If the work is genuinely continuous, hiring is usually right and we will tell you so. The question is whether you have enough work of the right kind to keep a specialist busy and improving, because an under-used specialist leaves.
Who this is for: Businesses at the point where digital work is constant enough to wonder whether it should be a salary rather than an invoice.
If two or more of these describe you, stop reading and go with that. We would rather you did than spent three weeks discovering it.
The role most businesses write is a designer who codes, understands search, can run paid media, and will also fix the CRM. That person exists, is rare, is expensive, and will leave for a role that lets them go deep on one thing. What you usually end up hiring is someone strong in one area doing three others at a level you cannot evaluate.
A single in-house specialist has no one to check their work, no one to cover leave, and no exposure to how the problem is solved elsewhere. Quality drifts slowly and invisibly, and the first real signal is often a bad audit or a security incident.
Digital work is lumpy. A rebuild is six intense months followed by maintenance. Hiring for the peak leaves you over-staffed for two years; hiring for the trough means the peak is delivered badly or late.
| An in-house hire | futr | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost shape | Fixed salary, benefits, tooling, recruitment | Variable — scales to what is actually happening |
| Skill breadth | Deep in one area, thin elsewhere | Several specialists, none of them your headcount |
| Institutional knowledge | Excellent, and the real reason to hire | Built deliberately, documented rather than remembered |
| Cover | None without a second hire | Built in |
| Time to productive | 3–6 months including recruitment | Weeks |
| Risk if it does not work | A difficult and slow correction | End of engagement |
Compare the fully loaded cost of the hire — salary, employer contributions, tooling, recruitment fee, the management time, the ramp — against a year of engagement, and be honest about how many months of genuinely skilled work you have to give them. Many businesses find the right answer is a hire for the continuous work and a partner for the peaks, which is an arrangement we are happy to be half of.
Yes, and we have. Where the work is continuous and the business is large enough to keep a specialist properly occupied, hiring is the better economics and we would rather say that early than be dropped in eighteen months.
That is one of the more useful things we do — holding delivery together during a search, then handing over to the person you hire with the documentation to make that handover real rather than a meeting.
Tell us what is changing in the business. If the answer is a freelancer, a hire or leaving it exactly as it is, that is what we will say — it costs us one project and saves you a year.