Finding Freelance Workers for any IT type related job. Part 1

If you are looking for a freelance web designer or programmer and you are looking to keep your cost down then a service like oDesk is the perfect solution (there are many other benefits as well but I’m not going to be covering them here).

I recently had experience with the oDesk web platform and found it very easy for hiring a web professional.  Overall, the odesk.com interface is intuitive and streamlined and you will not have a  problem navigating its swiftly written desktop like web interface.

The rest of this post covers what a job post process looks like. In this particular instance I’m looking for  freelance graphic designer to create a header for a WordPress site.

First, I’ll go to oDesk.com and setup an account.  Once I’m logged in I go to My Jobs –> Post a Job.

1. I’ll name the Job Title “Graphic Design”, then select Public Visibility since in this case I want a freelancer or in oDesk terms a “provider” to approach me for the job.

NOTE:  Try to be as specific as possible on your job title.

Then I set  Category to Design & Multimedia and Subcategory specifically to Graphic Design.

2. Under Skills and Description I’m simply looking for a header for my friend’s site that runs on WordPress (I’ll show you the before and after on a later post once the job is completed) so I’ll get to the point and put in just that in a few words or less.

3. This is a one time job so I’m going to set the Job type to Fixed Price for a budget of $20.00 and set the estimated end date to this Friday.

4. Once everything looks good for my ready to hire web graphics designer I’m going to click “Post this Job Opening”.

As soon as the job is posted you’ll start to receive applications within minutes and to prove that I’m showing you right here. Keep in mind this is a very low budget project but look how I already have 5 candidates in as little as 16 minutes.

Next, I’m going to click on the number of candidates (see image above) then sort by “number of feedbacks” once all the applicants are displayed. I like the feedback attribute as I think that’s the best way to get a feel for someone’s quality of work as well as experience.  After looking at feedback I like to look at hours worked and finally make sure my pricing has been met.

This job is not that complex so I’m going to make my pick fairly quick. However, I usually mark my top 5-10 applicants as favorites and go on then next step, looking at each candidates’ profile.

This next step allows me to look at the portfolio of the  freelance or freelances that have applied for my posted job. I can click on each of the profiles and look at an overview of their scope of work, their Résumé, Work History & Feedback (Very Important), Test (yes, oDesk contains test for anyone posting as a provider) and last Portfolio.

I like this provider so much that I’m going to pull the trigger and hire her for my web design job. All I need I need to do is click on HIRE at the top of the profile window and my newly hired web designer will get in touch with me.

The best is yet to come, on my next post I’ll show you how you can see screenshots of what a provider is actually working on when he/she is clocked in under your dollar. oDesk is one of the only sites with this type of feature and really sets the standard on these sorts of sites.