Understanding online freelancing
Evan Tan, 29, is currently the regional director of Freelancer.com in Southeast Asia. Founded in 2009, Freelancer.com is a global outsourcing marketplace that connects registered freelancers—now counting 16 million—with clients, jobs, and projects around the world.
The platform has been available to Filipinos since 2007, then known as “Get a Freelancer.Com” It was in 2010 when the global company set up office in the Philippines, and by 2011, Freelancer.ph was officially launched.
But according to Tan, even before the phenomenon of online freelancing reached its current peak, Filipinos were already involved in freelancing jobs.
He noted, “Freelancing per se began way, way back here. One example are selfemployed Filipinos who work on their own businesses. Consultants are also freelancers because they offer their expertise to a business as someone from outside a company. People just didn’t call it freelancing then but rather, ‘sideline’ or ‘ raket’.”
Tan, himself, had always been a freelancer first in the real world and then on the World Wide Web. A graduate of Mass Communications from Lyceum of the Philippines University, he used to contribute stories for different publications, among them The Manila Times.
Eventually, he helped a foreign startup travel website with their online content. He then returned to media until Freelancer.com chief executive officer Matt Barrie personally offered him to join his company in 2011.
Since accepting the responsibility then, Tan as head of Freelancer.com in South East Asia is now confident that the region is ready to adopt a more flexible kind of employment like online freelancing and other business process outsourcing, citing a report by software company Intuit. “The Intuit 2020 Report” predicts that by 2020, large corporations around the world will “substantially increase their use of a flexible workforce.”
Here in the Philippines, however, Tan has a more meaningful goal: To remove the stigma of “freelancing” among Filipinos.
“Early on, clients and companies thought they would not be able to get top level Filipino freelancers, which was why they were only outsourcing small jobs. The stigma of freelancing started that way and people identified freelancing with dataentry jobs,” he explained.
“As time progressed, people started to realize that ‘Even if I am an expert or a professional, I can be a freelancer.’ It didn’t mean that they had to settle for something low-paying,” he continued.
“At Freelancer, in fact, we have this rating system where freelancers are given 1 to 5 stars, with 5 being the highest rating in terms reviews of clients. Percentages of jobs completed, budget, meeting deadlines, and repeat hire rate are also displayed. With this system, we are able to reverse a lot of misconceptions and stigma about working from home,” he furthered.
Moreover, Tan hopes to take the option of online freelancing all over the Philippines. While most of the registered freelancers come from Manila at present, there is already a good number that hail from Cebu City in the Visayas, and Davao City and Iligan City in Mindanao.
To advance this cause, Freelancer.ph has partnered with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) through the recently concluded National Science and Technology Week. Representing Freelancer.ph, Tan talked at the “Rural Impact Sourcing Workshop” where he presented the concept of a flexible and independent job via freelancing.
“We want to empower equally skilled and talented Filipinos outside Metro Manila by maximizing the Internet—and not just taking selfies. It couldn’t be more timely as DOST plans to roll out free WiFi nationwide,” Tan added.
While the benefits and possibilities of online freelancing are indeed promising, there remains an issue with regard to a person’s responsibility in paying taxes.
Asked for his comment, Tan said, “While we are not the governing body for this, we still encourage our registered freelancers to pay their own taxes because its their obligation to the country. However, we also push for tax exemptions just like what small businesses have.”
With that, Tan told The Sunday Times Magazine that in the future, they would invite a representative from the Bureau of Internal Revenue to share insights and regulations on taxpaying at their monthly seminars.