Get Proactive
You should be assessing each contractor from the very first contact. Do they answer your questions quickly and thoroughly? Do they seem to have a firm grasp on what you’re looking for? Beware that the courtship might be better than the marriage, but at least you’ll get an idea of what their work habits are.
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Don’t forget to take into account the different time zones and holidays when communicating with prospective contractors. An eight-hour delay in response may just mean it’s the middle of the night for them. And they may have different religious or cultural holidays that temporarily interrupt the workflow.
You also need to be responsive to their questions. Set the example that you’re professional, legitimate, and a great client to work for. This will help the best contractors choose to work for you. It’s a two-way street, don’t forget.
Jeff Crystal, COO at Voltaic Systems (www.voltaicsystems.com), has used Elance hires extensively to build his business. Selecting the right contractor is critical in his eyes. Jeff says, “For us, it isn’t so much the money lost [if you hire the wrong person], but the time spent trying to manage someone who isn’t quite right.”
In this light, being proactive in assessing who’s best is a great way to speed up the selection process. What you actually choose to do will depend on your project, but consider the following ideas.
Key Questions
Sometimes a well-placed question will reveal a potential problem. The issue may be big enough that you choose not to work with that contractor, or they may be perfectly manageable once you know they exist.
Consider the following three questions successful Elance clients use with prospective hires:
• Tell me about a job that went bad. This might lead to revealing how they solve problems or what type of relationship skills they have.
• Is there anything that could keep you from completing this project on time? Find potential bugaboos in the form of vacations or different cultural or religious holidays.
• Is there anything you think I’m missing in this project before I get started? This opens up how creative or keyed into your vision they are. If they give you a canned response to sell more services, that’s one thing. But they also might genuinely identify gaps you hadn’t thought of.
Test-Drives
One of the most common bits of advice successful clients have regarding how to hire contractors is to give them a small project to do first. Sometimes due to the nature of the project this isn’t practical. But often it’s the key to seeing how they really function.
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It’s absolutely forbidden by Elance to ask a contractor to do work for free. You can’t ask them to do sample writing, but you can ask them for samples of writing. You can’t request trial programming, but you can ask to see what they’ve done in the past.
One way to do this is to break your project into chunks and give a piece to a few different contractors. This way the job still gets done, but you see how each contractor works for consideration when the bigger projects begin.
Another way is to have a select few contractors do the same job for you. At the beginning this is more expensive, but it can pay off big in the long run. Now you’ll really know who does the job the best, on time, and in a positive and creative way.
The Phone Interview
Many clients swear by the phone or Skype interview. This is done only for short-listed prospects and gives you the chance to see how they respond to your questions. Know what you’re going to ask in advance, and try to think of nonstandard questions to get them thinking outside the box.
Through these conversations, you can get into the nitty-gritty of the project. You also become one step closer to them because you’re having real interaction. Be sure to take notes and confirm anything you agree on in an email afterward.