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Welcome to Part II of how to use customer feedback to select a freelancer. This article covers how to analyse and vet customer comments, as well as how to do a simple web background check.

This article is part of a series on How to Select a Great Freelancer Online.

You can find Part 1 here.

Read the recent positive comments

Don’t just take an average rating as your guide, jump in and read customer comments. In particular, find jobs that sound like yours and see what customers had to say. Were they ecstatic or just so-so? Check the English quality in the posts, if you find recurring grammatical errors, or strangely recurring comments. Not everyone is an English major, but sometimes these little things can help you identify falsified comments, or at least suspect ones.

Customer’s Seem to Have a Positive Review Bias

Be aware that customers are often coerced, begged, cajoled by their freelancer to leave favourable comments. The freelancer may also try and use their personal relationship with the customer as leverage to ensure that ‘minor issues’ are left out of reviews. Some flippant examples…

“Look how hard we worked for you, it COST ME money to finish your work!”

“Hugh my friend, it has been an honour to work with you. I will leave excellent feedback for you. I would be privileged if you would do the same!

Why mention this? Are they bad people for trying to sway your grade? No… it’s just business. A bit of a gentle squeeze can add a few points to their average rating, and a few extra dollars in their pocket.

The point I want to make is that glossy reviews are more the norm than the exception. Average providers with charismatic ‘front men’ will have very similar high positive ratings, to technically excellent providers. You need to look very closely to see the difference.

An average quality freelancer will provide a worse experience then an excellent one; but they’ll do a better job convincing you that there were good reasons why you had trouble! The fact that there is a positive bias in customer reviews is another reason why outsourcers with bad ratings should generally be avoided. Read the rest of this entry

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? Read the rest of this entry