You have already decided you need freelancers and are new to the world of hiring one. How do you go about doing this? You can do this easily within a few days without taking on any stress. There are a free tools to help you connect with one. In any hiring process, there are three stages: Preparation, Interview and Work-After. In this article, I’ll share with you things I’ve done in each of them.
Preparation
Preparation starts from the time you start to find a freelancer. First impression matters here even more. Just like how long distance relationships are different from in-place relationships. Put yourself in the candidates shoes and ask yourself - What would I want to know to do about the job effectively?
- Job description as clear as possible.
- What kind of a person do you want to hire? Experience?
- How much can you pay the person? - Do you want pay hourly or fixed cost?
- How long do you want the person for - 1 week? 1 month?
- Does the location of the freelancer matter? If so where do you prefer.
Tools
Now, let’s go find the discovery tool that has the best group of people you listed in #2. Here is a small subset of tools I’ve used.
Upwork - This has been my go-to tool for all my tasks so far. Most popular among them all
PeoplePerHour - Another upward kinda thing. I found a lot of European freelancers in here.
Dribbble - Best for design
Behance - Another one for design
Now, you always have a choice to simply cold email people you’d like to work with. You’d be surprised how many responses I’ve gotten by doing that.
Interview
Let’s say you have chosen Upwork, now create a job and start finding the freelancer that fits the profile. After the job is submitted, you’ll soon start receiving interests. When the freelancer is interested, first - ask them if they have any questions on the job description. This makes the candidate comfortable and feeling being heard. Up to you to do an interview in any way you want. I’ve found it useful for them to do a sample task so that the candidate can get a feel for the task before they want to accept this job as well. Neither of you want to get to a place where you are not happy with each other. During this test run is when you should really observe how the candidate works. Things to observe:
- How long do they take to start the sample task
- How long to understand your response when they ask any questions. - this will tell you how their comprehension skills are.
- How long to complete the task? How far away is this from what you estimated a task to take?
- Are you happy with what they did?
Finally, when they are done - ask them for the feedback. How did they like working with you? Always always consider the candidate. You want to hire a a good candidate and not want to go through this process again.
After
Let’s skip ahead to when you have found a freelancer, what tools do you use to keep in touch. Upwork has all the tools built-in namely - messaging and video calling. The candidate also has to log the hours so you know you are not being over charged if doing an hourly job. Here is two other tools I’ve found useful - Trello board and Google Docs. Both are practically free.
With a trello board, you can assign tasks to your new freelancer and watch the progress. Take some time to setup a trello board and spend some time with the freelancer to walk through how you plan on assigning tasks and keeping track.
Documentation is key. You want everything written down so that it can be traced back for later when the contract is over. Google docs will help with this.
I created M-Thurs every week for a 1-1 sync . This gives an opportunity to re-evaluate where things are and any questions you both may have. I know things are working well when all the communication is async and there is no need for a 1-1. This means that the freelancer pings you then and there when there is a question and leaves comments or responds to google doc questions.
The process so far is done for a single freelancer. Would it change for more hires? Not really, you still need to do your due diligence and get them onboard. However, one key thing to watch out for in a team is to intra-team communication. Create a slack channel to keep conversations public.
Hope you found this useful. Let me know if you have other tips hiring freelancers, feel free to email me at pv1@alumni.cmu.edu