How to Hire A-Players on Elance
The ROI on hiring an A-Player (as Brad Smart calls them) is ridiculously high.
I’ve hired some amazing people off of Elance, but only since I’ve taken hiring a little more seriously and evolved my process.
Some of this I learned from the resources at and the end of this post, and some of this I ended up creating myself over these last few years…
Creating the Elance Brief
The first thing I do is try to define the role as best I can. I write my job listings in plain english. I try to go strait to the point.
Here’s a recent exmaple:
I usually have a PDF attachment detailing the role / the process in detail. You’re probably going to want this once you hire someone anyways.
Here’s an example.
I almost always buy the “Feature this job for $25" option. Mainly because we’re going to want to invite many (ideally 100+) freelancers to a job.
From my experience, Elance is a volume game. The quality of candidates vary wildly. The strategy = invite lots of candidates and then filter out aggressively until you’re left with the best.
Setting up a Tripwire
You’ll likely want someone who’s proactive and pays attention to detail. The majority of freelancers blindly copy paste proposals to jobs. It’s easy to identify and cut these out by setting up a “tripwire”.
It could be as simple as:
“If you want this job, start your bid with: Hi Guillaume, I’m the badass rockstar you’re looking for!”
Or more elaborate like in the example above:
“Want this job? Read my suggested workflow (attached), share your comments, changes and additions.”
Round 1: Did they fall into our trap?
Next we read through the proposals and use Elance’s Rate proposal feature to filter out anyone who didn’t follow our instructions and instead copy pasted a proposal.
I either give 1/5 to anyone who failed the tripwire stage and then [Filter by: My Rating > 1] or just hide those proposals in Elance altogether.
You should be able to cut out roughly 70% of all proposals at this stage.
Round 2: The Questionnaire
Next we message the remaining candidates congratulating them on making it to round 2 and asking them to complete a short questionnaire. I like to give them the stats to boost their confidence.
I just use a Google Docs form. Here’s an example of one of my live forms.
This way I get their answers in a Google Spreadsheet. I also add some of the freelancer’s stats from Elance (eg. how many jobs have they done on Elance, what’s their average rating…) From here I just hide the first column with their names so I’m not biased and I give each answer a score out of 5. I tally the scores and pick the best 3–5 to take to the final round.
Round 3: Interviews and Test Tasks
Depending on the job, round 3 usually consists of a short Skype/Phone interview (just a casual chat) and/or a paid test task.
If I organize a test task, I always offer to pay for their time, regardless of whether I choose them or not.
I often set a deadline for the test task.
Based on their performance, I pick the best candidate(s).
Here’s another example of a message inviting a candidate to Round 3.
Hi Brandon,
Your answers were strong in round 2 — welcome to the final round ☺
… comments on his answers …
I just have a couple more steps before we can proceed with hiring you.
I’ll add a $100 sign on bonus if we go with you, helping fund your quest of finding the perfect taco, and just so you know I’m not trying to waste your valuable time.
Here are a couple of ads that are currently running:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7183561/BDS-Ads-Example.png
Keyword = [bike racks]This is a B2B e-commerce website. This client typically sell to councils (government), schools, universities, builders, offices…
Step 1: Test Task
Write up 3 more ads that you think are worth testing and could outperform these two ads. Also, mention (doesn’t have to be long) how you came up with these ads/why you think it could outperform the current ones (eg. link to a blog post, competitor ads, other examples etc).Step 2: Short Skype Interview:
This will probably be short and informal. We can go over the AdWords account together, I can run you through our abnormal conversion data (we’re doing something different than AW conversion tracking / GA ecomm module) and also just chat.Along with your 3 ads, could you propose a few dates and times for a Skype interview? I’m quite flexible most of this coming week (note: I’m in GMT time).
Looking forward to your ads and to meeting you on Skype!
Guillaume
Closing Thoughts
This is clearly more involved than inviting a bunch of freelancers and just choosing the cheapest or going with your gut feel.
But if you try this out, I guarantee it will be worth it. In my experience hiring the right people has made all the difference.
Hope you found this process useful.
Please comment and share your feedback and thoughts!
