20 April 2008 | Newsletter, Outsourcing Tips | Jacqui

As an oDesk buyer, finding the right provider is as simple as posting a job in our robust marketplace and sitting back to wait for the dozens of applications to flood in, right?

Well, yes, but it’s not always the best way. It’s certainly the foundation of filling a job, but it’s also about as modern as a Norman Rockwell painting. Hanging a “Help Wanted” sign or putting an ad in your local paper and waiting for resumes is as quaint a 20th century custom as you could come up with. It’s the default position. In the online era, and with as powerful a tool as oDesk, you can do much more. We’ve got about 67,000 providers, but most of them are not who you’re looking for on any one project. On the other hand, we have about 73,000 jobs, with about 300 new ones posted per day. You’re sure to get worthy candidates applying to yours, but some really great providers will no doubt miss your listing. Good providers keep busy, and some people you’d love to talk to might not be checking new posts the day or week yours goes up.

oDesk, unlike the newspaper classifieds and the sites that recreate them online, doesn’t force you to wait for the right worker to come to your rescue. We recommend – especially when you’re looking for a more refined skill set – searching for candidates in our provider database and directly inviting them to interview. This lets you pick candidates based on skills and feedback and relevant work, and it gives you a shot at finding someone who might not have happened to apply to your posting. Great providers might get started with good marketing, but they thrive on word of mouth and repeat business. They’re busy. Taking the initiative to find the most suitable candidates gives you a better shot at bringing in the best person at the best rate.

There are potential downsides to this more proactive technique, of course. When you wait for candidates to come to you, they might not all be right for the job, but you know they’re available. When you make the move to contact a provider, she might be completely booked. You can improve your hit rate if, when checking out a candidate’s skill set, test scores and feedback, you also check his current number of jobs. But don’t be afraid of finding someone too busy – good providers network, and may well know someone who is skilled and available. And that ideal-but-swamped provider may be part of a company that can offer colleagues with the same qualifications but more time.

Another tip: Tweak the search engine. Say you’re looking for a web designer; a casual search yields upward of 11,000 providers. Not only is that a lot of pages to click through, but every other buyer looking for a designer is getting the same initial results, meaning the first few providers listed may be buried under interview invitations. To sift the data better, sort by different key qualifiers: number of feedbacks received, hourly rate, total hours worked, availability or other factors.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with just posting your job and finding the best candidates among those who respond. But if an initial round of submissions doesn’t bring you a candidate who quite fits your needs, or if you’d like to see what a more aggressive approach can bring, we recommend it. We’ve seen higher fill ratios for jobs and higher success ratios when buyers hire this way.

The whole point of oDesk is to put powerful information tools in both the buyers’ and providers’ hands. Don’t hesitate to make the most of them.