What Is the Best Site for Hiring Freelancers?
Articles. Press releases. A marketing plan. You need it done—but you want a freelancer to do the job. Those looking to hire freelance workers have a number of websites available to them. Of course, when choosing a website for hiring freelance workers, a small business should consider many factors:
First, there is price. Most sites, with the exception of Freelancer.com, are free for the hirer. But other sites, including Elance.com, oDesk.com and Guru.com, tend to include a fee that’s paid by the freelancer (an established percentage is removed from the job amount).
Also, consider the time you’ll need to learn a particular website. That time investment costs you money, after all. The best sites are quick, intuitive, and easy to navigate. Without question, oDesk.com and guru.com are the easiest freelance sites for prospective employers to use, considering they involve little physical or mental commitment. Elance ranges in the middle – it’s a tad more complex, while freelancer.com is counterintuitive and requires a great deal of effort.
An employer wants to be able to leave feedback about the people he hires – good and bad – so others know what they’re getting when considering a freelance hire. This rewards good work, while it acts as a deterrent against shoddy work. Every site out there offers relatively the same information on prospective hires, so there’s no advantage to be gained here by one site over another.
That’s not the case when it comes to support, however, only one site – Guru.com – offers easy-to-find phone support. Elance.com also offers phone support, but its phone number is far less prominent than the number for Guru.com, which is on every page of the website. These and all other sites do offer email and chat support, as needed.
All the sites allow employers freedom, in terms of paying freelancers only when the work is satisfactorily reviewed. Where they differ, to a bigger extent, is dispute resolution. Elance conducts its own reviews for hourly jobs, with fixed-price projects going to an arbiter (at the expense of both parties and elance.com), should a site facilitator fail to reach a resolution.
Meanwhile, oDesk gives freelancers the right to dispute projects – only if the project was done on an hourly basis. In that case, oDesk decides who is right. With project-based work, the employer alone decides whether to pay.
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Guru.com’s methods are similar to those of Elance. But a fee (the greater amount between 5% or $25) is deducted from the disputed amount to cover the cost of arbitration. And the site only lets employers—who pay using the safepay option—file disputes.
Freelancer.com charges an arbitration fee of either $5 or 5%, whichever is higher. The party that wins the dispute has its arbitration fee refunded. Likewise, Guru.com also restricts the ability to file disputes to only those who use a preferred payment method.
These sites all have their pluses and minuses. But Elance.com seems to have the best overall range options and would seem to be the way to go, especially for businesses new to the hiring process.
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