A glossary of hiring and freelancing

Behavioral competencies are interpersonal and self-management abilities, described as observable behaviors that can be rated: keeping a commitment, flagging a problem early, taking feedback well. It is the assessment term for what everyday language calls soft skills. The difference lies in how they are measured: a behavior is observed, not self-declared.

Behavioral fit is the degree to which a person's way of working matches what a mission requires: the expected autonomy, the pace, the share of ambiguity, the style of the team. It is distinct from technical skills, which tell you whether someone can do the work. Fit tells you whether the collaboration is likely to go well.

Billable days are the days a freelancer can actually sell in a year. You get them by taking public holidays, leave, training, prospecting and the gaps between missions out of the working days. It is the most decisive input when calculating a TJM, and the most often overstated one, which leads to a rate that is too low.

Go further: TJM calculator

The charge rate is the share of a freelancer's revenue taken by social contributions and income tax. It depends on the legal status and on the level of income. Because these deductions apply to revenue rather than to the quoted TJM, a freelancer has to invoice more than it seems to keep a given net income.

Go further: TJM calculator

An ESN (entreprise de services du numérique) is a French IT services company that delivers technology work for its clients, through its own employees or through freelancers it subcontracts. The client pays a margin in exchange for a single point of contact and for part of the risk being carried by the ESN. They used to be called SSII.

A freelance mission is a time-limited engagement in which an independent professional delivers a service for a client company, with an agreed scope, duration and rate. Unlike salaried employment, it creates no relationship of subordination. Whether it succeeds depends as much on the working conditions as on the expertise of the person delivering it.

Go further: Freelance missions by sector

The IDC (Inventaire de Dynamique Comportementale, or behavioral dynamics inventory) is the Migbirds assessment. It measures a person's behavioral dynamics rather than self-declared traits. In other words, it describes how someone tends to act in a professional context, not the portrait that person would paint of themselves if asked.

An IT freelancer is a technology professional who works independently and sells their expertise one mission at a time: development, data, infrastructure, cybersecurity, project management. They usually bill a day rate (TJM) and contract directly with the client, or go through an ESN, a platform or a portage salarial company.

Go further: Guide to freelance IT missions

Job performance is the quality and effectiveness with which a person meets the expectations of their role or mission. Research shows that technical skills alone do not explain it: behavior, motivation and fit with the context also play a part. Predicting it is possible, but always imperfectly, and any promise of certainty oversells.

The micro-entreprise, or micro-entrepreneur regime, is the simplest sole-trader status in France. Social contributions are calculated as a percentage of the revenue collected, with no deduction for actual expenses. Revenue is capped, and the status gives practically no access to unemployment insurance, which weighs on the calculation of a TJM.

Go further: TJM calculator

Person-environment fit is the work-psychology concept describing how well an individual matches their professional context: the role, the team, the organization. Research associates it with satisfaction, engagement and the intention to stay. It helps explain whether a collaboration will be satisfying and lasting, not only what a person is able to produce.

Portage salarial is a French arrangement in which an independent professional finds their own missions and negotiates their rate, then becomes an employee of a portage company that invoices the client. They keep the protection of salaried status, unemployment insurance included, in exchange for management fees. Migbirds is not a portage salarial company.

Go further: TJM calculator

Predictive hiring bases a hiring or selection decision on evidence that anticipates future success, rather than on intuition or past track record alone. It combines methods whose validity has been studied: structured interviews, work samples, standardized behavioral assessments. It reduces the uncertainty of a hiring decision without ever removing it.

Predictive matching estimates, before a mission starts, how well a person and that mission will work together. It draws on technical skills, but also on behavior, motivation and the working context. The result is a prediction of fit rather than a certainty, and it is the approach Migbirds takes to bringing companies and freelance experts together.

Predictive validity measures how well the results of a selection method anticipate the future performance of the person selected. It is expressed as a correlation between the score obtained at selection and the performance observed afterwards. It is what makes it possible to compare an interview, a test or a work sample on a common basis.

Working en régie means a contractor works for a client under their own company's contract, often an ESN's, and that company bills for the time spent. It absorbs part of the administrative and legal burden in exchange for a margin. A direct freelancer, by contrast, contracts with the client and carries their own business risk.

Soft skills are the interpersonal and self-management abilities that shape how a person works with others and with themselves: communication, reliability, handling ambiguity, taking feedback. They are distinct from technical skills. Hard to read on a CV, they are better assessed through observable behavior than through what a candidate says about themselves.

Go further: Soft skills: definition, examples and list

A structured interview asks every candidate the same questions, in the same order, and scores each answer against a grid written before the interviews begin. It removes part of the bias of a free-flowing conversation, because candidates are compared on the same criteria. Selection research ranks it among the most predictive methods available.

Go further: How to assess soft skills before you hire

Technical skills are the know-how specific to a field: a programming language, an accounting standard, a piece of software, a method. They can be learned, certified and checked fairly easily at the start of a mission. Necessary as they are, they are not enough: a collaboration can fail on ways of working while the technical side held up.

The TJM (Taux Journalier Moyen) is the daily rate a French freelancer charges a client for one day of work. Quoted excluding tax, it covers the freelancer's own pay, their social contributions and their business expenses. It is calculated by dividing target annual revenue by the number of genuinely billable days.

Go further: TJM calculator

Work motivation is what drives a person to commit to their activity and to sustain the effort: meaning, autonomy, recognition, challenge, balance. Its drivers vary from one person to another. A mission that draws on the right drivers sustains engagement, while a mission that ignores them wears it down, even when the skills are there.