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Edward Vanhoutte is the Founder and Managing Partner of Beam®, where he helps companies strengthen their HR teams through experienced freelance leaders and interim experts.
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Key takeaways
- Start with the problem, not the profile: Before writing a job description, define what actually needs to change. Ask whether you have a capacity problem, a capability problem, a continuity problem — or a combination of them. Only then decide what kind of person you need.
- Plan freelancers before you urgently need them: Some companies are moving from calling freelancers only when somebody leaves toward including external talent directly in workforce planning. Think beyond headcount and decide in advance where permanent employees, independent experts and technology fit best.
- Use freelancers for capability, not only capacity: Filling a six-month gap can keep the business running. But the bigger opportunity is bringing in someone who also transfers knowledge, improves how the team works and leaves something valuable behind after the assignment ends.
- Measure outcomes instead of presence: Agree upfront on what success looks like, which milestones matter and what should be different when the assignment is complete. A freelancer sitting at a desk for six months is not an outcome.
- Ask freelancers what your internal team cannot see: External experts arrive without many of your organisation’s existing assumptions and blind spots. Give them enough autonomy to challenge how things are currently done — and actually listen when their answer is uncomfortable.
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Deep Dive: Freelancers are moving from Plan B to workforce planning
For a long time, freelance hiring inside many companies followed a familiar pattern.
Someone leaves. Someone goes on parental leave. A project suddenly needs to be delivered. An expert cannot be found quickly enough on the permanent market.
Then someone asks: “Can we find a freelancer?”
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Sometimes a company simply needs another pair of hands. Edward describes this as bringing in capacity.
But he has also noticed another shift.
Companies (including smaller ones) are beginning to include external talent in workforce planning from the start.
Instead of planning 100 employees and calling freelancers only when something goes wrong, they might deliberately plan a workforce consisting of permanent people plus a certain number of external experts.
Edward describes this as total talent management: independent professionals become part of how the workforce is designed, not merely a solution called in after the original plan has failed.
That distinction may sound small. In practice, it changes almost everything.
Capacity solves today. Capability should improve tomorrow.
Imagine somebody important leaves for six months.
A freelancer comes in, performs the work, keeps everything moving and leaves when the employee returns.
That is useful capacity.
But what happens the day after the freelancer leaves?
If exactly the same problems, gaps and weaknesses return, the company has bought six months of output, but little lasting improvement.
Edward put it very simply:
“It wouldn’t be sustainable when, on the day that the freelancer leaves, the same problems come back again.”
The greater opportunity is to bring in someone who can operate quickly and share expertise along the way: improve a process, transfer knowledge, strengthen colleagues or introduce a different way of solving the problem.
That turns temporary talent into something less temporary: capability that remains inside the organisation.
And this changes how companies should evaluate freelancers.
The question becomes less: “Can this person do the job for six months?”
And more:
“Can this person do the job while making us better at doing it ourselves?”
👉 Sign up and post a project on freelancermap to start receiving proposals from IT experts and specialists
Begin with the problem
One of the easiest hiring mistakes happens before sourcing even starts.
A company knows something is wrong, decides it needs a certain role, writes a job description and starts looking for someone matching it.
Except the role might not actually be the solution.
Edward’s recommendation is to move one step backwards:
“Before looking, ‘Who do we need?’, I think a good first question is: ‘What do we want to solve?’
- Is it a continuity problem because somebody is absent?
- Is it a capacity problem because the internal team simply cannot handle the workload?
- Is it a capability problem because specific expertise is missing?
- Or is it a mixture of them?
Only after answering that does it make sense to define the person you need.
This sounds obvious.
Under pressure, it often isn’t.
Freelance hiring frequently happens in something close to panic mode. The project was supposed to start yesterday. Someone has suddenly left. A deadline is approaching.
Nobody wants to spend three weeks analysing organisational design.
But Edward argues that even one proper conversation can challenge the initial request and clarify what is genuinely required.
Otherwise, companies risk becoming very efficient at finding the wrong person.
Define the destination before measuring the journey
Once the problem is clear, another shift is necessary:
from measuring presence to measuring outcomes.
Edward recommends being honest with freelancers about the situation they are entering.
If the team is struggling, say so.
If there is internal tension, don’t disguise it.
If expectations are difficult, make them visible before the assignment begins.
Then agree on what success actually means.
- What outcome should be achieved?
- What are the milestones?
- What should be different in three or six months?
- And how will both sides know whether the assignment is working?
“Make clear agreements on the expectations, what success looks like, what are the milestones, and keep this outcome-based view.”
That is especially important with independent experts because their purpose should rarely be simply to occupy a desk for a defined number of hours.
Use the outside perspective.
Independent experts arrive with one particularly valuable disadvantage:
They don’t know how things have always been done here.
That means they may notice things the internal team no longer sees.
Edward argues that companies should deliberately make use of this.
Prepare the onboarding properly so access, systems and information are available.
Give the person enough autonomy to operate.
Then ask what they see.
And be prepared for the answer to be uncomfortable.
An experienced freelancer may have worked across several organisations, industries or operating models in the time an employee has spent inside one company.
That breadth is part of what the company is paying for.
Using an expert only to execute an existing process can therefore leave a large part of their value untouched.
Edward goes even further.
A very stable team can eventually lose fresh perspectives.
People develop strong relationships, shared assumptions and common ways of approaching problems. That stability is useful — until the company needs a different answer.
If the same people keep looking at the same problems through the same lens, innovation becomes more difficult.
External experts can introduce that different lens.
The future workforce may have three pillars
Edward’s thought experiment for designing a workforce from scratch is particularly useful.
Take a blank sheet of paper and forget, temporarily, about the current organisational chart.
Then think in three pillars:
Permanent employees. Independent talent. Technology and AI.
Now list the work.
- What tasks have to be done?
- What skills will the organisation need?
- Which work benefits from permanent internal ownership?
- Where would an independent specialist be better?
- And what can technology automate?
Only then put the pieces together.
It is almost the opposite of traditional headcount planning.
Instead of starting with:
“We need another full-time employee.”
Start with:
“We need this result. What is the best combination of people and technology to produce it?”
That does not mean replacing permanent employees with freelancers.
It means treating employment type as one design decision among several, rather than the automatic starting point.
The harder shift is organisational design
Adding freelancers to a company without changing anything else will only get you so far.
Edward also questions the traditional model of rigid functional departments working largely within their own boundaries.
His alternative is more blended teams: people from HR, finance, IT, marketing and other functions working around common projects rather than constantly handing work from one silo to another.
Independent experts fit naturally into this model because they can be brought in around a particular problem or specialist capability without requiring the organisation to build another permanent function around that need.
And this may become increasingly important as niche expertise gets harder to hire permanently.
The real shift, then, is larger than freelancing.
It is the move from owning every capability inside the company toward building access to the right capability when it is needed.
That is why the question for workforce leaders is no longer simply:
“How many people should we hire?”
It may increasingly become:
“What work needs to happen — and what is the smartest combination of employees, independent experts and technology to make it happen?”
Tips for success
| If you’re starting with freelancers… | If you’re improving workforce planning | If you already hire freelancers regularly |
|---|---|---|
| Write the problem before the job description. What needs to change? Why does it matter? | List every major task and skill the upcoming project requires (forget job titles) | Audit your last 5 freelance hires |
| Choose 2–3 concrete outcomes or milestones for the assignment | Divide the work into 3 buckets: Handle by permanent employees, freelancer, tech/AI. | During the assignment, ask: “What do you see here that we probably don’t see ourselves?” |
| Add a “leave us stronger” requirement – What process, knowledge, documentation can remain with the internal team? | Try the model on one project, measure what worked and what did not and use the results to improve | Identify what the team can now do better without the freelancer once the project is completed |
