Why does it take at least two weeks to hire a freelancer at a big company — and how to fix it
For teams who are tired of complicated freelancer onboarding
You found the right person. You've worked with them before. They're good at what they do, they respond to Slack, and they're available. You feel, briefly, like someone who has their life together.
Then you remember you work at a large company.
So you submit a vendor request. You attach a W-9. You explain, to someone you've never met, why this specific person is necessary for this specific project. You wait. You follow up. You wait again. At some point your freelancer — who has other clients, other options, a functional relationship with time — starts to wonder if this is still happening.
It is still happening. It's just happening very slowly, inside a procurement system that was not designed with this particular use case in mind.
Your procurement team is doing their jobs correctly. The problem isn't them — it's that enterprise procurement tools were built for stable supplier relationships, not a rotating bench of freelancers hired project by project.
Why this keeps occurring
To be fair to procurement: they're doing their jobs correctly. Vendor onboarding processes exist for good reasons — compliance, financial controls, risk management. The people running those systems are generally helpful and competent. The problem isn't them.
The problem is that enterprise procurement tools like SAP Ariba, Coupa, and NetSuite were built for large, stable supplier relationships. Agencies. Software vendors. The company that handles facilities maintenance. Relationships that get set up once and run for years.
They were not built for teams that work with a rotating bench of freelancers — hired project by project, each one technically a separate vendor, each requiring their own onboarding, their own W-9, their own contract routing through an approval chain that has other things going on.
Marketing teams live this. So do content teams, research teams, design teams, communications departments, and anyone else whose work regularly involves bringing in outside specialists for specific projects. The system isn't broken. It's optimized for a different kind of work than the one you're doing.
The solution most teams land on
Staffing agencies. They're already an approved vendor, so payments flow through without new setup each time. Problem nominally solved.
The issues: they charge 20–40% on top of whatever your freelancer actually makes. They sit between you and the person doing the work, which is fine until it isn't. And you're now explaining your project brief to a middleman who will explain it to your freelancer, who will do the work and wonder why there's a middleman.
It's a reasonable workaround. It's just an expensive one that adds unnecessary distance from the people doing the actual work — and your freelancers notice.
There's a model called a vendor of record
A vendor of record — VOR, if you're in a meeting and need to sound like you've been paying attention — is a single company that sits in your procurement system as the approved vendor for all your freelance work.
You onboard them once. After that, every freelancer you hire — people you already know, people you find through the VOR's network, whoever — gets paid through that one relationship.
One vendor. All your freelancers. Your procurement team has one relationship to manage. Your AP team has one invoice source. Your freelancers get paid on a normal schedule and receive a 1099 in January like adults. And procurement gets a cleaner picture of your freelance spend — which, it turns out, is something they've wanted all along.
How Basil does this specifically
Basil is a tech-enabled vendor of record platform for teams that work with freelancers regularly. Here's what it looks like in practice:
The practical numbers
What this looked like for one team
A Fortune 1000 consumer brand came to Basil with a familiar problem. Their in-house team worked with a large bench of freelancers — producers, editors, designers, strategists — people they'd built relationships with over years. But getting those freelancers paid through their procurement system was a constant friction point.
Each new hire required a separate vendor onboarding process. It slowed projects down. Freelancers were frustrated. The team was frustrated. And procurement, honestly, wasn't thrilled either — managing dozens of individual vendor relationships for one team's freelance spend isn't a good use of anyone's time.
After Basil became their vendor of record, the same team could onboard a new freelancer the same day a project was scoped. Procurement had one relationship to manage instead of many. The team stopped thinking about procurement overhead — which freed up everyone, including procurement, to focus on things that actually required their attention.
Is this for you
Basil works well for teams that hire freelancers regularly, run projects through an enterprise procurement system, and would prefer to spend their time on the work itself rather than the infrastructure around it.
If you hire one freelancer every couple of years and your procurement team is perfectly pleasant about the whole thing, you probably don't need this.
If you recognized yourself in the opening paragraph — yes. This is for you.
