Having spoken to Matt about the concept he described it as an experiment that aims to:

• Actively promote the regions vibrant freelance talent pool
• Connect likeminded individuals.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration.

If we can grow the community sufficiently, my hope is we expand beyond twitter. Equally I want this to be a community led group, so I’m eager to hear from other individuals who have ideas for how we can grow and more importantly support the group.

Many of the regions agencies have scaled down in recent months, which has seen a increase in the size of the freelance talent pool. My hope is NE Freelancers will help provide a voice for these individuals and equally a place for businesses to find the necessary talent they require.

I’m also developing an idea to take donations from businesses to fund courses/speakers/social events for the community. So essentially the money/time that businesses would save from recruitment fees, would instead be donated to the group or at least a small amount. Equally should recruiters wish to use the talent pool, I would hope that they also give a percentage of their finders fee to the group. Some may say Im a bit naive, however freelancers can represent fantastic value for money and if businesses really want to continue to benefit from this they need to support this group. For the record I do believe recruiters can provide an excellent service and therefore I hope they can get actively involved in supporting the community.

How does the Twitter group work?

1) Freelancers who want to be part of the group simply follow @nefreelancers and tweet their skill(s). We then add them to either one of our existing lists or create a new list that best matches their skill set.

2) Anyone looking for talent (a freelancer) simply DMs or tweet us with what they’re looking for and we then post an update to the community

3) From time-to-time we will also be posting relevant information, events and links to useful resources.

Anyone wishing to find out more please follow @nefreelancers and do let me know how it works out for you as an individual using NE Freelancers to showcase your talents and find work. Ill be keeping in touch with Matt too and finding out how he steers his idea through to fruition and the challenges hell overcome along he way.