How do you grow your startup with Online Freelancers?
by Startacus Admin
How do you grow your startup with Online Freelancers? Kjetil Olsen, vice-president of Elance Europe highlights some of his top tips on hiring talents, freelancers & partners online successfully using Elance.com
As a startup you never have enough cash on hand. You just don’t. Therefore you need to stretch the cash that you do have as much as possible and spend
your time on what is most valuable for your business.
Earlier, launching a business could be a bit of a hassle. You needed a bookkeeper, an accountant, a website designer and a programmer. All of them you would have to locate within your local network, or at least within friends of friends. This made a lot of ideas, just be ideas and not actually tested and realized businesses.
Even, despite the economic climate, aspiring entrepreneurs should be feeling cautiously optimistic. The web today is providing a new range of opportunities to help small businesses access knowledge, tools and even personnel, all available at the touch of a button. Meaning, your ideas and business can be realized within days.
Elance.com is one of the platforms that can help you get started. Elance allow businesses to hire talented temporary workers for a variety of tasks from translation and business writing to fixing code on your website. Hiring freelancers who work remotely is an easy way to reduce overheads and quickly increase your workforce in times of high demand. Hiring a cloud-based workforce cuts costs, allows you to react flexibly to times of high demand and opens the door for freelancers to global business operations.
To start using Elance for hiring talents, freelancers and partners online here is my advice on how to do this succesfull. I will do it by answering three key questions:
How do you find the right talent?
Attracting the Freelancer
You can do a lot to attract the best talent to your projects. One way to do this is through your job post/job description. Here are the key elements that provide the details freelancers need to provide a good proposal:
- A clear and detailed description of what you are looking for
- A summary of the skills and experience that is ideally suited for the job
- Describe special and unique preference, in this case for a freelancer in a specific location
- You can also take advantage of our templates. But, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write your own job post. Templates are available, but add more detail.
Choosing the right freelancer
By default, Elance will offer recommendations of Freelancers you may want to invite to submit proposals on your project. However, ultimately the responsibility of finding the right Freelancer sits with the Client. Because of this, Elance provides you with several ways in which to make the smartest decision for your objectives:
- Review a Freelancers’s reputation, visible through their Feedback and Levels
- View additional aspects of a Freelancer’s profile including their skills, past work experience and sample work
- Review the proposals that are submitted for your project
Scanning the proposals
When posting your project you can receive any number of proposals. A good way to pare these down is to start with a review of the freelancers bidding on your project. Then, move on to looking out for some key indicators of the proposals:
- The proposal should match the tone of the project description. You should feel comfortable with your Freelancer and their professionalism should be reflected from the outset.
- A proposal should demonstrate a clear understanding of your goals. Freelancers should demonstrate they’ve carefully reviewed the project description by answering all the questions. Look for a proposal that restates your goals. This can indicate attentiveness to the project and shows a freelancer is not simply copying proposals submitted on similar jobs.
- The proposal should quickly highlight the most convincing reason for why a contractor is the best fit for the job. Look for unique skills and experience that are the right match to get the results you want.
- Look for relevant samples. Freelancers can also provide up to 5 links within the proposal.
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