A short how-to by Julie Broad explaining three tips for hiring on Elance (now Upwork). She walks viewers through posting detailed job descriptions, recommends limiting the proposal window (default 14 days; she suggests 3–7 days), prefers fixed-price jobs over hourly to control cost, and describes a filtering process: remove extreme bids, check who read the proposal (look for tailored replies), review sample work and balanced client reviews, then choose based on quality and price. She also notes she sends small/simple tasks to Fiverr.
Questions this video answers
June 13, 2015.
14 days.
3–7 days (she says 'three, maybe seven days at the most').
Fiverr.
Fixed-price (set price limit) rather than hourly.
Chapters
Elance can be an awesome source to help you with your online presence, but choosing a provider can blow your mind and it can be really hard to know who is actually the right fit to help you. So today I've got three tips to help you when you're picking your Elance provider. So check it out. Hey there. I'm Julie Broad of havemoreinfluence.com I hiring people on Elance is awesome. It means you can get all kinds of help for your website, your social media, your tech problems, your videos, your podcasts, whatever it is that you're doing to create authority so people know your name and recognize you as the expert in your industry. So it's awesome because you don't need all these skills. However, it can be really challenging when you put a job out there. So. So you go to Elance. Let's just head on over to the Elance website, shall we? Let's go there together and let me walk you through. So you'll post a job and you're going to want to put as much detail in that job as possible. Now, Elance is great. They give you some examples. They give you skill sets to choose from. They even recommend certain providers based on some of the keywords you're using. So they've made it fairly easy. But you're going to want to know what you're looking for. So if you're an author and you're going to Elands to get somebody to create a book cover for you, in order to get the best quotes for your job, you're going to need to provide them with all kinds of information. What size is your book? What colors do you want? Give them your profile picture. You're going to need to include the different text, the testimonial options. There's lots of pieces that you'll need to include. Give them as much detail as possible, then submit your job. Now, often I think the default's 14 days. I recommend having three, maybe seven days at the most. Okay. Because you're going to probably get a whole bunch of people giving you offers. Now, typically I post my job so they have a set price limit versus the hourly rate. There's arguments for both, but for me, I like to know going in how much it's going to cost me versus multiple revisions or sorry versus paying by the hour. Now, you may want to assure somebody that this is only for two or three revisions because some providers may be very hesitant to bid on your job if they think it's going to be endless. An endless array of revisions. Okay, so you posted your job and now you start getting. Within minutes, you'll probably start to get people responding and you could end up with 50 to 100 responses. So how do you choose? What do you do? Well, first of all, I skim them and I will initially throw out anybody who's ridiculously cheap or ridiculously expensive. So I'm going to throw out the outliers. This may or may not be a good approach, but this is how I do it. Okay. I've also typically researched the jobs in advance so I have a sense of what I can expect to pay. And I might research it by looking at other elance jobs that have been posted, looking at places, if it's a design job, places like 99designs, or asking around in forums and blogs and other places that might be appropriate places to ask. Then if there's other, other prices that are just really high, I might get rid of them just to eliminate it down to only evaluating 10 or 15 people. Once I have a group of 10 to 15, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at who actually read my proposal because a lot of them submit a totally standard template reply and that's okay if I have a very standard request. So a banner for a website, for example, which by the way, small work like that I always send over to fiverr F I V E R r dot com. But if I have a basic standard work, then it's okay if they replied with a template. But for a lot of my jobs it's very specified and I want to see if they actually read it because I want to know if they're replying and proposing something that actually fits my needs or if it's just a template reply that they use to everybody. So I'll then narrow it down from there. If they actually read it, maybe if I had questions or comments, or if they have suggestions that specifically apply to my proposal, then it allows you to rate them. So I'm going to start giving them ratings. The providers don't see those ratings, by the way. That's just for you to filter out to choose your provider. So, number one, have they read my proposal and really, truly understood what I was looking for? Did they make good suggestions or comments or ask questions that show they understood subject to that. I then look at other work they've done to see if it's similar to the work that I'm asking for and if I like their work. So if it's design work, I'm going to want to review other design work to see if I like it. So I know they read my proposal. I like some of their work. Now I'm going to read some of the reviews. I'm going to skim. I typically will not pay attention to one person with a one star. What I'm looking for is a bunch of people that have given them three or four stars. And I'm going to read why. I'm going to read why. If everybody gives them five stars or they have no reviews, I'm not always that keen on that either. Right. So I'm looking for balanced reviews that say they were responsive, they were talented, they were good, they accepted revisions, they accepted feedback. Those are some of the things I'm looking for. Then finally, I'm going to look at price. Price is important, but initially I got rid of the expensive ones and the cheap ones. So these ones are all should be within a range that I'm happy with. So now I'm going to filter it based on price. So I'm giving all of them a rating based on these things. Assuming they fit all the criteria, then I'll probably go with the lowest price. But I might not. I might go with somebody that I loved their work and maybe they're a little more expensive. It's going to depend. But hopefully that filter helps you think this through, because I know elance is awesome, but it can be very overwhelming hiring people and feeling like you got the best person for the job.
