FlexJobs Review: Is FlexJobs Worth It for Hiring?
Jason Quey
Updated:
November 12, 2020
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It’s challenging to be an entrepreneur. The average entrepreneur works at least 52 hours a week, which is often longer than most employees. Fortunately, hiring a freelancer is often a great way to reduce your burden and allow you to focus on other tasks that are more in need of your attention.
With that in mind, is FlexJobs worth your time and your money to hire the right freelancers? It takes time to review freelancing sites properly.
In this FlexJobs review, you will learn how the site works, what the good parts are, what the bad parts are, how they price things, and whether it’s a good choice for hiring.
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As their name suggests and their page for employers clarifies, FlexJobs focuses on remote and flexible workers.
Keep in mind that remote and flexible are not the same. Remote workers are those who work outside of your company’s physical location, though many still rent office spaces for work. Flexible workers are those with unusual or changing work hours.
As they clarify below their primary advertising segment for employers, FlexJobs can also help you find hard-to-reach or otherwise-specialized employees.
This is particularly useful when you’re looking for people with unusual skill sets or experiences. For example, you could hire international writers to help produce material in local dialects, or you could access segments of the workforce that prefer remote work and don’t show up to regular job fairs.
FlexJobs mainly focuses on hiring employees rather than freelancers. In this context, employees are people you want to form a long-term relationship with, regardless of the amount of work you intend to provide. Freelancers tend to work for limited periods, then move on to other clients.
FlexJobs offers several ways to hire flexible workers, but job postings and resume searches are the most important ones. These function more-or-less how you expect them to, with the job postings asking people to submit information and resume searches functioning as a database that you can go through at your leisure.
Most companies prefer making job postings, but if you need some particularly rare or specialized skills, looking through resumes and finding people who match may be faster and easier.
That said, FlexJobs is not the best choice for hiring any employee. It doesn’t support finding artists or creative people as effectively as some other recruiting sites, and it’s not very useful for getting quick support on individual projects. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad site in general, just that there are some types of job searches where it will come up short.
FlexJobs offers several different factors that help it stand out from competitors within the hiring industry.
Applicants will notice this more than you will, but FlexJobs hand-screens every job posting they put on their site to check for errors, remove spam, and generally ensure that each job posting meets their standards.
As an employer, the main benefit of this is that applicants know you’re serious about the job and that you’ve already passed through a check to determine its validity. That can help encourage people to speak up, especially if they’ve been looking for a position like the one you’re offering and can’t quite believe it’s true.
FlexJobs offers an all-in-one payment plan (more on that below) where you can post as many jobs as you want while you have an active account with them. Only using them to hire for one position isn’t very cost-effective unless it’s a major position, and you want to do a lot of searching on your own. Using FlexJobs for many posts tends to work out much better.
Have you ever visited a job site where things are jumbled together with no easy way to sort them, other than a few brief search terms? It doesn’t work particularly well. FlexJobs offers a robust filtering system that you can use to label each of your job postings, and thereby reduce the number of people who see them.
That’s usually a bad thing, but job filters are good when they help eliminate searchers whose goals don’t align with yours. The more you make use of these filters, the more likely you are to get applicants that are worth considering seriously.
Employees heavily value flexibility in their work schedules. There are some businesses where flexibility doesn’t work due to the nature of the job, but for everyone else, it has a significant impact on morale and employee retention. In fact, FlexJobs found that 30% of people they polled quit their job because it didn’t offer flexible options.
Many others told FlexJobs that they’d be willing to give up some pay or benefits in return for flexible scheduling and remote opportunities. Even a 10% reduction in pay can be a lot of savings for your small business.
FlexJobs has many positive qualities when it comes to hiring remote and flexible positions, but it has a few negative sides you should keep in mind.
This is the major downside. While FlexJobs supports a variety of job categories, the truth of the matter is that most of the remote jobs it focuses on are technology-related. These include positions for things like programming, web development, and graphic designs.
Most employees who use FlexJobs expect that focus, so you won’t find as many people for non-technology roles. This isn’t a downside at all if you’re hiring for a flexible technology job, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you want to hire for a variety of positions at your company.
This is the big problem with getting as many applicants as possible. FlexJobs is paywalled for both employers and employees, which means you won’t get as many applications as you can on sites that offer free access to job searchers.
Many employees hate paying for job searches because they’re trying to earn money, not spend it. This is particularly true for people who just lost their job and are trying to make ends meet. You can still get a variety of applications through FlexJobs, but every paywall in front of employees fundamentally limits the number of high-quality applications you’ll get.
Check out our list of FlexJobs alternatives.
FlexJobs offers a comprehensive pricing plan where the only difference is how long you’re registering for.
This has both good and bad attributes compared to some other hiring sites, and that makes their pricing one of the most important parts of this FlexJobs review.
Realistically, most companies are going to want the 3-month plan as a minimum. Hiring can take a while if you want to sort and vet candidates, and losing access to their database after just one month could negatively impact your ability to sort and track applicants. This is particularly true because FlexJobs helps monitor applicants across multiple sites.
The main positive of this pricing plan is that you don’t have to pay lots of extra fees to access all of the services FlexJobs provides. Small businesses are considerably more price-sensitive than larger companies for hiring, and it’s always better to avoid getting nickel-and-dimed by hiring sites when possible.
In fact, the fees on the employee side go to help pay for screening all the jobs, which is a direct benefit to you.
However, despite the relatively high cost of FlexJobs, it does not offer personalized support like hiring managers or caseworkers. Many other hiring sites offer this sort of help for their higher-paying plans, but FlexJobs expects you to do all of the hiring work yourself. That’s a problem if your goal is to reduce your own workload as much as possible.
Overall, FlexJobs is worth it for hiring, but only when you’re looking at the types of jobs it supports the most. As this FlexJobs review explains above, it’s not as effective a site for any jobs outside of technology-related roles. This is particularly true for lower-paying categories like retail.
However, FlexJobs does stand out from other hiring sites with its focus on flexible scheduling and remote work opportunities. This is the main factor that draws potential applicants to the site, and since all jobs on FlexJobs must be flexible in some way, people know what to expect from it.
If you don’t offer flexible hours right now, it may be a good time to reconsider that and see if you can give employees the option. Keeping morale high is essential for small businesses, and since flexible jobs can save you money while making employees happier, it’s always worth considering.