OutsourceSurvival.com

This series of articles will help you achieve a much higher success rate on your projects by discussing how you can determine a good outsourcer/freelancer from a bad one. While it’s not 100% perfect, using my approach will dramatically improve your chances. I’ve used this approach on dozens of projects, and found that it has a excellent success rate.

When hiring a freelancer, we’re looking for someone who is adequately skilled, can communicate effectively, and who is going to take an interest in your work. It can be frustratingly difficult to find all of these qualities.

It’s also pretty common knowledge amongst freelancer’s that this is what most entrepreneurs are looking for. So it’s not surprising that on any given project, many of the bids received are designed to convince you that the bidder has all of these qualities… some bidders even go to the extreme of not addressing your project criteria at all; and instead focus on the touchy-feely ‘look how friendly I am’ stuff.

If you’re new to outsourcing, it’s normal to be drawn to the happy-friendly-feel good bidder. They make you feel comfortable and they always seen nice. I made this mistake early on, believing that many of these bidders must be so experienced, so smart, so great, that they need not concern themselves with the details of my project. I’ve had some major disasters (projects breaking down once the details are worked out) as a result, and I implore you to ignore feel good bidders and focus on my criteria below. Getting someone you can work with is important, but it’s essential that you don’t get drawn into the empty sales pitch!

So how do you pick a good freelancer?

I’m going to drop a list here, and I’ll discuss in more detail over the course of the series. In a vaguely prioritised order (things change depending on the work), the following are key considerations for finding the right freelancer. Under each group, i’ve put a list to the relevant article so that you can see the detailed discussion.

Websites and Resources

• Where to look and where not to look

You can find this article here.

Customer Feedback/Ratings and Work History

• Overall ratings and how to interpret them
• Past customer comments
• Past project size and volume

You can find this article here.

Quality of communication

• Responsiveness
• Comprehension of English and writing ability
• Willingness to be flexible/innovative
• Their approach, pushy or helpful

Price

• Is higher better?
• What’s a fair price?

Portfolio quality

• Does the work look similar to what you want
• Is it the right kind of work?
• Is it consistent?
  

Bid Quality

• Did they meet your requirements
• Did they provide a unique response
• Have they indicated that they can meet your deadline
• Reality Checks

You can find this article here.

Current workload

• How many projects
• What size projects
• Future availability

Interview performance (larger projects $4k+)

• What to expect
• Things to ask

General (web) background check

• Try and nail down their web identity

When I started writing these, and it quickly became clear that it was going to be much too long for a single article. So, I’m going to make each topic an individual post. As I go through, I’ll update this page with links to each of the subtopics. Should make navigation a bit easier for you too