How Tech Firms are Becoming More Diverse by Changing the Way They Recruit

Recently I wrote about the gender imbalance in the tech industry, and made some practical suggestions as to what we can all do to change that. One of the areas I covered was recruitment: if you're an employer, it's important to review your recruitment and employment practices to ensure you're not just attracting the same kind of people all the time.

Many tech employers, from giants to startups, are determined to make their companies more reflective of their customer and user base, and are changing the way they attract applicants and the recruitment processes those applicants have to go through.

This isn't about positive action: I'm not talking about introducing quotas or lowering standards in order to become more diverse. Instead, it's about recognising that by even indirectly discouraging underrepresented sections of the community from working for them, employers are missing out on a huge talent pool. 

More companies are complaining of a skills shortage as the demand for talented workers in the tech industry continues growing. These firms know they have access to a bigger talent pool if they ensure their recruitment practices aren't biased in any way.

Companies also know that there are business benefits by being more diverse: if your employees are customer facing, it helps if they're as representative of the customers as possible. A McKinsey study found that more diverse companies tend to be higher performing. Apple products, for example, aren't used exclusively by young white men: but most Apple store staff are young white men, and Apple wants to change that because they know it helps them to attract a broader customer base.

In this article I'll outline some of the steps employers are taking to increase the diversity of their employees, and I won't limit this analysis to gender diversity: a commitment to diversity is about something much broader than that, and isn't just about putting people into groups either. It can also be about recruiting people with a different mindset from existing employees, people who don't fit the company mould: something which many employers know can help them be more innovative and keep up with change.

I'm going to look at:

• Job titles: how employers are recognising that the name you give a job can affect who applies for it.
• Adverts: taking care in how they're worded.
• The recruitment process: making it as accessible as possible and ensuring it uses objective measures.
• Company culture: reducing the emphasis on cultural fit when recruiting and ensuring your culture doesn't exclude people.
• Location and hours: adopting more flexible practices to attract people with disabilities, caring commitments or who don't work in a location with lots of tech firms.
• Public perception: recognising that advertising, marketing and stores will influence people's perception of a company as a place to work.
• Outreach: how employers are reaching out to communities and encouraging young people to consider them as a future employer.

Ensuring Job Titles Apply to Everyone

For most people working in tech, their job title is something they don't give much thought to: some companies use very generic ones, others (especially the public sector in the UK) use odd ones that mean very little, and yet other employers, especially startups, do without them altogether.

But when you're placing a recruitment advert, a job titles will give potential applicants a quick idea of what the job involves and whether they'd be qualified to apply. Many people read no further than the job title.

Buffer discovered that by including the word 'hacker' in many of their job titles, they were putting women off applying for those jobs: only 2% of applicants were women. So they started an internal dialogue of how they might change their job titles. As they explain on their blog:

Through lots of discussion, we generally agreed that engineer sounded neutral, and developer sounded the friendliest, clearest and most inclusive of all.

So the word 'hacker' was replaced by the word 'developer' in their job titles. While their development team remains their least diverse team according to their diversity dashboard, it does now include 10% women, which is significant progress from 2% of applicants.

Buffer's diversity dashboard makes its progress on diversity public

Job Adverts

There's evidence that most tech job recruitment ads tend to include language that people perceive as masculine. This results in a subliminal message that can discourage women from applying. However the same research shows that if you use more inclusive, feminine language, it doesn't put men off applying: they'll still apply in the same numbers. What will happen is that more women will apply: some simple math tells you that this gives you more candidates and a broader recruitment pool, which can be no bad thing. 

Unitive is a startup founded to help tech firms adopt recruitment practices to enhance their diversity, including reviewing the language used in job adverts. It focuses on removing unconscious bias in all aspects of the recruitment process, including the words used in adverts. In an interview with CCN its founder Laura Mather said that many job adverts "project a 'brogrammer' culture".

Their software identifies words with male bias in job adverts so that recruiters can change the language to be more inclusive. So an advert requiring a 'driven, go-getting' individual, for example, could be edited to use words like 'excellent' and 'dedicated'.

Unitive was founded to help tech firms become more diverse.

Again this doesn't mean lowering standards or not seeking applicants with the skills you need: it just means using words that still describe what's required but in a way which won't exclude women.

The Recruitment Process

If you're applying for a job in a tech firm, you'll find that there's quite a range of recruitment procedures. This ranges from the traditional face-to-face interview to remote project-based assessment and everything in between.

Tech firms, especially startups, tend to be more innovative than other industries when it comes to recruitment practices. It's more common for recruitment to be conducted entirely remotely, as so many firms have dispersed teams. For example at Automattic the recruitment process is all done remotely using text: you won't be expected to have a Skype call at 3 AM with someone the other side of the world. That's not a bad thing, as I don't imagine any of us would perform at our best in those circumstances! Buffer employ a recruitment process that includes a 'boot camp': a trial period where you work on a specific project. Both firms base hiring decisions on seeing your work instead of the more traditional method of asking you to sell yourself to them.

British hosting company Bytemark Hosting has adopted an even more radical approach: it makes its recruitment anonymous to reduce bias. On their website they say:

Have you ever thought your chances of being hired were affected by something ... other than your ability to do the job? Hiring biases are real and they are ugly. We don't even trust ourselves to avoid them.

Bytemark has an innovative way of reducing bias in recruitment.

This level of honesty led them to change their recruitment process in early 2015, replacing phone calls or face to face chats in the early stages of their recruitment process with anonymous text-based interviews using online chat. If you pass this stage you'll complete an online challenge designed to let you showcase your skills: again this removes bias. It's only at the final stage of interviews that you'll actually meet someone from Bytemark.

I spent 15 years working in Human Resources and this runs counter to the perception of so many hiring managers that they just 'know' when they've met the right candidate. An attitude like this leads to companies recruiting in their own image: hiring managers will recruit people they 'click' with, who it's not unreasonable to assume will probably be like them in terms of gender, race, sexuality and disability status, not to mention personality. In my experiences hiring managers relying on intuitive decisions like this made a lot of mistakes they later come to regret!

Company Culture

It's common for tech firms to require new employees to fit in with the existing culture: Google even goes so far as to state that one of the traits it looks for is 'Googleyness'.

But there's evidence that companies who repeatedly recruit people in the same mould struggle to become more diverse and might even suffer in other ways, as they fail to attract people with new ideas and ways of thinking.

In an article in Forbes, Micha Solomon outlines the disadvantages of recruiting to a 'mould':

Whatever particular culture fit strategy you pursue, to succeed you need to make room for diverse backgrounds, interests, work and learning styles, and need for work/life balance rather than endless happy hours with the boss and the “team.”

For many hiring managers, identifying people who fit with the firm's culture actually becomes identifying people who they get along with during the interview.

Being successful in a firm and in a job doesn't mean being best friends with the boss or even your colleagues. And companies who consistently hire people 'like them' risk getting sucked into a comfort zone that can impact on their ability to react to change, and can become less diverse.

So companies like Bytemark who are working to become more diverse have dropped any requirement for a cultural fit. On the Bytemark careers site, they say:

There's no "cultural fit" requirement. If you have a skill we like and you can learn and work with a team, you'll get on fine here. You'll be our company culture, and we welcome your contribution.

However this is unusual. I struggled to find examples of firms that don't include cultural fit anywhere in their recruitment process, which is why it's so important that those companies ensure their culture is one that's diverse and open to new ideas and people.

So what are tech firms doing to ensure that their company culture doesn't exclude people?

Microsoft are working to ensure that their company culture embraces diversity:

Microsoft recognizes that diversity gains will not be sustained unless the work environment promotes behaviors that encourage new ways of problem-solving and rewards diversity of thought. We foster a culture of inclusive behaviors.

They've adopted measures such as providing training in diversity and culture to leaders and other staff, setting up programmes specifically aimed at encouraging women and ethnic monitories to advance within the firm, and offering flexible work arrangements. They also publish their diversity figures.

The attitudes and openness of high-profile senior staff will have an impact too. The fact that Tim Cook came out as gay in 2014 is likely to have an impact on how accepted gay people feel in the firm. And Sheryl Sandberg's vocal advocacy of women's empowerment should have an impact on how it feels to be a woman at Facebook.

Flexible Working Practices

Much of the debate around flexible working has traditionally focused on the fit between work and caring responsibilities, both for parents and for those with elderly or unwell relatives. But it goes much further than that. Tech firms, whether established giants or growing startups, are more likely than companies in other industries to have distributed teams and this can have a positive impact on diversity.

Not recruiting from a company's local area can positively impact racial diversity, for example. And allowing (or better, encouraging) staff to work from a location of their choice and adopt flexible hours can help employees with disabilities or mental illness.

Automattic employee Tom Nowell has written candidly about how his employer keeps its workers happy and healthy through being responsive to their needs and not having fixed demands in respect of working hours and location, for example. Automattic runs an internal Slack channel called Bluehackers which lets 'Automatticians' who are struggling support each other, and it focuses on people's health and long-term development rather than how many hours they're working. As Tom says:

I was told they didn’t care how much work I was doing as long as I was learning and happy. 

Tom Nowell's article on how Automattic supports its employees 

Obviously no employer will grow if employees are unable to do much work for prolonged periods, but Automattic knows that by being flexible and providing support, it will retain and attract talented employees like Tom.

The tech industry has more than its fair share of distributed teams: firms like Automattic and Buffer wok with entirely distributed teams and find that this gives them access to a larger talent pool, as well as reducing office costs.

A hosting company that works in a distributed way is Site5: all of its employees work from home and they're based all over the world. As a customer of Site5 I can attest to a major advantage of this: it means that whatever the time of day, there's always someone available. It also means that those people don't have to work antisocial shifts. I've had experiences of working on something with them over many hours and have watched as the location of support staff I'm dealing with moves across the globe with the daylight! It also means that they have a team which is extremely racially diverse, with staff based on every continent except Antarctica.

Site 5 employees are based all over the world

On their careers site, they state:

We want each of our team members to have a healthy balance between work and life...we understand that our team member’s time, their families, and their life outside of work are important.

Public Perception

Before any job applicant sends in their CV, the chances are they've come across the company in some other way. They might be a customer or work for a client or supplier organization (or a competitor). Or they may just have seen the company's advertising material or read its website.

So the way that companies present themselves to the world will have an impact on the people who consider applying for jobs with them, and how diverse that group will be. Companies that look diverse and project a progressive, inclusive image will be more likely to attract a diverse range of job applicants.

Apple knows that anyone applying for a job will already be a customer, and will most likely have visited an apple store (some people spend their lives in them!). Tim Cook says he's committed to “being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing products” and part of that commitment is in making its store staff more diverse:

"We want every person who joins our team, every customer visiting our stores or calling for support to feel welcome."

The apple jobs site showcases diversity.

Apple uses inclusive language on its careers page, highlights its diversity and affirmative action policies and includes images of a diverse range of apple store employees. It makes its commitment to diversity very public. Its diversity figures show that it's doubled the rate of female hires in the last year, but it explicitly recognises that this isn't enough and is continuing to sponsor programmes designed to encourage underrepresented groups to seek careers in tech and with Apple.

Outreach

Outreach is an important way for companies to ensure that people are aware of the company and what it does, both in terms of marketing and recruitment. This is one area in which companies are specifically engaging in outreach with individuals and organizations from underrepresented groups.

The BBC, for example, has outreach programmes around the UK and attends careers fairs and other events with a focus on reaching minority communities which may not traditionally have identified with the broadcaster.

IBM engages in outreach with women's tech groups such as GirlGeeks, sponsoring events and sending female employees along to speak to other women who might be among a future applicant pool. IBM is also registered with Pride in Diversity, which is an Australian not-for-profit employer support program that encourages all aspects of LGBTI workplace inclusion.

Apple has programs like the Thurgood Marshall College Fund which support students in historically black colleges, and works with the National Center for Women & Information Technology to encourage more women to pursue tech careers.

Summary

Tech firms know that our industry could be more diverse, and that by attracting a more diverse pool of job applicants, they have access to more talent and fresh ideas. And many of them are doing something about it. While there's still plenty more to be done, it's encouraging to see so many tech firms large and small tackling this issue head on and reviewing the way they attract, recruit and treat employees.

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Graphic Credit: Globe icon designed by Chris Tucker from the Noun Project.

by Rachel McCollin

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Freelance Rates: Guide to Hourly Versus Project Pricing

Regardless of your field of work, your status as a freelancer working on the web means that you will eventually and inevitably have to face the big fat rates question: How should I charge customers for the work I do? By the hour? By the project? By the package? Based on past projects? At whim?

First things first, you should never charge customers at whim. What you’re running is a business after all, not a whimsical circus.

All other options are game, and which one you choose to use depends entirely on your personality, the way you like to work with your customers, and sometimes your experience in the freelancing world.

Each freelancer's pricing style is as unique as their favorite coffee. “Grande skinny latte with two pumps of caramel syrup and extra froth,” said the girl in front of me in line once, when all I really wanted was a small americano. “No, no milk, thanks… No sugar, either.”

Thankfully, there are five basic types of rates you can use to find the ideal pricing scheme for displaying on your website. Each of the five pricing types comes with its own set of pros and cons and can be customized in a numbered of different ways.

It may all sound confusing at first, but once you understand how each pricing option works, what it implies to the customer about your work, and why it may benefit (or harm) you to adopt it, you’ll be able to concoct your ideal pricing strategy easily and confidently.

Calculating Your Base Freelance Rate

Before we dive deep into pricing schemes, however, you’ll first need to figure out what your base hourly rate should be as a freelancer, regardless of whether you’ll choose to display an hourly pricing model on your website or not. Your hourly basic rate will form the basis for calculating all other pricing approaches. And if you’ve got no idea how to determine your basic rate, you should read this great tutorial that explains how to come up with an estimate.

Once you have your basic fee, we’ll review all the information you need to make an educated decision on how to structure your pricing strategy and how to display that structure on your website for the best possible impact on your customers. 

Before you begin, download our free PDF on Hourly Versus Project Pricing as a quick reference to the key points in this tutorial.

Ready to discover the ideal pricing scheme for your business? Let's review the options.

1. Hourly Freelance Rates

The seemingly most straightforward way to charge clients is through an hourly rate. You figure out what the cost of running your freelance business is, you add on top of that what you’d like to earn after all is said and done, and bam you have an hourly rate. Although there certainly are benefits to this method, as we’re about to see, hourly rates also belie some pitfalls that you need to mind.

Pros of Hourly Rates

1. Display a Low Price on Your Website

Because any way you slice it, $75 an hour looks a lot more appealing to the eye than $600 for a day’s worth of work. Hourly rates is the lowest-looking pricing scheme you can offer a client.

2. Maintain Flexibility for Custom Projects

Hourly rates provide flexibility for those who work in fields that have no standard timeframes for each task. For example, a page of easy, light writing may take a writer 20 minutes to complete, but a page of specialized writing that needs to reference sources and mine data may take a couple of hours to complete. With an hourly rate, you can agree to charge the customer based not on the quantity of the work but on the time it takes you to complete it.

3. Avoid Price and Time Underestimations

The flexibility provided by hourly rates will seem particularly attractive to new freelancers who may not yet know how long each custom project may take them. If you charge an hourly rate, you can give the client an estimate of how many hours the project might take and agree on an additional range to be charged based on the changes the client may request. 

A web designer, for example, may charge five hours worth of work to design a requested page, with the agreement of an additional one to three hours for requested changes. That way you avoid the danger of underestimating how long a project may take and therefore end up underpaying yourself.

Cons of Hourly Rates

1. Your Hourly Rate May Appear High

Your hourly rate as a freelancer will inevitably sound excessively high based on what company employees get paid as an hourly salary. That’s because you have to calculate your business fees in that hourly rate and realize that you’ll never be able to work eight billable hours a day. Remember that your fee must also cover your time spent on administrative tasks, on emails, in meetings, in training, etc.

2. The Client May Start Treating You Like an Employee

When you agree to work on an hourly rate without setting any further parameters around a specific project, the client may start throwing all kinds of tasks your way with varying degrees of urgency. Having such an inflow of work may sound good at first, but the randomness can cost you more than you realize. 

With a client who keeps sending "urgent" requests your way that break up your productive time into bits and pieces, finding new clients with bigger projects and bigger budgets will become more difficult. As a freelancer, you need to have a good grip on your work schedule and try to diversify your clientele and sources of income as much as possible. Otherwise, lost opportunities may end up costing you a lot more than the incoming work.

3. The Client Will Probably Underestimate How Long It Takes to Do Your Work. 

Let’s say you’re a video producer who makes promotional videos for companies, and a client comes to you for a five-minute spot. You explain to him that the spot will take you about three hours to produce, and he throws a fit. “It’s only a five-minute spot! Why would it take you more than half an hour to do?” In the creative fields, in particular, it’s often difficult to account for all time spent on a project or to quantify creative exploration and inspiration. Outsiders may not understand why it takes as long as it does to do your work and an hourly rate may become a source of friction if the client can’t understand why you’re charging the hours that you do.

4. You May End Up Punishing Yourself for Being Good at What You Do

Remember those logic problems we used to do in math class? Two freelancers set their rates at $50 per hour. Freelancer A needs five hours to complete a given task, but freelancer B needs seven hours to complete the same task at a comparable quality. Which of the two freelancers earns more? An important thing to note with hourly rates is that as you get better and more efficient at what you do, you may end up earning less for your expertise rather than more.

2. “Starting At” Freelance Rates

Consider using a “starting at” rate if you like the flexibility that hourly rates provide for custom, creative work that can't be quantified, but you want something a little bit more structured. In order to create a “starting at” rate, you’ll need to organize and list your services into loose packages. For example, three hours of outdoor photography starting at $XXX; five pages of website content starting at $XXX. 

This is an example of an Express Logo Design package from a top freelancer on Envato Studio. The package price is listed with a starting rate of $95. It details a clear set of deliverables for that price point. Customers can readily add additional, related services for additional costs, like Logo Branding Documentation or they can contact the freelancer directly for custom quotes.  

This method of quoting clients eliminates some of the problems of time estimation we’ve encountered with hourly rates, but can also cause some other pain points.

Pros of "Starting At" Rates

1. You Provide the Client With a Baseline Price Right Away

With an hourly quote, the client can feel at a loss as to how much a complete project might cost because he doesn't know (and can't know) how long it takes to create a video or design a logo. A “starting at” price, however, with a basic description of what’s included in the price gives the client a better idea of what a full project might cost, even if it’s just a ballpark figure.

2. You Automatically Set Basic Project Parameters 

When you package your services for a “starting at” price, you simultaneously set parameters and expectations with the client. Notice how each of the examples given above quantifies the work to a specified amount, such as: the hours of photography, five pages of content, or one logo. That way you guard yourself against creeping project scopes that eat up all your precious time.

3. You Maintain Flexibility for Customizations

A “starting at” price lists the cost for the most basic kind of project, and you should clearly outline what that includes on your website. It also implies to the customer, moreover, that further customizations are possible and available for an additional fee.

Cons of "Starting At" Rates

1. The Customer Gets Stuck on the “Starting At” Price

Any price you give the client above the baseline “starting at” fee displayed on your website will probably sound expensive, no matter how fair it may be to the customizations the client requested. It’s part of human psychology to anchor our perception of price on the first number we see, causing us to feel a slight sense of disappointment at any other price that surpasses it.

2. Leaves the Client Feeling Uncertain About What the Final Price May Be

Although “starting at” prices give a clearer idea of pricing than hourly rates, a client who knows he’ll need certain additions has no way of knowing what those additions may cost. And when a client feels uncertain about the financial commitment he's making, he may not even contact you in the first place.

3. The Client May Start Requesting an Itemized Price Lists for Additions

A client who has a certain budget available will naturally try to get the most bang for his buck. But since it’s not clear how much extra bang he can get at what price, you may find yourself in uncomfortable discussions of itemized additions. “How much will it be if I add just one extra color? What if we take this out and add that instead?” It can be very difficult to provide itemized prices for each additional option since the final price may depend on the whole effort of the project rather than its separate parts.

3. Ranging Your Freelance Prices

Can a price range with a hard stop cure the anxiety the client may feel with a “starting at” price that can keep rising forever? In certain ways, yes. But it can also add some other hard stops and limitations on your earning potential which you may not like.

Pros of Freelance Price Ranges

1. Offers the Client a Clear Minimum and Maximum Investment Possibility

With the “starting at” price, a client may feel like you’re trying to lure them in with an unrealistically low price that you’ll later skyrocket based on customizations. But when clients see the full possible range, they know right away whether they can afford your prices and at which level.

2. Remain Flexible to Accommodate Customizations

When you offer a ranging price, the client understands that not all projects are created equal. A ranging price opens up the conversation to find the right project scope that will satisfy both the client’s needs and your payment expectations.

3. Offer Packages With Stepped Price Increases Within That Range

Instead of offering just a baseline scope, with a price range you can create three different packages with a low, intermediate, and high price, to give customers a better idea of what each different customization level might cost. This option usually works well for experienced freelancers who have a good understanding of the time required to finish a project of a particular scope. They can price their stepped packages accordingly without fearing they may be underpricing themselves.

Cons of Freelance Price Ranges

1. The Minimum Price in the Range Creates a Strong Anchor Point

Because a ranging price pits the two extremes side by side, the lower price can act as a strong anchor point to the minds of some clients who'll naturally gravitate towards it. As we talked about in the case of the “starting at” price, the client may feel a certain disappointment when he receives a final quote that exceeds the minimum anchor price.

2. It Caps Your Earning Potential

What if you get a client who asks for a project that includes more material and requires more bells and whistles than you ever thought possible? Or a customer who has a particularly complicated or specialized project that you weren’t anticipating when setting your price range? Suddenly you find yourself stuck at a maximum amount that won't cover your expenses and your effort, or have to face the uncomfortable conversation of explaining to a client why you need to exceed your maximum price. 

Having a ranging quote can be comforting to the client in a way, but limiting to the freelancer in another, especially to new freelancers who may not yet be familiar with the full scope of larger projects.

3. Stepped Prices Within a Range Require Clearly Outlined Package Descriptions

If you’re going to use your price range to display sample packages with stepped costs, you need to specify very clearly what each package includes and what it doesn't.  Otherwise, you may open the door to confusion and petty negotiations for extra features that will only create tension between you and the client and waste valuable time for the both of you.

Pricing tables are a simple way to display a range of your freelance package prices—each package progressively offering more. On Envato Market's Graphic River we offer a number of prebuilt pricing table templates you can purchase affordably and customize quickly. This minimalist style pricing table template above is created by author ThemeFacto.

4. Past Project Scopes and Costs

If you want to maintain complete flexibility and customization for each project without promising specific packages, then the best solution for you might be to display sample prices and project scopes from past clients. What you need to understand, however, is that in addition to the flexibility, this pricing style also brings with it the need for actively negotiating with each client, which, depending on your personality, you may find less than ideal.

Pros of Project Scope Costs

1. Show Authority and Experience

When you list the prices you've charged for past projects, you aren't just displaying your costs, you're also showing your authority and experience. Clients can see who you’ve worked with and the results you’ve produced, and that can help justify higher prices for good quality.

2. Keep Your Quotes Entirely Flexible

If you truly believe that each project must be priced entirely on its own terms and feel uncomfortable with packages, then this may be the ideal pricing style for you. Your past projects will act as a yardstick for customers to get an idea of your prices without causing them to be fixed on a specific price. In an indirect way, you make it understood that the final quote for each project depends on the particular scope.

3. Offer a Gauge Rather Than an Anchor

Unlike the “starting at” and range prices that tend to anchor clients to low prices, sample quotes offer a better guide to final costs to the client. It’s unlikely that all (or even any) of your past projects will be of the baseline type, which means that the quotes you display will be more representative of a project's final costs rather than starting costs.

Cons of Project Scope Costs

1. Demands More Detailed Discussion and Negotiations With the Client

When you offer baseline prices and packages, the client can easily select the level of customization appropriate to his project and buy your package almost “off the shelf” as it were. With an entirely custom pricing method, however, you need to discuss each project scope individually and in-depth with each client to arrive at a price. If you tend to avoid negotiating projects and prices like the plague, you may want to think twice before selecting this pricing scheme.

2. Your Sample Prices May Appear High

Certainly higher than per-hour quotes, higher even than “starting at” quotes, and probably higher than package quotes, because those can also be given in installments. (For example, three payments of $999 for a package seem a lot less than $2,997 for your particular project, even though it’s the same price.) Since you'll be displaying the scopes and prices of actual projects, each with its own set of customizations and specifications, your quotes may appear high to the first-time client.

3. Requires That You Have Past Work to Show

If you're going to use this method, you can't display suggested packages as you can do with the ranging price style. This pricing style required that you post real quotes for actual work completed, along with samples of that work. If you’re a new freelancer without previous clients, you obviously can’t use this method. And if you’re a fairly new freelancer still in the process of building your reputation and raising your fees, this pricing style may not be a good option for you either, as it will tie your average prices to whatever you’ve gotten paid in the past.

5. No Prices

The final option and one which sounds very attractive to a lot of freelancers is that of posting no prices on your website—just general service descriptions. Although this may sound like a good option for not pigeonholing yourself into boxes you can’t fit in, it can also give the wrong impression about your work.

Pros of No Prices

1. You’re Free to Set the Price for Each Client Separately

Without giving a sample price, you can gauge the customer’s budget before giving a quote. If you have a customer with a low budget, for example, whose project you want to take on—either because you’re having a slow month or because you like the particular project—you can give that client a lower-than-normal quote without seeming to be undercutting yourself for no reason.

2. You Won’t Scare Anyone Off With Your Quotes

Without listed prices, customers have to contact you for a quote, which opens the door to communication and the selling process. (At least, so it seems.)

Cons of No Prices

1. No Price Often Means “Expensive” in the Client’s Mind

Think about clothing stores. The cheaper the shop, the bigger the price tag in the front window usually is because cheap stores attract clients based on price. High-end boutiques, on the other hand, never display prices in the window, as if to say “if you need to ask how much, you can’t afford it.” You may not realize this, or it may not be your intention, but not listing prices on your website may imply to potential clients that you’re too expensive for them.

2. Brings a Slew of Price Negotiations

Those clients who may not think “expensive” at seeing no prices on your website, will think “I have no clue" and will contact you to find out how much you charge. This may not sound bad, but it actually shifts the conversations you're having with clients from the results you can get them and the quality you can offer them to just price and numbers. If the potential clients that do contact you, moreover, have meager budgets that you’d never work with, they’d be just wasting your precious time. Listing prices is a good way of qualifying your leads before they contact you.

Choose the Right Pricing Strategy for Your Freelance Business

And there you have them. The five basic pricing strategies you can use to set your fees as a freelancer, based on your level of experience with clients and the way you like to work on projects. I've gathered all the main points in one place for easy reference to help you make your decision, download this free Hourly Versus Project Pricing - Reference Sheet. It will make your life a lot easier!

You can tweak and change each pricing approach, of course, to fit your particular needs so that you give potential clients as clear an idea of what they’re getting as possible.

How do you (or will you) present your rates to your clients? Which pricing scheme best fits your business? Let us know in the comments!

by Julia Melymbrose

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Kickstarting Your Creative Career

If you've just started your creative career or you're considering starting one, then this article may help you on your journey. In this post, I will give you some tips to kickstart your creative career.

Even though many people don't consider themselves creative, I believe that everyone has a seed of creativity in them. Some decide to water and nurture that seed, while others don't know it exists or, even worse, ignore it.

Watering the Seed

While some people are innately more creative than others, it is possible to become more creative by practicing, by being creative. See it as watering the seed I mentioned earlier. Watering that seed means being creative by doing what you enjoy doing. 

If you're a web designer, then it means designing for the web. Are you a photographer? Practice your craft by photographing a subject you enjoy working with. If your ambition is to become a mobile developer, then start building a mobile application. Nothing stops you from being creative. Isn't that fantastic?

Don't Be Discouraged

Not everything you create will be gold. That's true for everybody, even the ones that we consider an overnight success or having a flawless track record. You have to make mistakes to understand what works and what doesn't. I would almost go as far as saying that it's mandatory to make mistakes.

You need to make mistakes to learn the ropes, become familiar with the tools, and find out what you like and don't like about your craft. Not only will this show you how to be more creative, it will also show you what works and what doesn't. And it may even help you discover things you didn't know were possible. Some of the biggest discoveries were made by mistake. Even your heroes have made mistakes, so don't be afraid to make some yourself.

When I started experimenting with photography, digital cameras were not a thing yet. I used film. This meant two things: mistakes were costly, and I had to wait several days before I could see the results of my work. Despite these limitations, it was incredibly exciting. I couldn't wait to see the results. 

Nowadays, photography has lost a bit of that magic, but it has gained a number of interesting, new advantages. You can now shoot photos at an incredible pace at a fraction of the cost. This means that you can learn much quicker, learning from your mistakes as you go. Take advantage of this by making lots of photos. You'll get better with every photo you take.

Being creative is easier and more accessible than ever. This also means that you don't have any excuses to hide behind. Find out what you enjoy doing and start creating.

A Creative Career

Create

I'm sure you agree that a creative career without creating isn't much of a career. A surprising number of people, however, wait for their career to start when another person tells them to be creative. In other words, for some people a career starts when they get their first job.

Don't make that mistake. Not only are you putting a severe limitation on yourself, it also won't help you find that first job. Show your future employer that you have the drive to be creative, even if nobody tells you to... especially if nobody tells you to.

Start designing clothes if that is your ambition. Shoot wildlife in your spare time if you dream of being a wildlife photographer. Build a mobile application if that's where your ambition lies. It will certainly help you find a job—in fact, many employers nowadays expect candidates to show some of their work simply to earn an interview.

Apprenticeship

A great way to start a career is by learning from the best. This means finding a team that is good in whatever you enjoy doing. This isn't easy without a proven track record, but it is possible.

Many companies offer internships or apprenticeships for this exact reason. They want to attract aspiring people, individuals with passion, potential, and ambition. For those people, internships and apprenticeships are a unique opportunity to skip a few steps in their career and enter the big league, the professional world of creativity.

I cannot emphasize enough how valuable such positions are. They may not make you rich, but that shouldn't be your motivation at this point in your career. They give you access to talent, relationships, and resources that will kickstart your creative career.

Most people don't have access to these things... ever. Books and courses are great for learning the basics, but nothing beats hands-on experience and learning from people who've been working in the trenches for years. If you find the right company or organization, you will learn more in one year than you ever thought possible.

Finding a Good Fit

You've found that company or organization that speaks to your imagination, but they don't offer internships or apprenticeships. Bummer, right? Not at all. Take some initiative and get in touch with someone working at the company. If the company is small, then direct your pitch straight to the captain of the ship. Tell her that you admire their work and would love to get some experience by working with them. Be honest and genuine. That always works.

If you have proof of your work and the company is open to this type of initiative, then chances are that they will invite you for an interview. What's there to lose?

Leave Your Comfort Zone

One of the most limiting factors of a creative career can be the fear of leaving your comfort zone, fear of failure. As a programmer, for example, you learned how to do something a certain way and that has worked fine for you. Never change a winning team. Right?

The world we live in changes at a rapid pace, alarmingly rapid if you ask me. It's important to adjust, to be flexible, to try new things. By trying different things or doing things differently, you will create the necessary flexibility to adjust when necessary. Not if. When.

But that's not the most important aspect of leaving your comfort zone. By leaving your comfort zone, you will become better at what you do. When you first drove a car, you were completely focused on the car, doing your very best to keep it on the road and not hitting any obstacles at the same time.

At some point, however, you began to feel more comfortable driving the car. A professional race-car driver uses that comfortable feeling as their foundation or springboard, to become better. They leave their comfort zone to excel at what they do. If they don't, they'll lose the race. It's that simple.

Your creative career is very similar. It's easy to stay in your comfort zone. It is easy to do things the way you're used to. Don't wait for someone else to push you out of your comfort zone. Beat them to it by taking that step yourself. This will make the experience less scary. It may even be fun.

Flying Solo

Instead of waiting for the perfect job, you can start your creative career as a freelancer. There are endless opportunities to find work online. At Envato, we haveEnvato Studio to bring freelancers and potential clients together. Show people your best work and convince them it's you they've been looking for.

The main difference with a regular job is that you are largely in control of your own future. It also means that you have more responsibilities. You have to find clients, pay bills, take care of administrative tasks, and a few other things.

It's important that you think this through before choosing between a job and starting a business. Another popular option is to get experience at a regular job and make the jump to self-employment a bit later in your career, after you've gained the necessary experience.

Conclusion

As you can see, the possibilities are endless, and the best part is that you are in control. You only need to take action. Many successful creatives will tell you that you shouldn't wait for opportunities to come your way. Create your own opportunities by doing one simple thing: being creative. It's what you're best at, it's what you enjoy most, and it's in your nature. Water that seed.

by Bart Jacobs

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