Five Tips to Hire the Best Medical Freelancers in the Market

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Medical freelancers are helping healthcare providers close the critical shortage of specialists. For example, a medical institution does not need to employ a scientific writer. The technical specialist will not have continuous work. But suddenly, it was necessary to publish a scientific article. Or you need to conduct large-scale research on the disease. Motivating an experienced specialist and offering him a monthly salary in the market is more complex than turning to the same specialist for a one-time consultation. We will tell you how to hire the best medical freelancers in the market: protect yourself from unpleasant experiences while selecting candidates, their interviews, and initial assessment.

Assess hard skills

In principle, the assessment of potential freelance employees does not differ from the assessment of regular staff. First, hard skills are assessed – professional skills that a candidate possesses and can demonstrate. A person develops hard skills by studying in college, attending courses and seminars, reading medical literature, and gaining professional experience. One way to check this out is to check out freelancing platforms to find the best freelance medical writers. When choosing a medical freelancer, it is often not how many years of experience matters but what projects he was involved in. And instead of looking for a writing editor for a long time with more than ten years of experience, it is sometimes more rational to take a copywriter with two years of experience from a private company on a part-time job.

Assess soft skills

The set of important soft skills for such freelancers is approximately the same:

  • Responsibility (in particular adherence to deadlines);
  • Self-organization;
  • Experience in freelancing;
  • Understanding the features and risks of this work format;
  • Ability to defend one’s opinion and negotiate with the customer.

It is difficult to assess soft skills, but it is necessary to minimize the possible difficulties of future cooperation. Ask the candidate questions about how his working day works, ask him about the problems he faced on past projects and ways to overcome them.

Schedule an interview

The higher the expertise, the greater the responsibility of the freelancer, and the wider his communication with other medical professionals, the more likely one or more face-to-face meetings or online interviews will be needed. Recommendations for them are the same as for interviewing employees in the state. Various materials on the Internet from the series “How to successfully conduct an online interview with a candidate” and “How to recruit remotely” will help prepare for them.

Conduct a test task

A test assignment is an excellent way to assess critical skills, both hard and soft skills: it shows how disciplined the candidate is (sent the task on time), attentive and accurate (completed all the points exactly as indicated), and motivated. It is easier and more efficient to give a real case for the test. For example, in the case of a medical writer, ask a freelancer to be part of a project team on projects related to developing reviews of preclinical and clinical literature, scientific articles. It is important to keep the test task small – 1-2 hours maximum. It is much easier for a candidate to allocate such time, which means he is more likely to agree to do it.

For some positions in medicine, the test task is integral and primary, but others cannot be evaluated using the test task. In this case, attach questions on the knowledge of the basics of the profession to the vacancy – this will help weed out completely random or insufficiently competent candidates.

You don’t always need an interview

At first glance, it might seem like a waste of time and effort to interview freelancers as full-time employees. For simple one-off projects, this is probably true. Here it will be more important to look at the portfolio, collect feedback on the work, or ask colleagues in the field to recommend freelancers with whom they collaborated and whose work they were satisfied with. If you cannot find reviews, it is appropriate to ask the freelancer himself for recommendations – ask for the contacts of two or three clients who can tell you about his work.

Final Words

If you want to unload your employees in a complex project by attracting freelancers, it would be wiser to rely on long-term relationships with “remote medical workers.” And the first step towards that is thoughtful hiring. Take your time, and the time and effort spent on selecting a freelancer will pay off with the quality of his work.

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