Selecting Best Applicants Using Sample Interviewing Questions

by Jimmy Cox
Nicolas Darvas Trading

When hiring outsourcers, something called the threelancer technique is useful. This is a little secret that I've been using for quite a while. What it's about, it's about picking three freelancers, it's the threelancer technique then provide sample interviewing questions to answer and tasks to accomplish. So what you want to do is pick your top three providers and get them all to do the first, say, podcast if your job requires this. They might come back and say it will cost you $20 to do this task, $15, $5, $100. Pick three to do the exact same podcast three times. Don't get them to do three different podcasts because it is hard to compare apples to oranges.

Pay three different people, the top three people you find, take them through the threelancer approach, get them all to do the first ten percent of the job. In this case it may be just one full video. If you're doing article writing and you want ten articles written, get three people to do one article, the exact same article together. That way you can get to pick them off against each other from different criteria. Who was the cheapest, who was the quickest, who gave best communication in answering office assistant interview questions and who gave you the best outcome? Don't just pick one person because you don't know what you're missing out on.

It's going to cost you more upfront, it's going to cost you three times as much to get the first ten percent of the job done, but long term, this threelancer technique is going to make a big difference to your outcome. You know you're going to get the best person to do the other twenty-nine podcasts for you.

So it's about trialing them, getting them to trial up, so using the threelancer technique makes a huge difference. The criteria you want to do are based on the quality of the job times the cost. That's the criteria you're going to assess the best of the three winners on. Also too, you know that someone can do a reasonable job as a second place getter if the first person falls over, you know the second person has some experience working with you. You know how good they are or how bad they are and where they're at.

So you can go straight back to them and you don't have to go through the whole searching process again. A big secret to doing anything, whether it's a website design, you might say, just wireframe it up for me, whether it's some software development, just code this little bit for me. Make it part of the job spec. I often say in the job spec, I want fifty articles written. I'm going to select the top three to write two articles for me. It's surprising how many people say, I'll do that for free for you.

People put their hand up and self select further and say I will do the first two articles for you for free. Here they are as part of my bid. If it's quick enough, they'll actually include them as part of their bid, here are my three articles. Here's my wireframe, here's my quick idea of what I think could work for you, how I think it could work for you. So they're putting it in there. I'm going to use the threelancer technique, choose the top three people to trial. It makes a big difference as well.

When you are looking for out taskers to aid you in your business, you need to know how to manage the job as part of sample interviewing questions that you asked them to answer. Most should be aware of user provider's management tools: oDesk and Elance. Most of the providers have some management tools inside it. Don't pick the winner on Elance and then go and deal with them directly in the real world. You've got no protection, you've got no security. The Elance guys, the oDesk guys, all those sorts of people offer some valuable resources and support if something goes wrong. So make sure you use those tools. Use escrow where possible. Don't make the mistake of paying someone for the full job upfront.

I once did exactly the wrong thing. I had someone from oDesk who was fine, moved them off oDesk and everything went bad. They say, oh, I'm free now, I can be a bit of a loose cannon. You want to protect yourself. Never pay one hundred percent upfront. Also get a Non Disclosure Agreement signed where possible. Even if it's not high IP, I encourage people for ongoing work to get them to sign an NDA anyway. It shows they're serious, it shows you're serious.

It's an added little hurdle that they have to jump through to prove to you that they want to work with you long term. It doesn't have to be anything scary, none of this twenty-five page thing, just a couple of page NDA and sample interviewing questions. It just shows you that these people are going to be less likely to do the wrong thing by you if they sign that. It's just that extra little bit of self selection you want to take them through.

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Article submitted Sunday, August 21, 2011 & read 45 times.

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