In my experience there has been a number of different ways in gaining work. Recruiters will obviously play a major part in keeping you booked throughout your career. There are many different levels to this.

Freelancing

Probably the easiest way to define it is that freelancing can be quite different to contracting. Freelancing in general usually comes from ad-hoc bookings that can be short maybe for a week to a month these are usually paid weekly based on your day rate, usually these come about from an agency/In-house client requiring extra resource to fulfil their end clients requests that may have gone out of scope to the original plan. There are also instances when these projects require specific skills for certain elements of the project such as Illustration / UI / copy and so on, they usually do not a carry an interview process and generally start very quickly. These are a great way to start your career and gain great exposure to some great agencies and brands alike. My longest week on a weekly booking was 14 months, thank you NKD.

Based on these small gigs you will quickly gain a reputation and how good that reputation is, is down to the legacy that you leave behind. If you have left with a good legacy you will find that you will probably get repeat booked again and again, now you have a client ca-Ching, but you will also have a double win, as the recruiter would have had positive feedback from the client which will lead to the recruiter pushing you forward for more opportunities with other end clients.

Plus if things go sour whilst your booked, I.e the agency changes the brief or everyone your working with is obnoxious your recruitment agency is your rip cord to eject the hell out of there.

Always be pleasant, you are representing the recruitment agency and more importantly yourself, people buy people at the end of the day, be a nice person.

Don’t be a client thief

I can’t stress enough however great the temptation maybe from conversations with the end client direct or any other reason that you should never ever go to the client direct and cut out the recruiter. This is unprofessional and really bad practice and not to mention you may get pulled over the coals by the recruiter for breaking the terms of your original contract, bad, bad and bad. Staying with the recruiter protects your income, you may earn slightly less on your day rate but when your only waiting 7 days for guaranteed payment this is a small sacrifice to make. I have known some agencies when working with them direct to be paying on 45 or even 60 day terms this is usually way too long for most of us. The recruiters themselves are probably being paid on these terms, so treat them fairly.

Contracting 

With contracting it is quite different, usually these are for longer term contracts, usually from 3 months beyond. I’m not saying all recruitment agencies do, but certainly most of them will pay weekly if it is a 3 month contract, beyond 3 months they usually pay monthly. Again you have the protection of having the recruitment agency in the middle so you are pretty much guaranteed to be paid when you should be. Unlike gigging, the winning process is more in line with full time employment. You will more than certainly either have a telephone interview, sometimes video call, which if successful will lead to a proper interview.

You should always cast your net as wide as you can in seeking new opportunities use every channel you can, in my experience using LinkedIn, Indeed, Totaljobs and such sites is great way of seeking contract opportunities. Usually contract opportunities exist with large firms such as BT, BMW, Shell to name a few, and usually you have the benefits of the companies culture as a contractor. At Three they have a thing called Wellness Wednesdays which means you have a two hour lunch break to go and do anything that makes you feel good. Lucky enough behind their HQ was a David Lloyd with an amazing swimming pool and jacuzzi, can’t beat that for mid-week brain alignment. 

You have to stay on top

Whatever your goals and ambitions you need to have drive and self discipline, like everything else in life nothing comes to you without hard work and putting the time in. You can’t expect opportunities to fall in your lap, if you fail to put yourself out there nobody knows about you, why would you get a great contract without any effort. I have found that sometimes you can be applying for opportunities like a mad thing, and then you usually end up with the first one you applied for. The road to being successful usually starts with multiple failures. I can remember having at least 10 interviews with various companies before I landed my first contract role. Failing is fine as long as you can learn something from it, by the time I hit interview 11 I had rehearsed my portfolio and CV so often and learnt so much from questions put to me, that by the time I was in number 11 I was super confident and well in tune. Just don’t forget you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you, If you get a bad vibe from them during the interview, chances are you won’t want to work with them anyway, let alone spend 3-6 months with them.

Freelancing and contracting isn’t for everybody sometimes the stress of finding work and the not knowing can be too much but it has its rewards, learning from multiple people across multiple industries and professions that can potentially fast track your career. In all my years of experience I have never known two companies or agencies to work in the same way, but then nothing great is ever achieved without a level of risk.

The sign-off

The advice above has no relevance to anything but my own experience of my 6 years of freelancing/contracting.