Outsourcing Heaven or Hell

A while back I already wrote about my outsourcing experiences and since I have recently upped the amount of work I outsource quite a bit, I thought I should write a short post about what I look for when hiring people.

I tried a few platforms to contact with people looking for freelance work but have mostly used getafreelancer.com so far. Before actually starting to outsource I read up a little bit on the subject and compared different projects that were already online to see what I could expect.

Gotta say though that I am amazed at what is being offered and expected at times, but also have noticed a lot of differences in work standard between one freelancer and the other. They say you get what you pay for but that really isn´t always the truth.

What I have noticed is that it is really important to clearly state what is being expected from the job at hand, in as much detail as possible and tried to find ways to separate those able to do the job well from those people who just look for a quick buck for as little work as possible.

Now, I am not saying here that I am expecting masterpieces for little money or anything like that, but I have felt at times that people actually accepted jobs without clearly understanding or knowing whether they would really be up for it in the first place.

First time I posted an ad looking for freelance writers, I got only a few responses so I didn´t have a lot of choices available. What I did learn though was that it was important to see how people were responding to my ad. The second time I posted an ad I used my experiences from the first time around and actually got well over 35 repsonses. This time though I had actually put a few points I really wanted to be answered in the replies and it just dazzled me just how bad some people actually had read my ad.

I decided I should test a little theory of mine just for the sake of testing and it is of course far from a scientific way to test, but it did show me a few things, that you might use when looking for freelancers to outsource some of your work.

Like I mentioned before, I ask a few questions in my ad that I want the freelancers response to, in order to see if they actually had read the ad in the first place. These questions were pretty simple, ranging from the amount they could handle a week, turn around time, their native language or the timezone they were in.

The responses I received can be devided into 2 types. The first type actually responded to my ad, told a little about themselves and then went on answering my questions. The second type responded by sending me a sample of their writing (something I had not asked for) and then went on about their expectations and experience level, without responding to my questions. Basically they were sending me a standard response they would probably send to many more “project buyers”.

I had a few exchanges of information and then went ahead and assigned a few small projects to a number of freelancers, rewriting 5 to 10 articles I needed and then just waited.

And guess what… those freelancers that had failed to respond to my questions in the initial ad, actually returned the work to a much lower standard than those who had taken the time to read and answer the questions.

So why would I have outsourced articles if I already had the gut feeling that the work done wouldn´t be all that great anyways? Simple, I wanted to be sure that my testing worked, after all I could be missing out on the possibility to work with a good freelancer, just because they had failed to answer a few small questions.

My number one tip when it comes to finding good freelancers is paying attention in your initial contacts, asking the right questions and see how they respond. When it sounds too good to be true, it normally is so try to find those people you feel have a realistic view of the work you want done. Having to wait for days to receive your work back and then find it really isn´t up to standards is not the most pleasant thing on earth so it pays off to spend a little time finding the right people in the first place.

Spelling mistakes in their answers  are obviously a tell tale sign they are not what you are looking for!

Have you ever thought about outsourcing some of your work or are you already doing it?

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