When to hire a freelancer or a full-time technical writer

“Should I employ a full-time technical writer?”

“Should I hire a freelance technical writer?”

We often get this question at Hackmamba. Which option do you choose? Both are beneficial, but the value you derive differs based on your circumstances and several factors. I’ll share my experience in this post to help you decide. As usual, we’ll quickly breeze through the basic stuff and get to the relatively unknown bits.

For the sake of this post, we’ll focus on technical writers within the software development domain; however, the concepts from this post can be applied to any other field.

The difference between freelance and full-time technical writers

Like every profession with part-timers, freelancers, on the one hand, are typically folks who spend a fraction of their time over a set period completing work or, in some cases, tasks with very specific requirements. Fulltimers, on the other hand, spend all their working day on specific content objectives. Both categories apply to technical writers serving product teams.

While some teams hire freelancers, others hire full-time writers, and rightly so. There isn’t a right or wrong answer to making a choice. It depends on certain top considerations, which we’ll examine next, starting with the cost, time, and quality trio.

Cost, time, and quality

It’s typical ‘project speak’ to learn that for a given project, you can’t have it cheap, fast, and with excellent quality. At any given stage of your organization, can only pick two out of the trio. I liken this to content creation, which means that you can’t have great content that’s cheap and created quickly. How do you choose freelance vs full-time following this constraint?

Freelancers are typically flexible on cost, time, and quality, whereas full-time writers aren’t. For full-time writers, you pay a fixed salary, expect certain deliverables to be completed within a period, and can ascertain specific competencies during the hiring process. Once a full-time writer is hired, you can only improve the trio over time. But then, this takes time. Therefore, if you have rapidly changing requirements that also demand flexible engagements, you may want to consider freelancers over full-time employees. We see super early-stage teams start with freelancers, evolve to full-timers, and eventually reach a hybrid model by working with agencies like Hackmamba.

Complexity, diversity, and subject-matter expertise

As products grow, so does the team’s diversity requirement. This is both in breadth and depth. Often, software teams can’t hire all the experts required, especially when solving a niche problem or building niche products and features. This resource requirement also extends to technical writers. With full-time writers, you’re limited by the boundaries of their knowledge and can only hope they upskill to meet the latest demands.

On the flip side, you can find subject-matter experts (SMEs) who are freelancers and can commit part-time to filling a temporary content gap. This is a solid reason to augment your team with an SME for the duration of a project, feature development, or marketing campaign. Expect that freelancers with this deep, complex knowledge will also come with a price.

Team availability and processes

From experience, some teams aren’t equipped to support freelance writers, and most early-stage teams aren’t. Here’s a scenario: A startup team X has four team members, and the founder is tired of writing content for marketing, so they decide to hire a freelancer on Fiverr. The freelancer is good at writing but needs supervision on what content to create, specifics around the audience, following a style (with a non-existent writing style guide), and managing internal communication with other team members.

The improper support and structure means that the team either lets the freelancer go or risks slowing down its processes, shipping worthless content, and burning valuable funds that could otherwise be spent on other forms of marketing.

In this case, an in-house technical writer who can sit in conversations with the rest of the team is advisable. They can independently create, edit, publish, and manage a basic content calendar over time. They are part of the team and can work together to improve the team’s processes. Small teams moving fast are always in constant communication, and many parts change rapidly, so having an in-house writer fits like a glove.

Marketing requirements

Similar to having niche product requirements, teams consider using freelancers or full-time writers to cater to various marketing needs. At Hackmamba, we place marketing requirements close to the buyer stages - Awareness, consideration, and decision. Corresponding to these is the need to create top-funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom-funnel content.

Top-funnel content typically drives general awareness through articles on broader, common problems. Therefore, marketing teams rely on freelancers to create this kind of content. These articles or content are mostly for search engine optimization (SEO) or long-form social media content. As the content requirements are lighter, employing freelancers is cheaper, and many freelancer options are available.

Bottom-funnel content has deeper marketing requirements, which could include content to enable sales teams to accelerate deal closure or content to enable deeper product adoption and retention. These deeper content requirements are suitable for full-time writers who understand the content strategy, can improve it, and efficiently support a cross-functional product, sales, and marketing team.

Product strategy and vision

A challenge to working with freelancers is their inability to share your product strategy and vision. Hard as you try to bring them close to your product through demos and sitting in customer calls, they’re just too far from the day-to-day of the product. Some teams are comfortable making this tradeoff for other benefits, while others aren’t.

On the other side, full-time technical writers are on your team. They contribute to your product’s roadmap, collect feedback from customers and internal teams, sit in sensitive business meetings, understand the rationale behind certain product decisions, and synthesize and translate these into thought-provoking pieces.

We’ve seen that Hackmamba authors who sit full-time with a team create the most contextual content and can speak to certain product decisions.

Content at scale

On the one hand, small teams focused on product awareness and top-of-funnel acquisition are okay with publishing a post weekly while augmenting with other marketing activities. On the other hand, larger teams create content for all stages of the buyer journey, content to show thought leadership and cement the brand position, and content for peripherals like events. This is a lot.

To handle these content requirements at scale, teams have to make concessions on capacity. A full-time internal content team shipping with this high throughput requires a large financial commitment that is affordable for only very large teams. Alternatively, smaller teams are better off utilizing freelancers to create the lower-effort content and reserve the internal team for strategic content and oversight.

At Hackmamba, for instance, we help software teams strike a perfect mix by augmenting an internal team with dedicated external technical writers. This is a necessity for scale.

Measuring success

This is probably the toughest variable to consider, and for good reason. Investing in content creation, especially technical content, isn’t immediately rewarding. You may strike gold, and certain pieces of content may go viral. But then, it’s gold for a reason. This means that creating content comes with an inherent risk—a risk that smaller teams are afraid to shoulder due to limited financial capacity. With this, it makes sense for teams who aren’t ready to take on that investment risk to explore working with freelancers rather than committing a full-time writer to the team.

To risk-averse teams, experimentation and making small bets are the way to go. Critical observation of these small bets may expose existing gaps, including people or process problems. Teams adept at content creation, relevant processes, and expected successes are more confident hiring a full-time contributor with very specific measurable outcomes in mind.

What is the best place to find freelance technical writers and full-time authors?

I had to add this section to share a gem. The best place to find a freelance writer is to look at publishing platforms. i.e. for technical writers, you should be looking for authors writing consistently on places like dev.to and those published on platforms like The New Stack. You can search for a typical post you’d have written and reach out to the author. Watch out for their writing style, attention to detail, and depth.

To find full-time authors, talk to your HR team, lol. If you’re a small team without one, you can create a job description and publish it on popular job boards and social platforms. Look for watering holes where technical writers hang out to post job descriptions, e.g., technical writing communities like the Hackmamba creators community, WriteTheDocs community, and X (Twitter).

When deciding between a freelance writer or a full-time writer, evaluate the above factors before making an appropriate choice. More importantly, know when each variable changes to re-evaluate your decision. Hackmamba thrives in the sweet spot, balancing all the factors you’ve considered above. Hackmamba provides you with dedicated technical writers who create your marketing content or, in some cases, full-time remote technical writers who write your documentation and product content.

Talk to us today, and we’re happy to help or otherwise advise you for free on how to drive deeper developer product adoption with the right content.