From Fast Company, Jared Lindzon offers good advice on how to find and manage freelancers including paying freelancers on time and showing them the love. He starts with how to find them. Jared writes:
HOW TO FIND AND VET FREELANCE PROFESSIONALS
While there are a number of online resources and databases containing freelancer profiles and portfolios, those should only act as a starting point, explains Rachel Zimmer, the cofounder of 5Crowd, a two-sided marketplace that connects freelance professionals in 150 cities around the world with Fortune 500 companies.
“It’s really important to do your homework when vetting an individual, and vetting an individual goes so much beyond just their portfolio,” she says. Zimmer adds that while online portfolios can be a strong indicator of the freelance professional’s quality of work, certain intangible yet equally important elements, such as how they respond to feedback, whether they have long-term potential, and whether they deliver on time, can only be discovered through a more thorough vetting process.
“Whether it’s the portfolio or email correspondence, all the way through to the pilot project, those are all pieces that we use to vet for a whole bunch of different criteria based on the required skill set,” she says.