropriate use of the Oxford comma? Employers and agencies won’t be shy about studying your socials, especially if you link to them in freelance applications. Look through each registered account and ask yourself what a stranger might deduce from these snapshots. If the conclusions aren’t flattering, start deleting.

Tip #4: Don’t be overly ambitious.

Employers usually have a certain calibre or type of candidate in mind, and it’s rare that someone changes their mind. Few job offers start with the phrase “you weren’t what we were initially looking for, but…”If you’re starting out as a freelancer, you’re incredibly unlikely to get a commission from a Royal Academy or a national newspaper until you have a portfolio of quality work. Bogging down the recruitment process with speculative freelance applications wastes your time and theirs. Some recruiters have long memories, so you might be damaging your career prospects further down the line.

Tip #5: Explain why this job appeals to you.

People want to earn money – that goes without saying. What does need to be said – and emphasised throughout freelance applications – is why each role caught your eye. Expressing passion and enthusiasm for a vacancy could elevate you above more highly qualified applicants with a less committed attitude. Perhaps you’ve volunteered in this industry, or the job contains elements you feel strongly about. Nobody will know if you don’t explain these points, but don’t get immersed in granular detail; one sentence per point should be enough to convey your commitment.

Taste the difference

If you’re an employer reading this and wondering why it’s so difficult to find high calibre writers and editors whenever you publish freelance applications, get in touch with G75 Media to discover the difference a quality copywriting agency and content production can make to your own organisation.