How do you find excellent freelancers? Any particular people you recommend?
I'd like to hire a couple of freelancers with specialist skills to help me work on projects related to Inbox When Ready.
I'm keen to pay high rates for talented freelancers who, given a clear brief, can deliver excellent results with high autonomy.
What search process do you use for finding people like this? Approaches I'm considering:
(a) Ask my network
(b) Search on freelancer platforms (Upwork etc)
(c) Search Google for freelancer portfolios.
Approach (a) hasn't yielded any great leads yet, so I may need to try (b) and (c).
I'm quite pessimistic about approaches (b) and (c), mainly because of following priors:
(i) Most freelancers who are >= 95th talent percentile won't advertise on platforms like Upwork.
(ii) Some (many?) freelancers who are >= 95th talent percentile won't bother maintaining online portfolios (since almost all their clients will come via recommendation).
(iii) Most freelancers who are >=95th talent percentile will have so many work requests that they will be very selective about the kind of projects they take on. If I reach out to such people without an introduction then I may have some trouble convincing them to consider me as a client.
Two questions for the IH community:
- If you've successfully hired brilliant freelancers to help with your projects, how did you find them?
- Are there any particular freelancers you'd be willing to recommend?
(If you think any or all of my priors are wrong I'd also be interested to hear that.)
I use Upwork to hire freelancers pretty frequently. The platform itself is kind of klunky and awkward to use, but I've found quality freelancers from it.
I see you're looking for help with illustration and writing. I've written two articles about hiring for that through Upwork:
Some other things I've found useful:
Define the acceptance criteria
I once made the mistake of telling a developer, "I want a library that does X, and it should be possible to run scripts to install it on Linux/Windows/OS X." The developer came back with just the library, but no install scripts. I asked where the scripts were and they said it was "possible" to write one to install it, but I didn't explicitly ask for one.
Now when I commission software projects, I define objective acceptance criteria. "The project is complete when you deliver X, Y, and Z. It should take input A and turn it into output B."
Good communicators trump almost everything else
I love freelancers who overcommunicate. Even if they flood me with information, it's much easier for me to just skim and take in what I need. I can usually tell from their cover letters or our first few exchanges that they're a good communicator.
I hate the opposite. I think IM is a hugely inefficient medium for communication, so I don't like when freelancers rely on that and dribble out questions or information one little bit at a time, forcing me to keep context switching.
The only language I speak well enough to hire someone for is English, so I look for people whose English is very strong. I've hired people whose English is advanced but not fluent and it actually ends up biting me more often than not. Little miscommunications add up because you have to go back and forth to clarify more often and more work is wasted due to information getting lost in translation.
Beware of jack of all trades
A lot of freelancers will stuff their profiles with a million skills. If I'm hiring for something like Golang, I'll instantly reject anyone whose profile says they're also WordPress experts. I think if someone was actually a talented Golang developer, there's enough demand that they'd have no need to take WordPress jobs, which pay much less.
Start with small jobs
Instead of trying to hire the perfect candidate, I screen pretty lightly up front. I read their cover letter, reviews, and their skills, but then I just hire for something small, like a one-week job and basically treat that as the interview.
Understand the biases in ratings
Keep in mind that ratings on sites like Upwork are made by people who are not deeply familiar with software. So they're rating on things like whether the software looks pretty and whether it was delivered on time. The ratings generally don't reflect things a developer might care about like maintainability of the code.
Your prejudices aren't only holding you back from results, they can be interpreted as insulting. Ask yourself why you hold these prejudices, see where it leads.
The essence is that you need to find someone. So start looking everywhere instead of scrapping all of your options before you've even tried them.
And remember that finding good people depends on the methods of the recruiter - do a bad job at recruiting and testing, give a bad offer, or try to recruit people you're not qualified to recruit/test, and you'll get bad results.
More than ever, the words "brilliant" and "excellent" should be discarded. It's used as an insult to mean people aren't "brilliant" when they don't meet and exceed all of our own wishes, while most often we're the ones who are lacking the knowledge, skills or perspective to recruit the right people in the first place.
What you need isn't >5%, what you need is good communication to get the results you're trying to achieve with a minimum of risk. Especially not for a trivial browser extension...
N.B. I've slightly edited my original post for tone since Sébastian posted this comment.
I'm happy that it helped to nudge your perspective and that you're reacting positively.
I was harsh in my own tone, but I'm on the other side. I'm the tech person you might want to hire, but I always get disappointed when people are looking to hire and base their phrasing/decisions/thoughts on wrong prejudices because of their own shortcomings. That's partly why I only work on my own projects these days.
A different way of phrasing it: you wouldn't go to your baker and demand that (s)he's in the top 5% of the world's bakers, and not related to sites such as Upbread.com (play on Upwork.com), before allowing them to bake you a bread. You just want regular bread.
FWIW, the specific skills I'd like to hire for are:
If you're a brilliant freelancer who specialises in one (or more) of these areas, I'd love to hear from you :)
Hey Peter, would love to talk further about your design needs... drop me a DM?
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Oh, man, I would stay away from Upwork and similar platforms. I mean, you can obviously get work done cheaply, but it's pretty hard holding the developers accountable; and if you're not well versed in programming yourself, you'll never know whether or not your program or software is littered with bugs because buddy rushed to finish it in order to get the paycheck asap.
Go with Upwork. I don't think you generate enough revenue to pay a developer over $50/h. You can find decent developers on Upwork. What you should do is find a technical co-founder once the platform takes off. This is what I would do anyway.
Speaking from other side of the table, I offer my services at UpWork, Reddit and at my blog. I have found UpWork to be really cut throat with clients usually opting for the lowest bidders.
On the positive side, most of my long term clients came from UpWork.
Hello Peter, I am an experienced freelancer in the following items of your list:
Please find my email and website on my profile page, I hope to hear from you soon.
Hello, nice question.
In my opinion first should definite precisely a freelancer for what ?
I think every specialists are grouped by communities. I'm UX designer i will rarely go to an events about code or DevOps.
And then if you're looking for someone in particular go to meet up, conferences about the subject, or find slack and other private online communities. Introduce yourself and your project.
I have had luck with looking at top contributors to github projects I am using.
Knowing they know the technology and having the ability to see their output are the big benefits to using this method.
Hi! I can help you with your projects. Ping me at bojan.programer@gmail.com
Hey Peter. I'm a consultant in web / mobile solutions (JavaScript).
Your points seem to be reasonable and I'd like to mention that it's not only about the qualification of talents but It's a two-way street. If you have right skills to communicate/manage properly then freelancers would happy to work with you.
At the same time, I see two extremes in the clients.
• Micromanaging
• Rough requirements
Failing to this two ends could lead to broken relationships.
Moreover, most of the freelancers are developing tech skills but the soft skills are developing along whole life which is obviously harder to do. That's why it's hard to find reliable engineers which fit your requirements.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago