How to Find the Right Freelancer

how to hire the right freelancer tutorials tips and tricks

Finding the right freelancer takes time. I was hiring people on Odesk, Elance, Upwork and from maybe 100 people I hired, less than 10 managed to exceed my expectations. Freelance sites are flooded with incompetent people with fake profiles.

Some of them are actually good in what they’re doing, but you may have a hard time to keep them work for you. Don’t be surprised if your “freelancer” suddenly disappears in the middle of project… that usually means that he got some better deal and left you hanging! After all, the word freelancer describes freedom, a complete freedom to run away in the most unexpected moment!

The golden rule for finding the right freelancer is patience! Take time to filter out all those low budget contractors, shoot high and wait till the perfect match shows up. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. So stop wasting your time expecting that you can get some quality work done for a few pennies.

The more money you offer and invest in your project, the more you’ll be able to benefit from it in a long run. Let’s say that you’re looking to hire a WordPress developer to make you a brand new site. And among many freelancers you pick the cheapest one who is willing to do it for $100 bucks. Even though someone can technically make you a site for small money, that doesn’t mean that the site will meet all the coding standards, be properly optimized and able to bring you more clients.

The Hiring Process

  • Publish your job offer on a freelance site
  • Be as detailed as possible
  • In your job offer settings, highlight that you’re looking only for people with 4.5 stars rating or above
  • Drastically increase your budget in order to get the attention of highly skilled freelancers
  • In your job offer description add some simple question and request from freelancers to provide an answer along with the cover letter. Simple trick to filter out spammers
  • Set preffered countries or regions
  • Use Escrow for payments, never pay upfront and look to avoid the hourly based contracts
  • After you start getting bids, pick the most expensive freelancers, check out their profiles, ratings, job history, portfolio and initiate an interview
  • Always doublecheck the portfolio (!), some freelancers are using other people’s projects
  • Interview only those people who dedicated their time to write a unique cover letter completely related to your job offer (the most of the cover letters are recycled and used over and over again which is not good, that does not show the real interest)
  • During the interview check does freelancer has all the skills you need, check his availability and if possible schedule a phone call
  • If freelancer is not fluent in English, find someone else

Here’s the list of best freelance sites where you can find developers, designers, writers, marketers, sales people and other contractors for your next project.

Upwork

Guru

Freelancer

99designs

PeoplePerHour

WordPress Services and Support