Hiring a freelancer is often something that business owners hate but unfortunately at times, cannot be avoided. It used to be something I avoided like the plague, mainly because after hiring a freelancer, the quality of work wasn’t good or something went wrong.
But eventually, thousands of dollars later, I worked out how to consistently hire great freelancers while also making the process a lot more pleasant.
Here are four actionable tips to help you consistently hire great freelancers every time.
1) Include All Details of the Job
This one is probably the most important one on the list. While it sounds obvious, including all the details of the job in your listing is crucial. Looking back, I used to create the blandest and shortest job posts because I found it to be such a tedious task.
Once I had looked through Upwork and found a few freelancers that I thought were good, I’d hire one or two of them. When it became time for them to start working, I found myself springing lots of new tasks on them – all of which were not in the job description. Starting off the working relationship like this was bad and meant that they didn’t stick around for long.
To avoid this, before creating your job listing on your freelance site of choice, write down all the tasks you need doing. For example, if you need an article written, detail every single thing you want in the article – include the topic, the writing style, the word count etc. Do this until you cannot possibly think of anything else to add. I typically type everything out in Notepad as I can just copy and paste it into the freelance site once completed.
2) Pay Enough
I have seen some fairly wild job listings in my time. Things like “You must have a Masters degree – do NOT apply unless you do!!” priced sensibly at $3 – for the whole project. Your job listing is the first interaction you have with your potential freelancer. It allows them to get a feel for how you are and what you might be like to work for. Pricing your job ridiculously low will only make the best freelancers avoid it altogether.
In order to find out what to pay, just search for similar jobs and check what people are offering. After you’ve looked at around ten to twenty listings or so you will have a good idea of how much to pay. Once you do, I recommend adding another 10-20% to your final price. If you are paying more than everyone else, it will attract better quality freelancers to your job listing.
3) Find out Their Availability
Another thing I never used to do was find out when my freelancer was actually going to be available. Not just in terms of working hours but also if I need to contact them, when would I get a reply? I once had some freelancers that were based in Thailand and as I’m in the UK, it meant sometimes half a day or more before I got a reply from them. In addition to this, some freelancers may have full-time jobs in the week and so may not reply or be able to complete your work until the weekend.
Therefore the best thing to do is to work out how many hours your job or task requires, as well as the times finding out when they are available and accessible. That way there will be no communication problems and everything will go smoothly.
4) Do a Test Job
Tests jobs are great because you get to find out immediately how well your freelancer will perform. If it doesn’t work out, no hard feelings. If it does work out, great. Finding out that your freelancer actually is not a good fit after you offer them the job is not great and can cost you a lot of time and money.
If you choose to do a test job make sure it is paid! Unfortunately, there are many people online that won’t pay for a test job or even the “test” job was actually an elaborate way to get free work. This is totally unfair to the freelancer. Even if it is just a test job, they are still carrying out some work and they deserve to be paid for their time.
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