What resources you guys use to hire freelancers?
I have mostly used odesk.com (because there are lot of people over there) to hire free lancers. I have seen most of them are crappy. They are just there to take your money and no worries about the deliverables. Applicants will try to negotiate on your total budget and will ask for 30%-40% advance. It's upto your negotiation power and you might be successful in bringing the advance to just $30-$40 and once they take that, they are gone.
I have lot of ideas (iphone apps, websites) . I am not looking to hire a dedicated full time team, just free lancers - billed on a fixed budget.
Please let me know what resources you will suggest to look and please share your experiences also.
Much Thanks.
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Hourly only, with work tracking.
Limit the hours authorized to just long enough to figure out if they're worth their rate (2-3 is what I use), then up them only when you like a candidate
If a task is important, hire the best 3 candidates to do the first two hours' worth. Usually 1 will totally flake somehow, 1 will almost do ok, 1 will be good.
Weigh heavily on iterative solving (inspect their work daily (archived attachments are a must), interact, and don't give them too long of a to-do list)
Avoid skype and off-oDesk emails; it's always good to keep things in writing to maintain perspective
Recognize that they have other projects going on and that you can't occupy the lowest-bidder and highest-priority spaces at the same time (though one or the other isn't too much to expect)
*Don't be afraid to walk away and stop throwing good money after bad if performance suffers (usually that means they get unresponsive or slow to return work)
I think that might be worth checking out. The rates will probably be higher than the ones on odesk.com, though.
I think delegation of work is a great idea instead of doing everything by yourself, IMHO.