Fun with reluctance, or especially working with freelancers

Good afternoon, colleagues. This material will be useful to you if:

• you develop your web project
• you have conceived to create a web studio and do not know where to start

Naturally, in both cases, not attracting freelancers.

I note that it will be much easier for you to work with freelancers if you understand that:

• people with developed self-control are in principle a bit
• nobody owes you anything. Even for the money. After all, the whole point of hiring a freelancer is not to put a person in an office and punitively influence him with a salary - but to find an ally, like-minded person who likes to solve problems that have arisen from you. And if you are deceived in the assessment of a person (remotely, not seeing him) - then this is your problem.

Thus, working with freelancers is always a risk, and in this article I will describe how to minimize it.

A little introductory. When you develop your Internet project - you will have a choice:

• to apply for modifications in the web studio. It is more expensive and more reliable.
• look for yourself freelancers and work at your own risk. But much cheaper.

Argument in favor of a web studio.
If your business is more or less stable, there is a steady profit, then it is natural that the time has come to develop. To think about expanding the pool of suppliers, working with new sales channels, organizing partnerships, and so on. Such an activity implies a free head, which is not filled with the question “whether the freelancer will disappear for a week, and whether he will ruin my base, and whether he will get sick and whether I will have to urgently look for a new one,” etc.
In such a rosy case (that is, when you have money) you need to shift the issues of improving the site onto the web studio’s shoulders, and certainly the one that specializes in solving exactly your tasks, and not “sites on Dupal, Jumla, social networks, Conclusion in the top cheap with a guarantee.

If you are just starting your business, and you have every penny in your account, then you have a direct route to the freelancer exchanges.
Freelancers are also better to hire for large amounts of tedious work - copywriting texts, for example, or filling sites. A familiar journalist may be tired after the hundredth text invented for you and lose pace. In the case, if several freelancers do the same - you just hire a new person - that's all.
')
Very helpful in working with freelancers exchange. I will explain how to use them correctly.

• Be sure to look at reviews of previous work and the advantages in the profile. The more reviews and more advantages in the freelancer profile - the higher the likelihood that cooperation will be successful. If there are 2-3 positive reviews, and many of the minuses in the profile are most likely a freelancer-cheater. How can this happen? Very simple - a person can perform work on safe transactions, as it is disciplined reviews. And if the deal is not done - then the freelancer relaxes, can easily take the money. And since the review cannot be left without a transaction, and the amount assigned by the freelancer is ridiculous - they simply put a minus in the profile.
• A secure transaction will protect you from a situation where today you agreed to work for 5 thousand rubles, and tomorrow an order for 10 thousand rubles was received by the freelancer. Naturally, your work is put on the back burner and you lose time (and if you leave the prepayment, you also lose money). In the case of a secured transaction, the freelancer will not forget about you if a higher paying job arrives, for fear of a negative review. Know that the profile on the exchange, with positive reviews - this is an asset of a freelancer, and it usually saves the person.
• A secure transaction will protect you from fraudsters who are begging for a cheap prepayment. Let's say - 5 freelancers agreed to do it for 10 thousand rubles, and one for 3 thousand, but asks for a prepayment of a thousand rubles. Do not flatter yourself with a low price. You will be deceived, and because of the penny amount, it will be easier for you to forget about failure than to figure it out.
• A safe deal will protect you from cases when a freelancer enthusiastically takes on work - and only in the middle he understands what the task he cannot do - the fuse is over, misjudged his strength. I call such situations "a swindler involuntarily." Sometimes people overestimate their strength, but this is not their fault. They just have such a character.
• Always understand that freelancers need to set workable goals. If you want something that is not technically feasible, then an unscrupulous freelancer can understand this, play a fix on your idea and pull a large enough amount out of you. For example (this is a completely real case), a parent called my employee, and offered $ 2,000 for cheating the vote on the site in favor of his son. At the same time, he complained, "I paid someone there 3,000 dollars for more votes than a competitor, and this morning the competitor has more money again." A conversation was held with the parent about the peculiarities of editing the bases of polling stations on the site directly.
• Pay attention to the average price. Choose a performer by the optimal ratio "story about work / quality"

Features of working with bona fide freelancers:

• You can search for a bona fide freelancer not only on freelance exchanges. It can also be found on the website of the Russian community of the CMS, on which your product is built. As a rule - the profile on the forum will be full of pluses. But it is still better to deal with such people through freelancers through exchanges.
• Know that often they combine employment and freelancing. Therefore, they often cannot communicate by phone (days at work, evenings at home with the child, and with the family are not very inclined to talk)
• Pros better not to jerk every 5 minutes. It is enough once a day to inquire about the state of the project.
• Pros always tell you how he did these tasks.

If you decide not to pay a commission to the freelance market - here are some tips that will reduce the likelihood of fraud:

• Always check your search in Google or Yandex nickname in Skype, ICQ, WebMoney wallet (it is better that it was personal), phone number.
• Always call or write to projects that are listed in the portfolio. If you have not heard about the person in the project, it means that he is a deceiver.
• Persistent nagging about prepaying a penny amount suggests that you will be forgotten immediately after receiving it.

Features of work with any freelancers:

• Always make a backup before giving a person access to the site. Better yet, keep a test copy of the project on which the freelancer will do the work.
• Do not transfer all data from the server unless it is necessary. Often, only FTP will suffice.
• Remember the rule from the very beginning of the article - with an oral agreement with a person whom you "see" for the first time - no one owes anything to anyone. Even for the money. But there are positive moments - sooner or later you will develop an instinct that allows you to remotely evaluate a person. Something like the intuition of Eastern doctors, who had to learn how to remotely diagnose women (in those days the classical diagnosis was hindered by the harshness of their husbands)

Actually, such approximately tasks will be faced by the owner of the starting web project, or by the person who decided to create a web studio from scratch. Further, the first is waiting for hiring a team, or outsourcing, and the second - building infrastructure from version control systems, tikitov, and others.

In the next article I will talk about how to work with finances that are intended to pay for the work of freelancers, and how very often you can drastically reduce such expenses.