Would love to hear what strategies you use to qualify candidates.

Some basics, and it varies a bit depending on whether you're hiring in India versus Europe/Eastern-Europe. I have found that a certain subset of candidates in India will be very aggressive with the frequency and obtuseness of communication. European and east-europeans candidates, in my experience, will often disqualify themselves by being presumptive about requirements or solutions, or dismissive about confounding aspects. I'm not generalizing overall, but in first/second interactions with remote freelancers on Upwork. This has been very consistent.

(I'm in North America, but have lived and worked in 3+ Western European countries).

Beyond basic technical qualifications, these additional steps have helped me onboard a good sized team of part-time and full-time freelancers around the globe:

* Include 1 very broad, and 1 very specific question in the job posting (don't make them required -- see who answers them of their own volition). You'll get a sense of reading comprehension, and the care someone will use in responding. The questions should not require an essay in response, but neither can they be fulfilled by a templated response.

* For higher level candidates, offer to get on a 5 minute video call and share a calendly/youcanbookme link. Ask for a problem synopsis and see how complete it is, and check how many unclear potentialities get called out in response.

* For lower level candidates, look for 5, hire and onboard 3. In a slack documentation channel, include an on-boarding document with 3-5 steps (update avatar, include available hours in spacetime, post a hello and basic introduction in #general, add themselves to #somechannel, etc). All my keepers very faithfully followed really basic requests. The people who most vociferously wasted my time could've been disqualified at this stage of the game.

For this last step, pay for their time and set a 1 or 2 hour max budget at the start. Don't train or lead anyone through this process. That's not a road you want to spend any time on, because it will become an expansive sinkhole.

I've found that there are plenty of talented professionals out there, but those who can be useful, engaged, remote resources are a special breed. You want conscientious forthrightness.

Thank you that is helpful! A lot of our hires have been short term and I suspect that doesn't help the situation.

Mostly-uninformed opinion in square brackets:

[By the point I'm spending five digits figures on Wordpress add-ins, I might as well hire a crew to make me a new product with React or Angular or ClojureDjango# -- whatever is en vogue right now and likely to remain so for a while.

Wordpress might have improved a lot since I last looked at it in 2008/9; but I recently made a free wordpress.com blog and it sure feels like a monocycle mounted on an elephant mounted on a Chevy carcass mounted on an electric scooter.]

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Am I wrong? A little wrong or out of whack entirely?

It depends on what you're doing and how much of the site it is. An add-in might be an almost totally separate product already, just one that's leveraging the existing infrastructure of WP such as logins, permissions, theming, etc. If it's just leveraging those things (and thereby changing appropriately if you change appearances) then how important is it if it's written in PHP?

I will say that if you're spending 10k+ on add-ins that you should probably make sure you've looked into what you're doing and how. That sounds like the kind of pricing I'd expect if you're having a custom add-in developed rather than what I'd expect for a commercially available one. Something custom may be appropriate, but unless your needs are unique it may not be the best approach.