Your First Outsource Job - Selecting a Freelancer

Let me make it very clear. The better the clarity of your job offer, the more likely people will bid on it.  I’m not saying you have to give all the details, but you need to create a very concrete requirement.

Look at it from the viewpoint of the freelancer. They are usually going to bid based on how much effort it takes them to do the job. If it’s not possible to accurately gauge the effort required, there’s no way to create a decent bid.

If you’ve followed the directions from part I in this series, you should have a pretty solid job offer. With a solid offer, you will receive plenty of bids. I’d say that on average, for the last year, I’ve been getting over 50 bids for most of my projects. Some highly technical ones get as few as 8-10. Some of the easiest get will over 100. Asking to get some articles written will most likely bag you 40-60 bids.

So You’ve Got Your Bids

Now, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? Most of the freelancer bid sites have similar information. For the purpose of explanation, we’ll use getafreelancer, my favorite for this type of work.

The following graphic will show you some of the information you’ll receive with each bid.

• A) Name of the Bidder. Clicking on this link will bring you to the bidder’s profile, which contains lots of valuable information about the bidder.
• B) The Bid for your project. This is what they claim they will do the project for. Read the small print. Sometimes, in a case like this one where we’re asking for several articles, they may list the ‘per article’ price. Price is important but not the only important element
• C) Provider Rating. At all the bidding sites, the freelancers are give rating reviews after projects. They consider this the most important result of a project. They depend on getting perfect reviews. Just a few lower scores can put them out of contention for some business. This is the strongest thing you can hold against them, if they don’t do what you want, and it’s a good indicator of past success. Obviously, a high number of reviews indicates many successful projects. In this case, we’re looking at a very successful freelancer - lots of business, lots of good reviews.
• D) The Bid Comment. It is very common for them to leave just a bit of information here, and put most of the feedback in the “Personal Message” on the Personal Message Board (PMB). That way the messages can’t be read by the other bidders.
• E) Links to the Personal Message Board (PMB) where you can carry on a dialog with this bidder.
• F) The bidder’s estimate on how long it will take to do the job. Take this with a grain of salt. Delays from comments, responses, evaluations, etc, are never taken into account.
• G) Time of Bid. When they placed this bid.
• H) Note Space. A place for you to place a personal note, nobody but you can see, about this bid.
• I) Bid Management. Several ways of disqualifying bids are available in the perform actions area.

Different Types of Bidders

If you have a quantity of bids, and now understand what the bid looks like, and what the bid information means, you can start evaluating the bids.

In general, the bids will come from 6 types of bidders.

1. Spammers. These guys don’t even read the details, they throw a bid out on everything. One way to combat this is to place a distinctive comment in your project requirement. For example: “Please write the words “Read and Understood” at the beginning of your response to indicate you have read and understood the requirements. Bids without these words will be ignored.” If you get a low-ball bid that says something like, “Hello, let’s get going, thanks!” I’d probably run.
2. Newbies. These bidders have no previous experience (or very little). Their bid prices may be all over the place. Again, for the most part, at this point you are better off ignoring this. If neither of you have much experience at this, you’re more likely to have issues. With a few jobs under your belt, you may want to go mining here as well.
3. Low Experience, Low Prices. There are bidders out there who do a good job and are looking to grow their business. They are willing to charge below market prices to build up their experience, and to create new business relationships. They are the most likely to be influenced by the aspect of future business. I will consider some of their offers.
4. High Experience, High Prices. These guys have been there and done that. You can review their work, and see the capability. They are often ‘teams’ and sometimes will present the work of one team member, and put a different on on the job. I’ll sometimes choose these if I know the rep of the bidder, and need exceptional work, fast.
5. High Experience, Low Prices. Yep, it happens. Lots of experience, low-to-reasonable price. Many times they’ve either done the job before, or have enough expertise that it’s very easy for them. Also, different areas have different per hour rates. US may be more expensive than India, but the Phillipines may be much cheaper than India. Obviously this is the sweet spot for our bid analysis.
6. Low Experience, High Price. Unless you’re just a good samaritan, or a sucker, why would you go there?

Making Your Choice

Personally, I like to look at the most experienced, high rated bidders, take the top 10-20% for example, and look at the best prices being bid by them. I’ll verify from their past history that this is their main area of expertise. I’ll then mark anything more expensive than the one or two I pick out, “not interested.”

Next I’ll go to my remaining bidders, and look for those that have some experience, (at least 4-5) and find the best prices among these.

If the price difference is negligible, I’ll go with the most experienced, and start the final discussion before assigning the project. If there is a big difference, I may go with the cheaper one, or, quite often, I’ll do both! If the cheaper one is 1/3 of the price of the more expensive one, I’ll sometimes offer them the same contract, just for them. I can build up a stable of inexpensive freelancers this way, who will likely be loyal to me, if I gave them business when they were starting out. With articles, graphics, simple things, it’s quite reasonable to create two projects. Assign the current one to the high-bidder, and create a new one, with ‘closed’ bidding, and offer it to the cheaper one at the previously bid price.

At this point I know what I want done, and I know who I want to do it, and how much I should pay.

Next, it’s time to finalize details. Make sure you have multiple ways to contact them. Review their previous work. Make it clear how many sample you need for things like graphics. Determine a payment schedule. Make it clear when a project is finished. Get all this agreed to BEFORE you finally assign the task.

NEXT: Managing Your Outsourced Task