Hiring on Elance- how to get amazing people for $5 more than the awful ones.
After Max Klein’s great post on hiring developers on RentACoder, it seems opportune to write about how we constantly hire amazing people on Elance.
The trick? Refuse to hire Indian and Pakistani firms, state your preference for individuals, and go for $15-$20 instead of $10-$15.
Indian and Pakistani firms are almost universal in their awfulness- horror stories abound. Part of this is a cultural mismatch- it’s tougher to work with an Indian firm than a European or American firm, simply because the cultures are different. People are less willing to tell you when something is going wrong, far less likely to give reasonable estimates, and generally less competent. India has had wages go up quite a bit, so the people you can get for $10/hour today are not the people you could get for $10 fifteen years ago.
But here’s the thing I think is key- if you are a developer in Romania or Hungary, you have to learn English to learn to program. You have to be near fluent to get access to the resources you need to learn. If you’re from India, it’s important to learn English, but it’s not critical. You can get by on Hindi- you can’t get by on Hungarian or Romanian.
The other great thing with $15-$25 is that, when you get bids at that level from people in emerging markets, they’re usually reaching. They usually can’t get that rate full-time, not by a long shot, so they ask for that as their first quote, and then go lower. This opens the door for long-term engagements- if you can pay $5/hour more and have someone talented whom you can depend on, why wouldn’t you go for that? $20-$25 gives you the top tier of talent in Romania, for instance. $10-$15 gives you average folks. Will you get plenty of bids at $10? Sure! But you’ll get much, much better bids at $15-$25.
Finally, hire individuals. Firms bounce you around, firms have bureaucracies, you won’t ever be able to bring a firm in-house if the work goes great. You’ll be one of five clients, one of ten clients- they need to make you happy to make payroll this week, but there are another four people they need to make happy to keep the money flowing for the rest of the month. Individuals, on the other hand, usually work one contract at a time when dealing with bigger projects- they have every incentive in the world to focus their attention on making your project a success. And, if all goes well, you can even hire them full-time. Awesome, eh?
On the whole we’ve had really phenomenal success hiring everyone from illustrators to Android developers on Elance- quality’s been fantastic, work’s been speedy, billed hours more than fair. The above rules of thumb really go back to one thing- be fair to your freelancers and they’ll be fair to you. If they’re doing really fantastic work, above and beyond your expectations, give them a bonus or increase their pay. Let them know how much you appreciate them busting their asses for you. Be consistent in the amount of work you provide, bundle up requests, and make it easy for them to plan their cashflow. Filter up front to get great bids, then, when you’ve selected someone, treat them great- not only is it the right thing to do, it’s the profitable thing to do.
