I’ve hired a lot of short term, one-off freelancers over the years.

Web designers. Email list managers. Graphic designers. Photographers. Videographers. Editors, for written and video content. Virtual assistants, and companies of crowdsourced virtual assistants.

While I got use out of some of them, most of the time, they weren’t worth their cost.

And there’s a good reason why: Freelancers are like rental cars.

Some of them are really nice, some are junk, but, when the job is over, they always go back to somewhere else. In general, freelancers don’t have ownership over the product they’re working on. Oh, yes — there are review sites and feedback forms and ratings and such, but all you need to do to overcome a bad review is get a bunch of good reviews that buries the bad news. One-off freelancers know that, no matter how bad or good they are at this job, there’s another job coming after this one.

That, or I just suck at picking the right help.