In case you haven’t noticed, there are approximately 3 billion different ways in which friends, relatives, clients, freelancers, employers, and anyone else riding the World Wide Web can communicate. Okay, so maybe I can’t back that number up, but the point is, there are enough communications-based software suites, stand-alone programs, freeware downloads, payware applications, and other nifty add-ons to help ensure that even your mother-in-law can stay in the loop. Some of these applications are basic chat programs, while others offer everything from video conferencing, online document sharing, and even real-time brainstorming and document editing in virtual online meetings. Whether you’re a part-time freelancer with just a couple clients, or a swamped buyer with a large staff of contractors working on multiple projects, these five communications keepers should be close at hand.

Skype

Skype offers users high-quality voice and/or video chat to any other Skype user in the world, free of charge. Let me put that another way: Free international voice/video conversations in a professional, high quality application. The only fees associated with Skype are for calls made to traditional land lines or cell phones, but then again, isn’t that what a normal telephone is for? Skype is one of the most popular online communications tools, and it should be a staple for anyone who makes a living through the internet.

Eyejot

Eyejot is the exact opposite of text-messaging, in that it uses a web interface to send and receive video messages through email. Eyejot is convenient in that it requires no special install or client, it works with just about any web browser, it’s free to download and use, and the video emails can be sent to any valid email address. In an era where people fanatically send text messages over a phone, sending video messages in an email seems deliciously ironic.

Digsby

Digsby is ideal for social networking aficionados seeking a single interface to manage communications across multiple platforms, including personal email accounts, social networking sites such as Facebook, and popular chat programs like Yahoo Messenger, all with a single login. Users can also respond to individual sites through Digsby, or issue a general posting to all sites under the Digsby umbrella.  And since Digsby is free to use, it could be the most convenient piece of communications software you never had to buy.

AIM Pro

AOL’s dressed-up, free-to-use, Instant Messenger professional edition offers some impressive resources for online communications, including video conferencing, integration with Microsoft Outlook, encrypted communications, and when partnered with WebEx (see below), secure online file sharing.

WebEx

Cisco’s WebEx is the only item on this list that actually costs money to use, but it’s also arguably the best web-based meeting software available. It features a relatively simple interface that allows users to set up virtual meetings complete with voice chat and video conferencing, secure connections, file hosting, desktop sharing, and real-time file corrections for anyone participating in the meeting. If your workweek consists of daily brainstorming sessions or regular project updates, shelling out $59 per month for WebEx isn’t such a bad deal.

These are but a few of the tools available to both buyers and providers in the quest to keep the lines of communication open. Have you any other offerings to add? Tell us about the must-have communications suites you use to keep in touch with your associates!

We needed some design help for a couple projects that we knew would be short and simple for someone familiar with Photoshop and had a graphical eye, and turned to oDesk for help. Through our experiences, we wanted to give buyers some advice on how to find a graphic designer to help improve a website, create a logo, or even develop a Twitter background, and pinpoint the one that can deliver the results that you’re looking for when it comes to graphic design for the web.

* Communicate your needs.
What exactly do you want? Be as specific as possible: Provide dimensions of the final product, desired file types and sizes, and give some creative direction. Sometimes even sketches or Powerpoint mockups can help. After all, a picture’s worth a thousand words!
* Provide examples of websites or graphics that you like.
Even if you don’t have a vision of the final product, provide 3-5 examples of websites or logos that have design elements that you like or really don’t like. A brief sentence about why you like or don’t like something (maybe the fonts are fine but you hate the colors) will help the provider get a better sense of what direction to take the job. It’s even better if you can identify 1-2 websites with designs that you want the provider to emulate in style.

* Review the provider’s profile carefully.
Look for a work history of completed projects with similar themes or deliverables to your project. If you’ll be incorporating text into your graphics, make sure providers are from an English-speaking country or have passed the U.S. English language tests with high marks. Review the combination of the provider’s minimum number of hours worked, their total positive feedbacks AND read the reviews. Sometimes you can learn a lot from what is suggested about a provider in their feedback than what is in print.

* Comb the provider’s portfolio.
To make sure you’re working with a pro, see if the graphics used incorporate good optimization practices, so that the images can load quickly without compromising the sharpness of the image. Usually this will take the form of smaller images to help make the page load quickly. Make sure the images aren’t of degraded quality (ex. fuzzy, or grainy imagery), which can happen if a picture is over-optimized. Look at the variety of artwork across the portfolio. Note if the provider uses a variety of standard techniques such as gradients, shading, stock imagery, and incorporation of different fonts.

Those are just a few suggestions on how to find a graphic designer on oDesk to help with your projects. We hope you have as much success with your provider as we had with ours!

DealBase.com is a hotel deals review site, evaluating over 5000 sources to find the best hotel deals and discounts. This article was written by Liz Kao, DealBase.com Director of Marketing.

My faith in professional online etiquette was called into question last week, when I spotted a rather unflattering eBay auction—posted by a professional dealer no less—advertising a car. In a single run-on sentence devoid of capital letters, the auction promised heightened sexual attraction for anyone in the driver’s seat, contained several obvious spelling mistakes, and concluded with no less than 18 exclamation points. If ever there was an example of how not to conduct business online, this auction was it.

Acting professional in online communications, whether through email, online postings, or profiles, should be a matter of common sense for oDesk providers and buyers alike. Unfortunately, the comfortable anonymity that stems from communicating through a computer keyboard can be quite deceptive. As a result, the automatic etiquette-check in our brain that separates professional communications from informal situations may never get tripped. Should this happen, lucky individuals will just eat a crow sandwich and move on. Those less fortunate could miss key employment opportunities or even lose clients.

Blogs and guides for more detailed “netiquette” are everywhere, but Netmanners.com should be a prerequisite for anyone venturing into a professional online career. Carol Bory’s daily blog on business etiquette and Marcia Pledger’s suggestions are also worthy reads. If you don’t have hours to study the finer points however, these six etiquette tips can help ensure you don’t commit a professional faux pas.

• Don’t use smiles or emoticons. These are fun, cute ways to convey emotions in an informal email or forum post, but they don’t belong in a professional communication. Good rule of thumb: if you’re not sure a particular passage will be taken correctly without a smiley or emoticon, don’t use that passage.

• Don’t get fancy on fonts or formatting. Formatting can change between computers, fancy fonts or multi-colored formatting can sometimes be difficult to read, and frankly, it also looks like a cheap attempt to get attention.

• Keep email attachments small. Under 256 Kilobytes (Kb) is a good rule of thumb. If you’re unsure what kind of connection your recipient is using, contact them first to ask permission on larger attachments.

• Don’t use internet lingo or abbreviations. Everyone likes to LOL, but AFAIC, such lingo is far too informal—and potentially confusing—for anything but basic chatting between friends.

• Include your email address in your closing signature. Aside from being convenient, some mail readers don’t display email addresses. Sure, one could just hit reply, but what if your message was forwarded to someone else?

• Don’t type angry. You will type things when you’re angry that you’d never, ever say to someone in person, and if you send it, you will regret it.

Jasmine with oDesk friends, April 2008

“Things change when you love your work,” says Jasmine Sison, who has been with the team for two years. “I am always looking to find new ways of making my work easier and faster without sacrificing quality.”

Jasmine quit her in-house job and has worked full-time for the oDesk team since January ‘08. She notes that the posting that led to this great fit seemed perfectly suited to her from the start — it wasn’t just work she could do, it was work she wanted to do. “The position was something that interested me and I am very good at doing,” she says. “A nice combination of my education, acquired skills and experiences that I have gained from other work and work environments.”

As director of customer service, Shannon Adkins makes sure the job stays interesting, and that her providers continue to feel engaged, with brief weekly training sessions in which they troubleshoot a recent difficult case. She also uses oDesk’s transparency to keep everyone involved. “All metrics are published to the entire team, and all team members know how they are doing relative to their peers, as well as how oDesk as a whole is doing.” And those who are doing well receive bonuses.

But Shannon looks not just to the present, but the future: “We provide a clear guideline of how to move up in the organization, from entry level to team lead or specialist.”

“My potential is being discovered and my existing skills are honed and challenged,” Jasmine says. “I love learning, and I get my daily dose from this team.”

For more on how oDesk makes remote work work, read our full case study.

Stature Software started using oDesk in August 2006, only three weeks after it formed. “I realized at the time that the future was with offshore developers,” says partner Gregory Silvano. “My problem was that I didn’t know how to find good offshore developers. … Once I saw oDesk, I realized it was exactly what I was looking for.”

Three years later, Silvano’s partnership with Joseph Patalano has grown, with no capital investment, into a business that earns $2 million a year. Relying almost entirely on remote providers, they’re experts at managing online workteams — they have 20 oDesk providers and a smaller number of outside contractors — so we asked them for a buyer’s perspective on provider relationships.

Q: You really emphasize long-term relationships with your providers, don’t you?
A: “Once we find a provider, we typically keep that provider full-time forever. The second person I ever interviewed was Roman Trotsenko, who now has a dozen developers in his company working for Stature. Originally it was Roman as our developer, and we kept adding more and more to his team.”

Q: Besides the specific technical skills, what do you look for when you’re seeking a good provider?
A: “Creativity, reliability, English skills, responsiveness. I don’t want to give perfect specs every time. I want the developer to understand our clients’ business and really understand the problems they need to solve.”

Q: What’s a fatal mistake that providers commonly make, whether in their profiles or in initial communication with you?
A: “Lack of responsiveness is absolutely No. 1. It is probably the only fatal mistake they can make in my eyes. They can always get better at coding and better at the processes. But if they are unreliable, then they’re gone. I’d rather have an eager and responsive junior developer than an unresponsive expert.”

Q: You’ve got providers all over the world. What are the tricks and advantages to building a widely dispersed workteam?
A: We have nearly 24 hour coverage … it’s good to have the team all over the world. I intentionally found providers from several locations in 2006 because I didn’t want one political situation or one tidal wave to wipe out my entire company. We typically focus on Russia, Ukraine, and Philippines.”

Q: In what ways does using oDesk providers give your business an edge over the competition?
A: “Cost and ability to rapidly expand. I can add new developers quicker than my (competent) competitors can. I can also add developers quicker than my clients can add in-house developers, which means I can ramp up for a new project quicker than they can — so I’ll often get the new business.”

Q: You’ve got multiple projects under way at a time; how do you divide the work among your various workteams?
A: “We’ve found it’s best to not use multiple teams on the same projects. There are different coding styles, time zones, managers, etc. In the end, I’d rather have all of the code written by the same team.”

Read our full story on Stature Software here.

There is a ton of good advice available about hiring online workteams, but I find that I’m often pressed for time and cannot do everything that one “could” do. At the same time, I never want to settle when it comes to hiring, especially when I’m looking to build a long-term relationship – which is pretty much always the case. Here are steps 2 & 3 of my advice for hiring better online teams:

2. Interview by email first. I much prefer email to other approaches of first-round interviewing (phone or chat).

Email has four advantages:

1. You get a chance to collect more information with minimal additional time investment since you’ll be sending a nearly identical list of questions to each candidate.
2. If a candidate’s English-language skills slow down real-time communication, you’ll save even more time.
3. It’s asynchronous, so you don’t need to schedule time to talk with the candidate.
4. All candidates have an equal opportunity to shine. I hate to admit it, but I’m less consistent with real-time interviews. Sometimes timezone issues require that I do an interview at an odd hour when I’m less alert or I might be rushed. Real-time conversations might also take you on tangents that bias your decision.

I’ve found that candidates at this stage are also more motivated to provide you with information because you’ve confirmed that there may be a good fit. I suggest positioning the questions as a prelude to a real-time phone/skype conversation or chat if it looks like the candidate is still a promising fit. The specific questions you ask depend on the work you want done and I am more confident asking for more information the larger the work opportunity is – e.g., I’ll ask more if I’m hiring for a long-term, full-time position than I would if it’s a smaller engagement. Strategies for specific interview questions are probably better suited for another post, but here’s a rough list of things I’ve asked freelance software developers at this stage for a long-term, full-time engagement:

# What experience do you already have building this type of technology? Please include a description of past projects that best illustrate your capabilities in this area.
# What is your development methodology? How do you ensure quality? Extensibility? Maintainability?
# How do you like to interact with your clients? How often do you do builds that we can see and test?
# What questions do you have about the engagement? What other info would you need from me in order to start work?
# (If the engagement has a set deliverable or clear initial milestone) How long do you think it would take to develop [the technology or achieve a certain milestone]?
# What factors will determine the actual amount of time? Where is there risk? Where do you need more info?
# What’s your availability to work on this? Number of people and hours per person? (If a provider company) which of your team members will be doing the work?
# What is it about your work that most differentiates you from other providers?
# Assuming that the initial “version 1″ project is successful, what would you charge me for follow-on work? How will costs change as we scale? [I'm trying to pre-negotiate good rates if the team grows with this question]
# We’re looking for a long-term partner, would you be willing to commit to a long-term relationship with an extended notice period should we decide to end the relationship at some point down the road?
# What questions do you have for me? [reciprocity is a key part of the process and long-term relationships need to work for both parties, so encouraging the candidate to ask questions is important]

I’ve used this strategy to reduce candidate queues from ~10 people down to 3 to 5 finalist candidates.

3. Test drive. By hiring your most promising candidates for short “test drive” projects, you get a chance to see the candidates in action and both you and the candidates get an opportunity to see if your working styles are compatible. oDesk makes it very easy to hire people and set a maximum number of hours they can bill. I recommend assigning the exact same project to your top candidates so you can make an apples-to-apples comparison. Also, I put the assignment in writing and send the same copy to all candidates, so that there is less risk of my guiding one candidate to a greater extent than I guide the others. Plus, it saves time to re-use the same project.

If you’re hiring an analyst, you might send the candidates a data sample and ask them to analyze it and present their findings in a 2-3 PowerPoint slides. You might ask software developer candidates to port a small open-source program from one language to another.

If all works according to plan, you’ll know exactly who your superstar is by the end of the test drive without having to waste any time. Plus, by following all the steps in the process above you will have laid the foundation for a great long-term work relationship.

Please leave a comment if you have a question or suggestions for other strategies that work for you!

There is a ton of good advice available about hiring online workteams, but I find that I’m often pressed for time and cannot do everything that one “could” do. At the same time, I never want to settle when it comes to hiring, especially when I’m looking to build a long-term relationship – which is pretty much always the case.

So what’s the best way to hire top-notch online talent on a tight time budget?

I’ll share the approach that I’ve been refining over the past few years. It’s led me to the right hire almost every time. It’s an approach that is particularly well-suited for online contract work where it’s as easy to hire as it is to fire, and where timezone and language barriers need to be broken down.

At its core, my recommended strategy is one that recognizes that you’re both buying and selling during the hiring process and recognizes that you place a lot of value on your time. At each stage, you want to sell your opportunity to generate interest from the right candidates (since top performers usually have lots of options) while also efficiently gathering critical information that will enable you to identify the best candidate.

I follow three key steps:

1. Write the killer job description. This post will show you an approach that should attract a lot of interest, but I suggest one important twist: tell prospective candidates what you want to see in cover letters including at least one specific request that will be easy for you to evaluate when you are screening applications later. The idea isn’t to discourage applications, but rather to make sure that you collect information that will both enable you to quickly eliminate unsuitable candidates and identify promising ones without needing to review their full online profile. The request should be something that would be a lay-up for the right candidate. I’ve used this strategy to reduce candidate queues with 50+ candidates down to 10 “qualified” candidates in less than an hour.

If you’re hiring an engineer, for example, you might ask candidates to describe an application that best illustrates their capabilities to do the type of work you require along with a short (2-3 sentence) description of why that’s the case. If you’re hiring a customer service agent, you might ask them to give you their favorite tip for keeping customers happy. If you’re hiring someone to help you with social media marketing, ask for a link to their blog or Twitter account.

Templated (cut and paste) applications are really easy to eliminate with this approach and often several responses stand out right away. Plus, this same job description is still suitable for sharing with friends or for reaching out to passive candidates if you have time for that.

Since this article is a bit lengthy, I’ve broken it into two parts: stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on Step 2 – Interviewing and Step 3 – Testing!

So, you want to use Facebook to promote yourself and your work. Network a little. Get friendly with potential clientele, while finding old friends. Here are some things you might want to avoid doing the next time you log in to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward for a professional image:

PROFILE FAUX PAS

Posting a pretentious profile picture that looks nothing like you. Really? The glossy headshot from your brother’s wedding in 1997? Don’t do it. (Unless it’s just for fun.)

Using a shot of your children for your profile picture. It might be cute, but post it to your wall instead. Your profile pic should be you. Don’t be lame.

Not setting up your profile carefully. A well-set profile is your best friend. Learn  Facebook’s privacy features and use them. Categorize friends. Select privacy settings carefully.

POSTING FAUX PAS

Addressing political hot buttons on your page. Unless you’re willing to lose business opportunities over Proposition Whatever-It-Is, keep it to yourself.

Arguing with a friend’s friend on their wall (or any wall). You may hate that Dawn Whats-Her-Name  just called The Office juvenile on Joe Shmoe’s wall, but don’t get into it with her there. Walk away…

Posting something every 5 minutes. I don’t care if it’s your status, a video, a link or photo, every time you make a move on Facebook, other people know.  Don’t let your constant updates become annoying.

Constantly marketing yourself and your work in your status updates. Facebook is a platform–and maybe networking is the only reason you signed up–but be careful, or people will start clicking “unfriend” to shut you up.

PHOTO FAUX PAS

Posting pictures of yourself in compromising situations. Pics of you half-dressed or drunk will change the way others (who weren’t there) see you. If you can’t delete it, at least un-tag it.

Tagging someone else in such pictures. This is totally uncalled for. Friends don’t tag friends in compromising photos.

SOCIAL FAUX PAS

Constantly sending out games and throwing sheep. A cupcake never hurt anybody, but the quizzes and the games get old. Beware of overkill. Have fun without inviting everyone in on it every time.

Following every Facebook trend. The tagging of friends in your egotistical (albeit fun) sharing of life stories gets really old (i.e. 20 Things You Don’t Know About Me). One or two of these a year, please. No more. Stop the madness!

PRIVATE MESSAGE FAUX PAS

Spamming friends with messages about your work. Limit how often you send out mass ”private” messages meant to drum up potential business. Your friends WILL get tired of them.

Exchanging messages with old flames while currently married. Bad form. Don’t do it. Just don’t.

Accidentally replying to multiple recipients. You get a message sent to several friends. You then respond to the sender, not realizing that everyone else will get it too. It gets you in hot water and/or makes you annoying. So pay better attention.

So there you have it. Any other faux pas or pet peeves to add to the mix?

Update: For more thoughts on maintaining professionalism on Facebook, CNN covered this topic on August 22, 2009.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Ruven Meulenberg (author of “The Unplugged“) who had mentioned oDesk in his book and wanted to delve a bit deeper into our motto of “Changing How the World Works.” We had a very fruitful conversation, and you may see future guest posts from Ruven and his team on this blog, but I wanted to begin by introducing you to the book and some of the principles presented in it.

There are some extremely powerful ideas addressed in this book, especially when  you consider the entire thing is only 95 pages long! The writing is a bit “rough” but the concepts are solid and definitely worth diving into.

It starts by discussing the effect change has on a project (specifically a development project, but I think the idea can be almost universally applied.) As developers know, it is the change process in a project that complicates things. Freelance software developers feel this pain especially, as the specs for a project change and they may have to shift their contracts to account for additional time spent moving this item over there and modifying that background color from red to blue. The key to managing change, Ruven says, is moving all change to the beginning of the process.

That’s right. All changes happen early on. In order for this to work, the second principle needs to be enforced. This is understanding that every development should be fundamentally the same and accepting the need to lay out a roadmap that can be applied to all development projects. Ruven asserts that all projects run the course of Cloud – Create – Contstruct – Control. (Essentially: brainstorm, design, build, test/tweak.) The book delves into this concept deeply, and I think the idea presented within this framework is pretty powerful for non-technical people to understand how the development process works – especially realizing that the Create process begins with an end vision and works backwards to the startpoint, while the Construct process that immediately follows begins at the start and builds logically to the finished product. (For some this might seem like a no-brainer, but it was a real eye-opener to “admittedly-only-minorly-technical” me!)

One of my favorite sections of the book described software and Web-ware creators as “artists”. This particularly resonated with me, as I always felt that there was an inherent creativity to the creation process of technology, one that was seldom recognized as such (at least outside of the video game community). Where “The Unplugged” gets its name from is the idea that creativity is constrained by rigid systems – and that technology in and of itself is a mathematical, rigid construct. The idea here is to free software developers and UX designers from their computers and give them more free-form tools to create with. The book then gives a hearty pitch for Guimags, the invention of Ruven and his team, an interesting blend of whiteboard and magnetic design board intended to open up the creative process in a hands-on and intuitive way.

I’m not a developer, so I can’t tell you definitively how effective their product is, but the process seems sound (Cloud – Create – Construct – Control) and widely applicable to many creative fields. Where it gets a bit exciting though, is the end of the book, where Ruven addresses applying the process and the tools to projects. He talks quite a bit about changing the way the world works by balancing the application of technology and talent on any given project, and the idea that freelance providers are a smart, flexible and economic way to tap into skilled talent at the points in process where it is needed the most.

For those of you who know oDesk well, this concept may sound familiar. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below. Do you think the concepts above are sound? Have you read “The Unplugged?”

Many of you already know that we love Twitter and love finding and retweeting great tips and stories. But now, we think it’s time for us to take a break from hearing ourselves talk (oops, did I say that out loud?).

We want to hear what YOU have to share!

• Are you on Twitter?
• Do you have a great tip for remote working or managing remote workteams?
• Can you annotate it in 120 characters or less?

If you answered YES to all of those questions, enter our Twiveaway for a chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate!

All qualified tweets will receive an entry into our contest. We will hand-pick the top 10 tweets and post them on our blog. A winner will then be randomly drawn from the top 10.

What makes a qualifying tweet, you ask?

It’s simple, just follow these steps:

1. Follow @oDesk on Twitter
2. Send an @ reply to @oDesk with your tip
3. End your tweet with this hashtag: #oTip
4. Make sure your entire tweet (including @oDesk and #oTip) is less than 140 characters

That’s it!

Here’s an example of a qualifying tweet (we sent a similar tweet to @mashable last month):

@odesk When emailing a buyer, ALWAYS spellcheck words like “shift” before hitting send…one letter makes a BIG difference! #oTip

Be insightful. Get creative. Add a dash of humor. Show us what you’ve got!

Deadline for submission is Thursday, July 2nd.

Salesforce.com has helped build a group of certified Force.com developers on oDesk, making our marketplace one of the best resources for buyers looking to use Salesforce.com CRM solutions on the Force.com platform. And we’re hearing from the providers offering Force.com skills that being part of this latest certified group on oDesk is paying off as “cloud computing” reaches new heights.

Rakesh Aggarwal is a salesforce.com-certified developer in India who says demand for Force.com implementations has brought him a steady stream of customers since a buyer brought him onto oDesk last summer.

“I was already developing applications on salesforce.com when one of my clients insisted on working through oDesk,” he says. “After my first successful job through oDesk—now I insist that my clients work through oDesk!”

In its first three weeks, the salesforce.com/Force.com group on oDesk has grown to about 60 programmers. Jobs were already on the rise—a year ago, about 10 jobs involving Salesforce CRM were being posted each month on oDesk. Today it’s between 40 and 50. Rakesh says the technology has a lot of appeal. “I knew this was the future of technology because it’s the fastest, most trusted and most complete platform for building and delivering applications in the cloud.”

The cloud idea is simple—offering the full software platform as a service, so that the applications and data reside on the Internet (conceptualized as a cloud of servers), where a business can access them. This keeps in-house IT costs down and allows more flexibility and faster rollout of new services. Rakesh says a wide range of companies are taking advantage of the concept. “I’ve worked with individual developers who wanted to push their applications to Appexchange, and also with companies with more than 200 licenses, where they wanted to extend their business processes within salesforce.com.”

Rakesh has been working with salesforce.com technology for three years, since before the Force.com offering launched. He says that Force.com and oDesk have been a powerful combination for his business. oDesk lets him focus on his work as a developer, rather than on the hassles of being a one-man small business.

“I can manage my work much easier now,” he says. Which is good, because there’s more of it. “I had to go about searching for work earlier, but after couple of jobs here, I have been constantly getting work through oDesk.”

He says he’s even busier since joining the new salesforce.com certified users group. “It’s a great initiative, and it’s great to be part of this group,” he says. “After joining this group, the number of leads for salesforce.com projects has increased for me.”

While his profile offers other skills besides his salesforce.com expertise, Rakesh sees the Force.com platform as the critical focus, for himself and the buyers he’s serving.

“Cloud computing is a simple idea,” he says, “but it can have a huge impact on your business.”

Click here to see salesforce.com certified providers.
Click here to see all of oDesk’s sponsored groups.

Got a great idea and wondering how to turn it into a company? The increasingly popular answer is to build your app in the cloud with freelance software developers. We’re pleased to announce that Salesforce.com and oDesk have partnered to launch a Salesforce and Force.com Group on oDesk that allows you to do just that.

So what is Cloud Computing anyway?

“Cloud computing” is a new model that dramatically changes how people build and run business applications. It eliminates the costs and complexity of buying, configuring, and managing the hardware and software needed to build and deploy applications. Instead, these applications are delivered as a service over the Internet (the “cloud”).

The Power to Innovate

The Force.com cloud platform is changing the way startups and small businesses build their applications and scale their businesses. By eliminating the problems of traditional application development, the cloud-computing model frees you to focus on developing solutions that deliver real business value. The Force.com platform lets you innovate while avoiding the costs and headaches associated with servers, individual software solutions, middleware or point-to-point connections, upgrades—and the staff needed to manage it all. Finally, the convenient pay-as-you-go pricing schemes are designed to provide you with the flexibility of paying only what you need and expand as your business grows.

The Talent Repository

oDesk hosts a variety of developers who specialize in application development in the cloud and more specifically, the Force.com platform. With our partnership with Salesforce, we can identify the best talent in the field and help small businesses and startups hire the right person for the job. The group is moderated by the Salesforce.com and membership is available only to oDesk salesforce developers who are members of Developer Force, the official Force.com developer community.

So what are you waiting for? Bring that big idea to life today. Post jobs and Hire talented people on the Salesforce group at oDesk. Leave those worries about traditional application development behind and focus your energy and creativity on bringing that amazing idea to the world.

Working with any team, including remote teams, requires great project management skills.  Thus, we thought we’d put together a list of top 25 project management blogs to help you manage your workteams wherever they may be.

20 PROJECT MANAGEMENT BLOGS

1. Project Shrink Though software projects have been Bas de Baar’sspecialty, his thoughts on project management in general are increasingly sought after on the internet. He’s become a bit of a guru, with posts like “Fifth Discipline: What to Do When All Your Projects are Failing.”
2. Bob Sutton: Work Matters There’s a reason Bob Sutton keeps getting book deals. His project management and all-around leadership advice is often priceless, even when it’s simple (or laced with certain profanities). Case in point: “Do You End Meetings on Time?”
3. Herding Cats The expertise of Glen Alleman shines on this blog, with posts such as this one on increasing the probability of project success, called “Back to Basics.“
4. Project Management Hut Readers will find job listings here, as well as innovative tips like how to use a weather metaphor next time you assess the state of your project.
5. PM Crunch This blog from multiple contributors offers various insights on the topic of project management, including this  post from John Reilly on Software as a Service–otherwise known as” SaaS.”
6. Raven’s Brain Here, Raven Young gives readers great highlights of the blogosphere on project management. In this way, her blog is a gateway to many other points of view.
7. A Girl’s Guide to Project Management This blogger, Elizabeth Harrin, offers a distinctly feminine viewpoint, but she has the all around expertise to pull it off for any gender. An example? “What Are You Worth?”
8. PM Majik This blog comes from multiple contributors, contains a job board, and contains a stellar post posing the question “Are You A Prima Donna PM?” It’s a worthwhile read–if nothing else, you have to see the image topping the post.
9. Gary Gagliardi’s Blog He seems to be on the blogroll of every project management blogger around. Maybe it’s him or maybe it’s the Science of Strategy Institute behind him, but Gary offers up insights like  “What Isn’t Changing in the Twenty-First Century?”
10. Project Management Bistro The project management community site PM Boulevard sponsors this blog, with great tips like this article from guest blogger Raven Young (see #6) called “4 Keys to Successful Project Management.”
11. PM Think! This blog from multiple contributors has been around for years, and still manages to find interesting things to say. Example?   “Project Managers Specialize in the Project Management Lifestyle.”
12. Crossderry Coming from experienced project manager Paul Ritchie, the beauty of this blog is typically found in it’s simplicity. No long rants or lectures here, just quick tidbits of advice, food for thought or simply quotes, like this one from Abraham Lincoln.
13. Zen, Project Management and Life This one from Bob Tarne has been going strong for four years, with thought-provoking posts like this one: “Can You Share Best Practices?”
14. Eight to Late This insightful blog goes deep and even includes graphics to help project managers who learn visually. An interesting sample, from creator Kailash Awati: “A Communication-Centric Approach to Tackling Project Complexity.”
15. Beaufortes Blog Blog creators and co-founders of Beaufortes Jason Bates and Philip Greenwood prefer innovation in project management, and it shows in their blog. An example?  The N-Gage Process.
16. Better Projects Here, you ‘ll find Craig Brown’s musings on project management.  Sometimes his thoughts are brief, but almost always helpful, such as “The Better Projects Scrum Reading List.”
17. How to Manage a Camel This blog from Arras People includes a lot of project management outsourcing advice, such as “How to Maximize Short Term Project Management Contracts.”
18. Cutting’s Edge Here, blogger Thomas Cutting instills his wisdom for project management with posts like “Killing False Confidence.”
19. The Tao of Project Management This blog’s title isn’t just a cute play on words. Blogger John Carroll is serious in his observations of Taoism and the art of proper project management. Take a look at this convicting post: “Owning or Being Owned.”
20. PM Karma Though it’s a smaller blog, from a blogger named Sreejith, it is impressive in the areas of practicality and thoroughness. Check out Sreejith’s review of project management software 5PM.

5 AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT BLOGS

1. Agile Blog When Jean Tabaka and Ryan Martens (founder of Rally Software) talk Agile, people listen. This blog has a growing following for posts like this one: “8 Ways to Re-Tool a PMO in an Agile Environment.”
2. Agile Thoughts This blog from Agile consultant Tobias Mayer has a solid following for thoughtful posts about things like this: the place of Scrum in the world.
3. Drunken PM Here, Dave Prior offers Scrum and Agile project management thoughts and a lot of humor. A good sample? “Done, Done and the Bag of Oranges.” (P.S. He will be the first to tell you, he did not come up with the concept–but he might just word it the best.)
4. Agile Project Management This blog from Patrick Merg proves Agile is “more than a method, it’s a mindset” with posts like this one on “MoSCoW.”
5. Tommy Norman Posts like “How Scrum Are You?” might make Agile purists cringe, but Norman seems to maintain balance.

What do you think of our list? What’s your favorite project management blog?

So you want to master Microsoft Excel, but don’t know where to start? Do terms like Array Formula, VLOOKUP, User Defined Functions, ODBC, VBA and PivotCharts make you cringe? Is the transition from Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 giving you a double migraine headache? Have no fear! There is a vibrant community of Excel Experts online, who are willing to take you under their wing…you just have to know where to look! We’ve compiled the top 10 places online to find help and get trained for free.

1. Mr. Excel Message Boards

The mother of all Excel Help Forums, Mr. Excel has gathered quite a following over the years. With most of the top Excel “power users” from around the world hanging out in these forums, you’re bound to get your questions answered directly, or find that they have already been answered in their vast archives of previous threads. Just be mindful of posting your questions in the proper format (read the posting rules); Message Board types don’t take too kindly to newbies not following the rules. Also check out their fantastic archive of Excel Video Tutorials

2. Ozgrid.com Forums

Ozgrid.com’s Forums have a lively community of Excel Experts ready to answer your questions. If you see an ozgrid.com post while searching google for excel information, you can usually be assured that it is a quality thread. Ozgrid is exceptionally good at VBA programming-related questions.

3. Experts-Exchange

Experts-Exchange is the cream of the crop. The site is set up in a question/answer format. Users can post questions, and Experts can post answers. The user then selects the best answer (much like Yahoo! Answers, but Tech-focused). All previously answered questions are searchable. Experts Exchange is unmatched in their quality of content, and is the go-to place for obscure questions that can’t normally be answered anywhere else. We would have ranked Experts-Exchange #1 if it wasn’t for one thing, you have to register for the site and either pay a monthly fee, or contribute “answers” on a regular basis to keep your account active. Many a frustrated Excel novice will tell you that Experts-Exchange is no good, but that is because only the questions are viewable to the public, not the answers. Suck it up and register for the site, answer a few questions for people that are more of a novice than you, and save yourself the monthly fee.

4. Microsoft’s Official Excel 2003 Training Site / Microsoft’s Official Excel 2007 Training Site

Yes, that’s right…Microsoft actually provides some things for free. The online training modules offered on Microsoft’s websites are top notch. With hundreds of videos, podcasts and tutorials, there’s bound to be something for everyone. Many of the tutorials are a little on the easy side, but the quality is fantastic.

5. Jon Peltier’s Site

Jon Peltier is a Certified Microsoft MVP for Excel. He probably knows more than anyone on the planet about Excel, and fortunately he’s willing to share his knowledge with us. Currently, there are only 90 people ever granted the title of Excel MVP by Microsoft, so you can see how important of a designation it is. Check out the chart tutorials; they’re a little more advanced, but some pretty amazing stuff, especially if you design corporate dashboards.

6. AllExperts.com Forums

AllExperts is a simple, mostly text-based site that follows the question & answer format. They have hundreds of users waiting to answer your questions.

7. PCreview.co.uk Forums

Based in the United Kingdom, PCreview offers a sleek, traditional Message Board interface and an unusually high volume of posts which translates into faster response times to your questions.

8. Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) Excel Blog

Keep abreast of the latest MS Excel news straight from the horse’s mouth. Another valuable, free service offered by Microsoft.

9. YouTube

Believe it or not, YouTube has many high quality tutorials. If you’re a visual learner, this is an indispensable tool.

10. Google

When in doubt, google it! Learn how to do advanced google queries to help you find what you need faster.

Need number crunching, but don’t have time to do it yourself? oDesk has 21,718 excel professionals that can help you out. The number of excel jobs per month has been steadily rising over the past 12 months.

Did we miss one of your favorite Excel resources? Let us know in the comments below!

After the popularity of last week’s “Top 100 Freelance Blogs” post, we thought we’d do it again.  This time, we’ve searched the web for the 100 best resources for all things outsourcing and offshoring. Our finds are categorized first by general topic and then alphabetized, for your convenience. Enjoy!

GENERAL OUTSOURCING

1. AMR Research This web site from a research firm has podcasts and a free newsletter, but to view their online research articles, of which 486 directly relate to outsourcing, you must register.
2. Accenture.com Under the leadership of CEO Bill Green, Accenture’s site contains several blogs, but the most relevant information to outsourcing is found in their pdf-download articles–such as “The New Force Driving High Performance Through Outsourcing”–which can be found by sorting through topics here.
3. BNet This management resource contains an  outsourcing archive of articles from all across the internet. The site can be filtered (scroll all the way down) to categories and pages specific to four countries: Australia, China, UK and US.
4. BPO This blog, created by Manoj Jain, contains an excellent article on the next outsourcing hot spot.
5. BPO-KPO This site gives answers to random outsourcing questions, but you’ll find a lot in their outsourcing archive category, like this article on US tax returns being outsourced to India.
6. BPO Voice This unique site is an online community for BPO professionals. Members have access to each others opinions and helps, as well as articles like this recent survey.
7. Big Fat Finance A blog with a lot to offer from multiple finance experts, they have an outsourcing archive with insightful articles like “Getting a Handle on the Outsourcing Discussion.”
8. Business Pundit This blog is one of the most consistent on the web, and you can search their archives for outsource-related posts. When it comes to outsourcing, senior writer Drea Knufken speaks her mind, but Lela Davidson wrote this article on call centers moving to Egypt.
9. CIO Vendor Management This blog about CIO is a little big to handle, but has a great Outsourcing Category Archive.
10. Consider the Source A fantastic resource, this TPI blog from one of several contributors  covers “The Globalization of Outsourced Services Industry.”
11. Cranendonk The blog from Karin Le Blanc includes this simple, but helpful, article called “Things to Outsource.”
12. E-Business Strategies: BPO This site comes from a consulting firm, but includes a few great articles like this one, called The 5 Phases of a BPO Relationship.
13. E-Business Strategies: Offshore Outsourcing This web site from a consulting firm (see #12), contains a great article–”10 Keys to Success”–on their offshore blog.
    
14. E-Commerce Times This informative site from the ECT News Network often delves into outsourcing, such as the two-part article “Transparency in Outsourcing.”
15. Forbes The famous magazine’s online news archive is full of  outsourcing updates and news. This article called “Outsourcing’s Big Picture” is a winner by Ed Sperling.
16. GSS Blog It has a manufacturing focus, but this blog from  Global Sourcing Specialists contains a few gems, like this is the article about the global sourcing short-term outlook.
17. Global Services This site and news feed pulls from other sources for relevant news, such as this outsourcing article straight from Tunisia Online News.
18. Global Sourcing Council This blog from GSC seeks to better the systems and practices of global sourcing, such as “The Goldfish Effect.”
19. Globespotting Here is a blog from Business Week’s Steve Hamm–who often hotly debates the political roadblocks to offshoring that are being discussed in the US because of the economy. Become a member of the Business Exchange (Beta) and have even more access to helps.
20. Horses for Sources Check out this article: “Is it time to dump the term Outsourcing?” The blog from Phil Fersht is full of discussion on BPO, IT, research, best practices, etc.
21. Information Week From the magazine by the same name, this blog contains a lot of solid articles like “Tips for Managing Vendor Relationships.”
22. Infosys.com From the similarly named company, of course, this resource covers global sourcing and includes great  case studies worth reading.
23. Inside Outsource Of course, Tom Hickman is a consultant offering his services, but his blog is great–like this readiness analysis for those considering outsourcing.
24. Integreon Here you’ll find archived categories on BPO, KPO and LPO, plus this article on the Black Book of Outsourcing; but, of course, Integreon is also selling itself, as it provides a network for all of the above.
25. Network World The hot print publication, web site and blog for network and IT executives has tons of user discussions going. It’s easy to search the directory for outsourcing-related articles like “4 Tips for Better Outsourcing Deals.”
26. New Economist From an anonymous London-based macroeconomist, this blog has a helpful offshoring and outsourcing archive.
27. oConomy This is where we, oDesk, showcase our fascinating data from the work activity of 240,000+ oDesk users in over 150 countries. Be sure to check out our 2008 Global Outsourcing Report.
28. oDesk blog We’re not gonna lie to you, we think our blog is pretty great. Just click on our “Outsourcing Tips” archive, and you’ll know why too.
29. Outsource Portfolio Here you’ll find interesting pieces like “When You Outsource, Don’t Outsource Your Happiness.” Though many blog here, the creator is  Mani Malarvanna.
30. Outsourcing Insider This blog created by Infinit-O contains a lot of articles, including this one on outsourcing growth in the healthcare field.
31. Outsourcing Institute Members can take advantage of the outsourcing training, but anyone can utilize the pdf pages of outsourcing  research OI has compiled, such as this one: “Approaching Challenges of Managing OS Relationships.”
32. Outsourcing Journal This online magazine from Outsourcing Center is totally dedicated to giving good outsourcing advice, like  the article 9 Way to Cut Costs–which includes global sourcing among them.
33. Outsourcing Weblog Though various editors contribute to this blog, the quality is consistent. Check out this article: “Statistics on Outsourcing.”
34. Pragmatic Outsourcing This blog mentioned frequently on the net contains the 5 T’s–Thoughts, Tools, Tips, Tricks, and Traps of outsourcing–from creator Nick Krym. Take a look at “10 Offshore Deal Showstoppers,” which reflects both sides of outsourcing. 
35. Provocations and Cogitations This blog from Mark Robinson is for the smart outsourcer on the edge of changes, like this post “Crisis? Outsourcing, Carpe Diem!”
36. Services Shift This blog is based on the book of the same name by Robert Kennedy with Ajay Sharma. You’ll find related news from around the web, but also ideas from the book like “Offshoring Is Not Reversing Anytime Soon.”
37. Shared Services & Outsourcing Networks It may be tough to forget they are also selling themselves, and members pay a fee, but the Q&A forum might be worth it.
    
38. Small Business Trends This blog from the online publication has more than 112,000 subscribers. Check out this article on the Top 10 Outsourcing Trends.
39. Sourcing Insight For any company sourcing out of Asia,  Michael Rehkopf’s ZDNet blog is a must-read. Just like his post: “Look Ahead at 2009.”
40. Sourcing Market Pulse This blog from EquaSiis,  includes a look at many areas of global sourcing, including “IT Hardware Market Consolidation.”
41. Talking Outsourcing Created by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, you should probably be subscribing to this blog and reading this: “Beware the Outsourcing Rumor Mill”
42. Verve Communications This infant and anonymous blog could go places, because it has potential as a how-to for outsourcing beginners.
43. 360˚ Vendor Management After a long hiatus, this site and blog (from a decidedly anonymous source) dedicated to helping business of all sizes manage outsourcing is back.
    

    IT & SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT OUTSOURCING

44. About IT Outsourcing This blog is from veteran software developer Remi Vespa, contributor to the book Building a Future With BRICs. See this post:  “Beware the Turnover Rate of Your Outsourcing Supplier.”
45. Ann All This IT Business Edge blogger Ann All is all over business and outsourcing, including this article on the political climate of outsourcing.
46. Clarity Consulting This web site is offering you their services, but if you go to worthwhile list of papers and articles, you’ll find the person behind them all is Ian Hayes.
47. Computer Weekly The IT and outsourcing channel of this online magazine is worth your while. Especially this article: “Bridging the Generation Gap at the Heart of … Outsourcing.”
48. Computing This UK news feed (linked to their Outsource channel) is a fantastic resource for outsourcing news on the IT and software front. Check out this video on the need for security in remote teams.
49. Gartner This technology research firm’s site contains some really good information on outsourcing, but you’ll either have to dig through their analysts’ blogs to find it or pay for their research papers (and they aren’t cheap).
50. ICT Outsourcing News This blog cycles in news feeds from all over the globe, like this one about 1 million outsourcing jobs for Chinese graduates (from People Daily). It’s fairly new, but with its clean lines and straightforward approach to simply bringing in related news, it should do well.
51. Offshore Outsourcing This blog from Jason Aviet appears to be fairly new, but could be a promising resource in 2009.
52. Software Projects This blog from Bas de Baar is subscribed to by almost 26,000 readers and contains a lot of advice on outsourcing software development, including this post: “Keeping in Touch with Offshore Programming Projects.”
53. Silicon Valley Powered by the Mercury News out of San Jose, this news feed offers business information specific to the industry, such as this news article on Infosys and outsourcing to India. It includes an Asia Tech news feed and Europe Tech news feed, readers can subscribe to as well.
54. Steve Mezak’s Blog From the author of Software Without Borders,  Steve Mezak, this blog contains much on software development and archived categories reflecting more than 15 different countries. Great article on whether or not you should outsource.
55. Tech Republic In addition to their downloads, forums and webcasts, if you run a search of their many blogs, you’ll find over 72 articles related to outsourcing. This article called “Outsourcing Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word” is just one of many.
56. Toolbox for IT This knowledge sharing community with more than a million members also includes many articles and blogs about outsourcing, including this Q&A with those who’ve outsourced to South America.
    

    OUTSOURCING TO CHINA

57. China Success Stories This web site also contains a newsletter subscribed to by more than 10,000 people. It’s a very interactive user-based blog, worth your while.
58. The Dao of Outsourcing Here is a blog dedicated to the practice of outsourcing, mainly to China. Check out this post on the revenue of Chinese software services.
59. Go East From software developer Dean Stevens, who says he recognized China as “the next big thing” in outsourcing years ago, this blog as a lot to offer, like this post on Wuxi, China.
60. Managing the Dragon A blog from author Jack Perkowski and newsfeed that will keep businesses in other parts of the world in tune with business and the economy in China. Be sure to read: “Unemployment and SMEs: Two Worries for 2009“
61. Smart China Sourcing A web site from Global Sources, though it deals mostly with sourcing manufacturing in China, this small collection of Chinese business culture guidelines would be of help to anyone outsourcing to the country.
62. Startech Global Blog From a Los Angeles based software company partnering with Chinese software engineers, this is a solid blog for US-China sourcing. A great post to get you acquainted with their blog:  “4 Concerns About Outsourcing to China.”
    

    OUTSOURCING TO INDIA

63. BizTech2.0 This site from Network 18 contains an article on IT outsourcing in the recession.
64. Emerge The focus here is Indian IT. Multiple authors (over 30 contributors) create articles like:  “Holding Existing Customers (Dearly!)”
65. IT Outsourcing India This blog created by Ruchi Biswas contains one article on why India may lose 75,000 outsourcing jobs in 2009. It also contains links to outsource-related job listings.
66. Inside India Another ZDNet blog, this one from Swati Prasad asks the hard questions about Indian business, like “How Far Should The Government Go in Rescuing Satyam?”
67. KPO Services India This compilation of the latest news from dozens of other blogs is all about India and outsourcing.
68. OffshoreOutsource This “Android Development India” article, is one of many. Of course, the site is promoting their services, but the blog is a useful resource.
69. Offshoring Times This online resource is focused on what India has to offer, but it’s good for anyone outsourcing. It covers BPO and IT sourcing–like this article “Indian BPO Market to Double.”
70. Rediff India This news feed is a great resource for business in India, including this article on–what else?–the Satyam scandal.
71. SiliconIndia This site from SiliconIndia Magazine contains a plethora of blogs from Indian professionals, but the real gem is the main news feed such as this article outlining India’s lead in IT export.
72. The Times of India If you have outsourced to India, this list of major cities and their breaking news will be an invaluable asset to help you stay connected to India during your collaboration.
    

    OUTSOURCING TO EASTERN EUROPE & RUSSIA

73. IT Offshore Development An outsourcing blog from Sergey Lesnikov in the Ukraine, check out his post on the link between telepresence and outsourcing business.
74. Nearshore Outsourcing This blog from Levi9 Global Sourcing deals mainly with Western Europeans outsourcing to Eastern European countries. A can’t miss article? Five tips on making your outsourcing deal survive a crisis.
75. Outsourcing-Russia This news feed from RUSSOFT contains a lot of useful information for sourcing out to Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. This article details the hopefulness of the IT export industry there.
76. Russia Today Stay on top of business and breaking news in Russia through this online news channel. For candid editorial on the relationship between Russia, the US and the economy, check out  Peter Lavelle’s RT blog called Untimely Thoughts.
77. Softheme The Ukraine-based company’s blog does promote their service, but you can learn a bit about outsourcing to the Ukraine along the way–try “Why Outsourcing to Ukraine?”
    

    LEGAL PROCESS OUTSOURCING (LPO)

78. LPO Market Insight Created by the team at Aphelion Legal Solutions, this blog contains articles like “What to Ask Before Purchasing LPO Services.”
79. Law Scribe Created by Mark Ross, one of the notable articles is “LPO: A Bandaid or an Innovative Solution.”
80. LegalEase Solutions Here, the must-read article is “Evaluating What Not to Outsource.” Though the blog has multiple contributors, it was  created by LegalEase Solutions.
81. Legally Yours This popular LPO blog by Rahul Jindal has a focus on LPO and India, but the best article here would be More Than 100 Law Firms … Used LPO.
82. Slaw A Canadian collaborative law blog,  Slaw touches on LPO often, especially in this article: “LPO Provides a Positive Boost for Economy in Recession.”
    

    HUMAN RESOURCES OUTSOURCING (HRO)

83. HR Outsourcing This site is brand new, but seems promising as a collaborative effort among those in the HRO field, like this post that offers a few tips for dealing with downsizing.
84. HR Outsourcing Solutions Of course, Employers RX is not just offering their services, but advice for HRO agents too. Go straight to this HR outsourcing archive and start reading–not all articles are original content, but all are relevant.
85. Outsourcing-HR This site from Outsourcing Center (like the Outsourcing Journal), gives advice relevant to the economy of 2009.
86. TriNet’s HR Blog This human resources blog from TriNet–who would like it if you outsourced your HR to them–often weighs in on outsourcing hot topics in their white papers, but you must register to get access.
    

    PHILIPPINES OUTSOURCING

87. Business Articles This blog, from an anonymous source, discusses the ins and outs of outsourcing in the Philippines–with articles that tackle problems like language barriers.
88. Pinoy Post Like his post “The Need for Filipino IT Firms to Go Global,” Melvin Calimag’s self-proclaimed rantings make this a can’t-miss blog for those outsourcing in and to the Philippines.
89. Prime Outsourcing Though the article archive is linked to the business, it’s still useful, and highlights the outsourcing business in the Philippines with articles like this one.
    

    CALL CENTERS

90. Call Center Blog This blog was created by BPO Phillipines, a Filipino call center, and contains this interesting article on US expatriots filling call center seats overseas.
91. Call Center Blogger This anonymous blogger is a veteran of call centers, particularly those in the Phillipines. Check out his take on how the US economy is affecting Phillipino call centers.
92. Call Center Gal Here Nhil blogs about her ups and downs in the call center. Her most valuable archive is probably her training category, like her post on the 100 most common US last names every call center agent should know how to pronounce.
93. Virtual Observations This site from Coordinated Systems Inc. contains advice for call centers, such as the article “8 Things Your Call Center Can Implement to Help Offset … the Economy.”
94. 24×7 People Calling their site “Your Complete Call Center and BPO Guide,” 24×7 People is interested in keeping call center agents informed. They have an important list of call-center training and interview advice, to help potential workers spot scams.
    

    MISC. RESOURCES

95. Business News Americas You’ll have to pay for access after your free trial is up, but this news feed is full of vital and breaking news for those  outsourcing to South America.
96. Experiments in Lifestyle Design This blog from author Tim Ferriss has an archive of posts under the category Outsourcing Life.
97. Global Watchtower A blog from the Common Sense Advisory, this site focuses on the moving globalization. A must read?  “Rosetta Stone Unlocks IPO Market for Language Learning.”
98. Global Labor Strategies This site deals with the issues of labor overseas. Check out this post: “Challenging Corporate Secrecy in China.”
99. Globalization Blog This blog from five analysts, offers support, research and information related to global sourcing and globalization. A must-read? “Mutillingual Social Media.”
100. Incorporation Offshore This blog from Ramapati Singhania discusses the possible benefits of incorporating offshore. See the differences yourself here.

In Closing …

Did we miss one of your favorite outsourcing news feeds or blogs? Let us know in the comments below.

We’ve been using oDesk for a while now to subcontract out programming, data entry and virtual assistance services. We’ve been pleasantly surprised with the quality of people, but it took a while for us to get into our groove and figure out how to best use oDesk to our advantage. Below are 7 steps that we’ve learned while using oDesk, should make your employer experience a lot easier and more useful.

1. Establish Clear Objectives and Talents

When looking for an hourly hire, make sure you know what you’re looking for. Don’t just put up an ad for “PHP Programmer”. Instead, establish what skills you are looking for: PHP Developer with 4 Years Experience, extensive knowledge of XML and PayPal integration. Not only does this help you attract more experienced candidates, it will help you figure out what you’re looking for.

2. Keep Clear Lines of Communication

Just as you want to hear from employees, they want to hear from you. Keep them informed of anticipated work, project completions, and even why you let them go. This makes it a much more beneficial experience for everyone involved.

3. Test before Hiring

If you’re not sure about a potential hire, hire them first for a small fixed pay job. That way you can judge their skills without committing to a long term project. You can also limit their amount of hours initially to get an idea of a skill level. For certain jobs, like writing, you can ask for specific samples from potential hires.

4. Know the going wage

I see this one a lot – You can’t hire competent programmers from North America for the same price you would someone from overseas. Cost of living and taxes just won’t tell you. So if you’re angling for the homeshoring angle, be prepared to pay more than you would for someone overseas, and plan accordingly.

5. Use the tools at your disposal

oDesk has great tools available built in to help you work with your workers, so make sure to learn about them and use them. If you hire for long term projects, consider using tools like Basecamp or DeskAway to fully integrate your hire into your team.

6. Feedback is king

The oDesk feedback system has been a tremendous help in evaluating new hires. Written feedback often speaks volume about a candidate’s abilities, or lack thereof. Be prepared to give those who have no feedback a chance however, and ask them to compensate by lowering their rate temporarily. As a corollary, leave feedback for your providers so other employers can benefit as well.

7. Speak Softly and use the Carrot System

Your hires are humans too – treat them with the same respect you would offer employees in your office. More importantly, bonuses for those who are worthy will continue to keep them in your employ for a long time. Rewards often work more wonders then fear of any punishment or layoff.

Ari writes about cell phones for cellphones.org. cellphones.org uses oDesk providers for customer service, data entry, and various backend tasks.

A new feature coming in the next few weeks inspires us to discuss a key technique for project management. It’s relevant to any kind of remote work, but at oDesk the ideas grew out of managing software development workteams. Our co-founder and CTO Odysseas Tsatalos is a firm believer in breaking the development process down to the smallest tasks, and our new task code feature will let buyers and project managers who adopt the technique to more accurately track the time and costs dedicated to each task. So for those inspired by the new feature, we offer eight tips that can make you a better manager:

1. Think small: Break a larger assignment down to manageable tasks. Each takes a few hours—sometimes, a few days, but the larger the task, the harder it is to manage and track, so break things down as far as logic allows. Examples from an engineering environment: “Add landing page to production trunk,” “update the What’s New section on homepage,” or “add fields to database.”
    
2. Go high level: Keep your task description (or codes) to a high-level concept. This way, your reports will be more meaningful. Example: “Write a newsletter article,” “Edit the newsletter” and “Format and email the newsletter” may be tasks for three different providers, but they form a “Newsletter” component owned by your marketing manager. When reviewing the communication efforts at the end of the month, your reports will immediately show how much effort was spent on the newsletter.
    
3. Automate: Tasks should be automatically queued to their correct owners. There are many project management tools available to do that; these days we’re using Bugzilla, which is available in every team room. What system you use isn’t as important as finding one that works for you.
    
4. One thing at a time: Tell providers to devote 100 percent of their time to completing one given task at a time; don’t let them shift among three tasks you’ve assigned them. We find that if a provider focuses on one task at a time, each item gets done faster and better.
    
5. From the top: A provider should do the task at the front of her queue, move to the next, then to any recurring back-burner task once all priority tasks are completed.
    
6. Keep it moving: We have project architects pushing tasks, while development managers are responsible for keeping everybody’s queue full. However you do it, make sure that tasks are being generated and distributed correctly.
    
7. Pay attention: With oDesk’s new Task Code feature, create a set of codes for each task and instruct your providers to select the correct code when they sign in with their work memo. This will let you generate reports that can show you, among other things, how much of your resources go to each kind of task.
    
8. Evolve: With that data, refine the process to perfection.
    

There are a lot of ways to efficiently manage your workteams and to organize the tasks you assign them. We’re hoping that the upcoming Task Code tool will be one more way you (and your team) get the job done.

We’ve got this new feature coming in the next few weeks: Task codes. Buyers break jobs down by small tasks, and a provider logging in selects a code indicating the kind of task she’s working on. That way, the buyer can plan and budget better. We haven’t come up with a version just for the provider’s personal recordkeeping (yet!), but it occurs to us that this is a great way for a provider to approach a job even if the buyer hasn’t embraced the feature.

A buyer might hire you to “build an online store,” but approaching the job in that giant-sized chunk is a recipe for failure. You know you have to approach it one step at a time, and making this process visible to the buyer is a way to ensure solid communication and a smooth workflow. Go back to your buyer with a list of the specific tasks — “build database,” “populate database with product info,” “implement Yahoo shopping cart” — and time estimates for each. If your buyer creates applicable task codes, use them when you sign in. If not, just specify the task at hand on your work memo.

Why go through all this nitty-gritty detail work? Here are four reasons:

1. Manage expectations. Showing each step can make sure the buyer understands why the job will take the time and money you estimate it will take. It prevents misunderstandings or disappointment down the line.
    
2. Involve other team members. If your breakdown includes functions other team members will perform, this helps the buyer organize the team, and raises your stature as a key member. For example, your time may be best spent on building the database but not keying-in the information. Have a data-entry specialist do that while you are focusing on your core work.
    
3. Establish transparency. You’re creating an easy way for the buyer to follow your progress. For some jobs, you may want to ask the buyer to sign off on each step — a simple email will do. Other times, you might be satisfied knowing you’re providing the right information, and tackling the job one task at a time.
    
4. Increase your long-term value. Task codes, or just an understanding of the breakdown, creates a way of looking at the job, a language your buyer knows you speak. In the long term, she’ll want providers who are already on the same page — so start writing that page now.
    

Task codes roll out in the next few weeks — keep an eye on our What’s New page. But in the meantime, if you’re not already geared toward thinking about the small pieces that create the big picture, there’s no better time to start.

If you are ineffective during any part of your workday and cannot determine why, then you need oDesk to help you track the use of your time and increase your throughput. oDesk is an extremely useful site due to the increasing use of contingency workforces, rise in telecommuting and growth of independent contractors. This suite of time management tools, job boards, and contractor payment services is surely to become indispensable to project managers in today’s global economy.

During the past month, I have used the oDesk utilities, especially the Team Room, with several contractors and internal employees with incredible success. Time management, tracking of billable hours, team collaboration & communication  all are among the many capabilities of the Team Room. These features have increased the turnaround of team projects and improved the communication among staff members.

Additionally, I have been able to use the Team Room’s work diary to track my time spent on various tasks and produce a weekly time-study. The work diary allows a user to identity time spent on various projects during the day, track productivity levels with an activity meter, and store screenshots of work being completed. The combined information can be used to evaluate use of work hours, evaluate employee performance, and review the use of resources across a team.

The work diary can also be very useful to anyone working for several departments because the capture time and task tracking can be used to calculate chargeback time. Regardless of the chosen use of the work diary and other team room features, all of the mentioned features are extremely easy to use and can be seamlessly worked into the normal routine of almost any position working from a computer workstation, especially administrative, technical, and data entry positions.

The clean and well organized interfaces of oDesk will make use of its tools an easy sell. Whether you or your employees are interfacing with the installed software on your desktop or using the internet version, you will find that all the features and tools are intuitive and the learning curve is very small. During a recent roll-out, several contractors were extremely comfortable with the tool in fewer than 48 hours.

Once you have implemented oDesk in your organization, the ROI on your investment will increase daily. The increase in accountability and project turn-around time will be the two greatest rewards experienced. Accountability will rise immediately because team members will quickly realize that their progress can be followed in real-time by their colleagues. Project completion time will decrease because staff members will have one place to communicate and get progress updates from team members. All guesses regarding project progression are eliminated.

Miller Roberts is the Chief of Staff of the Career Communications Group and a buyer on oDesk.

Here are 5 agile tips for completing a successful project, in general and on oDesk.

1) Work from a prioritized list - There are always going to be features that are more important than others. I know clients like to say that it’s all important and that they needed it yesterday. But, assure them of the importance of prioritizing. Work with your client to prioritize their list of items. Tell them that it is important because you want to make sure you’re working on the most important items first. And, working on the most important things will assure that you are always delivering value to your client.

2) Get feedback early and often – If a project is going to last a month, break it up into deliverable chunks. Establish a delivery schedule e.g. “I will deliver small pieces of the application every Friday evening for you to try out”. This does several things: First, it creates trust with your client. Second, it gives you valuable feedback that you need throughout the project instead of finding out you were doing something wrong after it’s too late. In the end, you final delivery will be more in line with what they want than if they hadn’t seen it until the end.

3) Time-box your work – Do you ever notice that a task that should’ve taken you an hour to do expands to several hours and sometimes a day? Tasks tend to shrink or expand with the amount of time allotted. Set a realistic, but aggressive goal for each task, then re-evaluate when you hit your deadline. You’ll be surprised as to how much more you can get done.

4) Make your work visible - Always make your work transparent to your client by pushing your status instead of making your client query you for it. A mutually agreed upon tool such as a wiki or an agile tool like ScrumNinja can play a great role as a central location for you to keep progress updates.

5) Communicate with your client regularly – There’s nothing a client dislikes more than having to check up with you on your progress. Establish check-in times up front when you begin the project and stick to it. For example, “Let’s check in once a week by Skype. I will also send you a status update by email daily and will not hesitate to IM you during the week if I need clarification”. A client that feels like you’re taking care of them is a happy client.

A lot of businesses think of public relations as the province of enormous corporations, but it’s more—and less—than a fully staffed in-house department. PR is the function of presenting your business and its message in the clearest and most positive light, and motivating the prospective client to see you as a go-to authority. In an increasingly competitive economic environment, every business needs to work harder to get its name out there. And you’d be surprised how far you can get on only a little effort in this digital age. Example? Sure:

We issued a press release about iPhone developer stats, submitted it to a press-release aggregator or two, inspiring post on an Apple blog that got about 800 hits on Digg. That’s not even all the reads, that’s just people who read it, had a Digg account, and were motivated to vote it up.

Underlying every PR campaign is the idea of “owning” your category. When people think of what you do, you want them to think of you. Your public relations campaign is simply the process of getting other people to agree that, yeah, you do own that category. You can reach that goal, and there are talented oDesk providers to help you with specific PR tasks quickly and efficiently. We have experienced publicists and marketing writers, journalists and sharp-eyed editors, plus experts in search-engine optimization (SEO), social networking, business research and more.

Here are 10 focused PR goals and tips on what to look for in a provider:

Do it yourself:

You will need certain expertise, but remember that you’re the face of your company. This list of DIY PR tips will help you get a handle on being your own chief marketer. You don’t need PR people to reach out to journalists, and the most genuine—not the most tailored—pitch is what will succeed. Journalists often view PR professionals as the obstacle between themselves and the story. You are the story, so put your best face forward—your own.

Write press releases:

Publicize new products, promotions or partnerships. You want an experienced writer who knows how to address your message to the appropriate audience—mainstream news media, business writers, tech sites or the general public. A veteran of marketing or journalism can also help identify the right editors or reporters to pitch.

Blog stuff:

Business is about relationships, and a blog lets you open and maintain a dialogue. This is more casual, lower-key and more frequent than a full press-release media blitz; find a writer with experience in blogging, whose samples you like reading, and who can maintain the blog with agreed-upon regularity.

Track your PR:

Distribute your press release inexpensively through PRweb to help get your news on top sites like Google News & Yahoo News, boost your site traffic and search ranks, send your news to top journalists. Make sure you check your campaign results on PRweb, Google analytics (free!) and your own metrics to improve your next effort. Your publicist/marketing writer can handle that, or it might be more cost-efficient to give this work to a personal assistant who has good web skills but perhaps not high-end writing/marketing chops.

Sift the Data:

oDesk regularly releases data from our global workplace on the oConomy page, in blog posts and press releases, sharing our perspective on the rapidly changing economy with a world hungry for such news. Identify information your business collects that could interest the wider world. Find a talented writer with the research skills, or get an experienced researcher who’ll pass the data to a more polished writer. A researcher can also examine trends in your space (online and off) and the general economy to identify improvements to your business strategy. Have her share findings with your audience—or turn them over to your blogger/publicist. Hire a database administrator to improve your data collection about your customers so you can start analyzing it and making interesting observations to share with the world.

Digg Yourself:

Blog items, press releases, news articles—submit ‘em all to sites like Digg and Stumbleupon that let users vote on content they like, bringing it to a wider audience. “Digg” the material you produce and any content that mentions your business in a favorable light. A personal assistant or social media marketing (SMM) provider can keep up with this for you.

Socialize:

Social media sites such as Facebook, and Twitter are quickly being adopted by businesses. “That’s crazy,” an old-line executive will say, but look at all the major businesses doing it. Hire the same assistant/SMM who handles your Diggs.

Go Hollywood:

Hire a video producer to make a short, fun video about your business. Post it on your site and have your SMM professional post and promote it on YouTube.

Create a slideshow:

Any data or announcement that can be rendered as a visually interesting slideshow can be posted for free on Slideshare.com. Have your PowerPoint-adept personal assistant create and post it.

Get Published:

Press releases inspire news outlets to write about you—but many business-to-business publications accept bylined articles in which your top executives can share their perspective and expertise. A publicist can help you brainstorm ideas, identify and pitch to likely venues, and craft the final piece.

There’s a lot that can be done with a small team of skilled providers delivering just the work you need, when you need it. And these days, who doesn’t need it right now?

In the age of cyberspace and technology, social media is helping small businesses in a way never imagined as few as 10 years ago.

If you’re not familiar with social media, think of it as word of mouth…upgraded! With colloquial applications like Twitter and Facebook on the rise, and bulletin sites like Digg and Reddit taking news stories to extraordinary heights, comes the potential to change the way small businesses do…well, business.

Gary Vaynerchuk, social media enthusiast and host of Wine Library TV, talks about the power of word of mouth in social media in his video titled Word of mouth has changed:

Word of mouth is on steroids, my friends. It’s Roger Clemens, it’s Barry Bonds, it’s – let’s throw Brett Boon in there – it is absolutely on steroids. More and more tools are being created every day to allow your word to travel in so many more places.

Anyone running a small business knows the power of word of mouth. But when it comes to social media, what’s in it for your organization?

Exposure and Marketing

Having a web presence opens up a wide range of opportunities for small businesses. Simply having a website makes your business accessible to the entire world. Suddenly, your business card can be distributed across the globe with minimal effort. But is it enough?

In some cases, it is – for example, a lawn care service may not need worldwide exposure. For companies embracing Internet technologies and globalization, however, social media is the wave of the future.

In the example to the right, the first page of a search for the term “oDesk” on Yahoo! returns five links to social networking and community websites (with two of the results linking back to a blog maintained by happy oDesk providers).

That’s 50% of the first page of results attributed to social communities! Considering most SEO consultants will tell you that people rarely venture beyond the second or third pages of search results, having 90% coverage on the first page is a pretty good return on investment!

Putting a Face on the Faceless

But while marketing is very important, interacting with your customer base (not to mention other industry professionals) can make a big impact on how people view your company. People like to know their voices are being heard – even it’s as simple as an @reply on Twitter. People feel a connection with you and you become more than just a corporate identity.

While not exactly a small business, the bar has been raised by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. With over 1400 “tweets” and almost 84,000 followers, thousands are anxiously awaiting his updates each day to see which celebrities he’s meeting, or whether he’ll get locked out of his hotel room. In a recent blog post, he explains how Twitter’s transparency (which he equates to being on camera 24/7) helps people connect with him and his company:

What I found was that people really appreciated the openness and honesty, and that led people to feel more of a personal connection with Zappos and me compared to other corporations and business people that were on Twitter.

But Who Has the Time?

If you’re like countless other small business owners out there, you may not have the time needed to build relationships online.

Consider hiring a social media consultant to help determine the course of action that best suits your needs. Then find a well-spoken, energetic virtual assistant to become your company’s social network representative for a few hours a week.

The results can be rewarding!

Why it’s Good for You

Having a website for your business is one thing. In fact, it’s almost expected these days – everybody has a website. But knowing how to use that medium properly is something entirely different. While websites and apps like Twitter and Digg started off as something of a novelty, they’ve grown and evolved into the perfect ways for small businesses to put themselves on the map. Not only do they get your company’s name out there, they can also be very useful in showing the human drama (or comedy) that goes on behind the scenes.

After all, a good business is one where customers are interested in the product; a great business is one where customers are interested in the company, as well.

Danalyn West is a freelance web designer on oDesk and an advocate for freelancers. She offers advice to freelancers and small businesses in oDesk forums and on her SavvyLancer.com blog.

A recent perspective discussed how to write a killer job description, designed to bring highly qualified providers rushing at you from all over the world. Now we’ll look at what to do if, uh-oh, it works.

1. Your first order of business is to smartly sift though the candidates queue. Some tips:

• Include a specific instruction or “captcha” in your job description, such as, “Include two URLs to previous jobs in your cover letter.” Applicants who don’t follow instructions, reject immediately.

• Reject ridiculously low or ridiculously high rates/bids — deal with serious people only.

• Remove providers with below-average feedback. Anyone under a 4.0 is in the bottom quartile of all providers. Tread carefully. Of course, a brand-new provider will have no feedback, and that’s natural. If you like her portfolio, give her an interview. If that goes well, you may have discovered a new gem before anyone else!

2. Once you narrowed down the candidate queue, carefully read each provider’s profile.

• Work history and feedback are very telling. A provider who has had only one job, but has billed 500 hours and is still in progress, is keeping her buyer very happy. If a provider has 20 one-hour or one-day jobs on his record, pay close attention to the tasks and feedback. (Hint: you can click on a job opening and see the original job description to compare.)

• Check to see whether he has passed relevant tests. If an interesting candidate hasn’t yet taken a test pertaining to your job, invite him to interview and ask him to take it — it’s free and shouldn’t take more than an hour.

• Review portfolios for the quality, style and range of their work. If someone doesn’t have a portfolio — request one.

3. You can also use the provider search to find more great candidates. Tips on how to do it, and why to bother:

• The best providers are often also very busy — not too surprising. Many of them don’t spend time searching for new jobs. You’ve got to make the first move and send them an invitation.

• Start with the criteria you entered in the job description, then narrow or expand the list by changing the parameters. Entering keyword ‘PHP’ will yield about 17,000 results. More stringent criteria, like “search titles only,” feedback score (set to “at least 4.5”), last activity (to “within 30 days”) and tests passed (to “PHP5 test”) narrows the list to around 300.

4. Now you’ve just got to interview effectively:

• Coordinating across time zones can be confusing at first — consult a world clock when necessary.

• Offer any method of communication you are comfortable with (email, IM, Skype, phone, etc.) and make yourself as available as possible.

• Communicate in the medium the job will require. If you’ll expect written reports daily or weekly, include an email exchange that lets you see the candidate’s clarity and thoroughness. Hiring a customer service rep? Of course you’ll want to hear his phone manner.

• Probe into past or current assignments (you saw them on her profile), ask about anything in the profile that struck you as unusual.

• Prepare a quiz or a set of test questions and give the same ones to all interviewees.

• Give a few finalists a test job. Set a limit to the time to keep costs down, get some real-world proof of their abilities, and show the candidates that you value their time.

The hiring process can be overwhelming, especially when presented with as many as 50 candidates. Few bosses look forward to the task. But there’s a lot of talent on oDesk, and a focused approach can bring fast, successful results. Happy hunting!

PS. We always appreciate your feedback on how we can help you address these challenges — participate in our forums.

When every news report warns of global doom and gloom, the business owner’s first instinct is to cut all extraneous costs. You run your production team lean, run your sales force lean, and everything else goes into the deep freeze. Too many people see marketing as something irrelevant, as vague feel-good fluff that neither makes the product nor closes the sale. That’s crazy talk.When the sales pipeline is running dry, or at least no longer gushing, it’s marketing that fills that pipeline, and even in lean times, targeted efforts can keep your name out in the marketplace and create a conversation (and hey, maybe even hype). This shows you’re a thriving player, not one of many recessionary casualties, and prepares potential customers for the closing move your sales team will execute.We’ve come up with ideas for marketing yourself through the latest social media and the old-fashioned general Internet:

Social Media Optimization:

1. Are you on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other social media sites? If not (or if so, and you’re overwhelmed with all of it), you may want a Social Media Optimization (SMO) expert to put your message into the newest and fastest-growing Internet arena.  Have her create a Facebook or LinkedIn group for your company and invite your users; every one of their friends will see that they are related to your company and there is just nothing better than that for word-of-mouth.
2. Keep that SMO expert onboard to troll conversation on Twitter about your company and your industry, so she can send responses and begin threads. Use Google Alerts to be notified when terms relevant to your business are mentioned.
3. Other social media your expert can monitor: Forum and blog commenting, LinkedIn and Yahoo Answers, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and GetSatisfaction.
4. Launch video tutorials for your website. In addition post them to YouTube. Hire a personable, well-spoken provider to help you convert your script to a professional-looking online video using tools like Camtasia or Snapz.
5. Get a blogger to maintain a company blog and to reach out to other blogs to keep your message in the conversation.
6. Do you have a community forum on your website? When users post questions, are they getting an answer? Bring in a moderator for your community forum to make sure that when users take the time to post a comment, they get a response that will encourage them to come back.
7. Hire a writer to create articles relevant to your industry and syndicate them to Squidoo, Business.com and EzineArticles.com.
8. Get a writer with exceptional PowerPoint skills to prepare a presentation that is highly relevant to your industry, and post it on SlideShare.com.
9. Recruit an analyst to prepare a few charts and data about your company and business and post on swivel.com.

You may have noticed that the economy is on shaky ground pretty much everywhere. It’s been in all the papers. While everyone’s on edge, the small-business owner is probably most nervous — you’ve got all the concerns everyone has, plus the future of your business and employees to worry about. A real challenge is how to make money go further — you can’t slash expenses, because you’re already running lean, and you don’t want to stifle your business out of economic fear.

1. Move customer service to a remote team.
    
2. Move your system admin, network professional or support team from a retainer to hourly pay (for just those tasks that you need).
    
3. Hire writers or graphic designers from rural areas rather than more expensive urban areas.
    
4. Focus on search engine optimization instead of paid search efforts: Showing up at the top of a Google search beats buying an ad slot, anyway.
    
5. Expand the role of your existing team members, online and offline, so everyone participates in stretching your dollar further.
    
6. Free up executive time to focus on higher-value activities: Hiring someone for data entry and other time-consuming, lower-level tasks lets you and your top people concentrate on taking the business forward.
    
7. Buy used equipment from failed companies that need to sell computers, furniture or office supplies. You may even be able to score an amazing deal on that cool espresso machine you always wanted.
    
8. Use what’s free: Trade land lines for Skype, ooVoo or TokBox; use oDesk Share instead of paid web conference tools.
    
9. Use open source instead of paid software: PostgreSQL instead of Oracle, Gmail and Google Apps instead of an expensive in-house email and collaboration server.
    
10. Reduce travel expenses and gas costs by using oDesk Team to work from home when possible.
     

Everyone is worried about riding out the current storm, but you can’t let fear swamp your ability to think tactically. Find value where you can. A rising tide isn’t so threatening when you’re a strong swimmer.

There are hundreds of thousands providers on oDesk. You, however, don’t want 100,000 providers. You may want one provider — the one who offers the best combination of experience, reliability and affordability. And the thing is, you’re competing on any given day with dozens of other buyers to get her attention. On a random day this month, 550 jobs popped up for a search of Graphic Design, and nearly a thousand for PHP. We have a lot of talent on oDesk, and a lot of buyers, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t have first pick. The secret to that: writing a killer job description.

The best people aren’t worried about keeping busy, and they’re not throwing themselves at any job that comes along. They’ve got two priorities: work that is interesting or challenging, and work that can turn into longer projects, so they can spend more time billing hours and less typing up cover letters on spec.

When you get to the point of conducting interviews with hopeful applicants, you’re in control — you’re doing the hiring. When a provider sits down to sift through the latest job posts, he’s deciding whom to apply to — he’s hiring you, in a sense. Here’s how to make yours work:

• Make it interesting — no one wants to be bored, and talented people have multiple options.
• Be open and informative — providers want a strong communicator, and they want to see that you understand the project you’re hiring for. “Need programmer to build website” will not draw the best people. Give details, especially about deadlines and deliverables.
• Identify yourself and your company. If this isn’t appropriate, write a sentence about who you are and what your company does. Specify requirements, including skills tests, so the candidate can take them before applying. Also note required tools, including software and applications, plus time commitments and other necessities. Detailed requirements let the candidate self-assess whether she’ll be a good fit.
• Share examples of work that looks like what you want. Need a shopping cart added to your site? Point to a site whose functionality and design you want to use as a guideline (just don’t infringe on any intellectual property).
• Offer incentives — If there’s the potential for longer-term work, say so. We’ve found this to attract more, and better, candidates. Perhaps you’d like to offer a bonus for reaching a milestone.

Have you ever sorted through resumes and were appalled by the way some completely fail to interest you? Look at your job description with the same eye. Is it compelling? Does it draw the right candidates and clearly discourage those with, say, insufficient experience or a current inability to meet your deadline? Are you selling yourself to the best talent out there, or just throwing your doors open to whoever is desperate enough to apply?

Just six months after signing up as a provider company, oDesk jobs account for 25% of five-year-old Ahmedabad, India-based DIGICorp’s workload. We talked to cofounder Abhishek Desai about oDesk’s part in the rapid growth of his online custom application development business.

Q:  Some providers describe a learning curve before establishing themselves on oDesk. When did it click for you?
A:  I think the best thing I did was creating my profile and my company’s profile as per guidelines provided by oDesk. Also, I apply to carefully selected jobs that I think we are really capable of doing. And I write personalized cover letters for all my applications. I don’t believe in just copy-pasting readymade cover letters. Because of all these, I can say I hit the ground really fast after becoming a member of oDesk.

Q:  When you’re choosing which jobs to apply for, what tips you off about the best opportunities, versus the ones you decide not to pursue?
A:  We tend to apply to jobs of a certain size, usually four weeks or longer. That does not mean we don’t do smaller jobs — if a job is interesting enough, we tend to pursue it. From the job description a buyer has written, you get to know how much the buyer is interested in really going forward. I like to work with a buyer who is equally excited to have his/her project up and running.

Q:  If a buyer asks you how to attract the best providers, what’s your advice?
A:  Carefully choose them by reading their cover letters first. Make sure you have providers who have written a personalized letter for you. This means the provider cares about your job and he/she has already spent time understanding it. After that, it depends on the interview. Go for the provider who is as passionate for your project as you are.

To read the full interview, click here.

CogWise Software specializes in building Ruby on Rails web applications. Based in Nashville, TN, USA, the company was founded in January 2007 and started hiring oDesk providers last November. The company relies on oDesk to simplify administration and to provide the bulk of its manpower–with only two in-house employees, it has 12 to 15 oDesk providers working on projects at any time.

The company had been known as BluePaw Software, but was rebranded as CogWise just this week. CEO William Bridges says the new company is a fresh partnership with an oDesk provider, and the time was right for a new start. “CogWise is also about building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with clients and building our own internal software projects that my partner and I have thought of.”

Q:  Do you have a small group of providers you work with regularly, or do you tend to seek new providers to suit each individual project?
A:  A little of both. As we’ve grown, we’ve needed more developers. We actually look in the oDesk marketplace and outside, but we always have new developers sign up for an oDesk account, because it makes things a lot easier to manage. Our strategy is to have two or three small teams and some specialists for technology outside our core interest.

Q:  How do you manage your providers? What have you learned about setting timelines, specifying deliverables or managing communication that’s unique to the remote worker relationship?
A:  We use a project management software package called RedMine to foster communication. We usually have one lead developer who sets up tickets, milestones, and the deliverable schedule, and then the other programmers help execute that vision. Remote situations can be difficult and rewarding in many ways. We usually pick a lead that can somewhat overlap the programmers’ schedules if they are in a remote time zone, as proper communication is key. Language and cultural differences must be understood by the lead or by myself. I usually take time to understand those differences for each country we hire from.

Q:  Some buyers describe a learning curve before they began using oDesk effectively. Did you just hit the ground running, or was there a point where you really “got” it?
A:  We had a few rough experiences early on in understanding how to do this as well. Really, the way we solved it is as follows: Since most of our customers are English speaking we pick an American, European or someone who understands Western culture extremely well to lead projects and use them as a bridge. It’s more costly to do things that way, but that person also spends less than full-time working on the project. They are able to explain the technical intricacies going on in the project in a way that can be understood easily to us and that we can quickly plan for.

For the full interview, click here.

Outsourcing customer support can be nerve-wracking. If you hire someone to build a website but don’t like the result, you’re out some time and money. Failures in customer support will cost you clients. Yet, if your in-house resources are drawn too thin, you can’t do a good job of managing your customers, either.

There are reliable, responsible people working from home, and the cost savings over hiring and housing office staff are obvious–there’s a reason it’s a growing trend. JetBlue has thousands of people fielding customer calls from their homes, and the airline consistently ranks high in customer satisfaction.

So it can be done. The question is, how do you do it right?

Profile Details: Scan feedback for comments that praise not just work product, but interaction: “a joy to work with,” “an excellent communicator,” “very responsive.” Also look for test scores; oDesk offers certification in email etiquette and call-center skills. Anyone serious about the job will have taken the tests and scored well.

Enjoy the Interview: The best customer service people are extremely competent and genuinely dedicated to helping you out. They’re sympathetic and friendly, but always professional, not chatty. When you interview your candidates, make sure they’re giving you the vibe you want your customers to get.

Asset Allocation: Does the candidate have the time to commit to the schedule you need? Does she have the necessary technology and a quiet place to use it? Does she demonstrate the problem-solving skills the job requires?

Role-play: Practice a few scenarios to see how your top candidates perform. Can your prospective hire listen in on a few well-handled calls? You should definitely monitor the first few calls after you hire her and provide very specific feedback.

Measure Up: Set metrics for customer satisfaction that will let you assess your worker’s success, and provide a mechanism for rewarding her for a job well done.

Picking out an expert in human language and interaction can be harder than finding a programming whizz, but the combination of competitive pricing and premier talent available on oDesk makes this kind of outsourcing a viable, and valuable, option.

oDesk is an exciting new paradigm that offers multiple advantages– remote, low-cost and low overhead work product without upfront outlay; a wealth of skilled contractors to select from; pay-for-performance; flexibility with a built-in background structure and real-time monitoring. However, with all these pluses, buyers are left with the same final hiring decision they have in any employment situation.
New buyers and experts familiar with oDesk face the same question and the same challenge.

The challenge.
How can I be confident that I’m hiring the best person for the job at hand?
Although  relevant for first time buyers and buyers seeking expertise in an area they have never hired for, any long term relationship is going to have the same initial trial period. I want to know not only that the people I hire are qualified, but also that they are going to fit my organization and the way I conduct business..
Examining provider profiles, portfolios and feedback is the suggested method, and for many jobs, this is sufficient. But  this may not be enough. There’s more to it than selecting a qualified person: Will this person work well with me? Will they meet my specific expectations, time constraints and budget? Will our relationship be effective and productive?

The solution.
There’s a way to test drive providers at oDesk with little risk. A way to answer the important questions and ease the worries that come with any new hire. And it can be key when filling a longterm position.
The idea is simple. Post your Job and expectations normally, but when you find providers that have the qualifications necessary, hire them with limited hours and assign a portion of a project (or a smaller but similar project). You can create a small project and test several providers. The cost is minimal, as little as a single hour’s time for each provider.
The commitment is limited, but the experience of working remotely and using the oDesk tools with a particular provider can be invaluable. If evaluating provider profiles, work samples and cover letters is the gold standard, test driving would be the platinum standard. You get to see how one (or multiple) providers actually performs with a task you set. And you get to find out how you perform as a team.

More Advantages.
As a manager or business owner, you know that jobs evolve– the goal posts change, deadlines and scope get modified, new ideas pop up and new concerns need to be addressed. Test driving allows you to do an initial shake-out and tighten your focus before you decide on the right  approach. It may be that the job requires a different mix of talent than you originally thought. Perhaps your deadline or budget was too optimistic. Test driving is a way to clarify things.
Test driving by limiting hours also protects you from an unscrupulous provider who ‘milks’ time. If a provider cannot produce a quality product in a reasonable amount of time, you’ve made a mistake hiring at a rock-bottom hourly rate. Trying before buying will allow you to find out before you’ve committed.
Finally, test driving lets you filter a larger set of qualified applicants to find the best fit. By hiring several providers and test driving, you can see exactly what you will get for your money and keep the best of the group.

–Bill Morrison, Guest Blogger

It’s easy to find skilled workers on oDesk–post a job, check out providers’ profiles, interview. It really is that simple, but a few tricks can help you get more from our global network of nearly 100,000 remote workers.

Feedback: The first thing you’ll do is check the provider’s feedback and work history, but don’t just count stars. Look at what your candidate’s impressive 4.5 score really means to you.

• How many people contributed to that rating? Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, but the length of their track records should matter.
• Were they short projects or long? A ten-hour job is one thing, but longer assignments reveal the ability to handle complex jobs, manage relationships and deliver consistently, so weigh feedback on that 200-hour project more heavily.
• Are they getting repeat business? Seeing the same buyer IDs come back is a stronger recommendation than the highest written praise.
• What about ongoing projects? If the provider has a lot of continuing jobs, check whether she’ll have time to meet your deadlines. But be encouraged when a provider is still engaged in a project after logging 400 hours: She’s proven herself indispensable.
• What kind of jobs are listed? Your prospective Java developer lists a full alphabet soup of skills: ActiveX, CSS, J2EE, PHP, the works. If most of his projects have been in PHP and CSS, even dazzling feedback might not qualify him for your six-month J2EE project.

Portfolio: Feedback lets you see whether a provider’s work made the buyer happy. The portfolio lets you see whether their work makes you happy.

• Is it good enough? Do you like your prospective writer’s “voice”? Do you find that prospective web designer’s last site attractive and easily navigable?
• Is it big enough? Does the portfolio contain work of the scope you’re hiring for?

Skills: Scores on oDesk skills tests expose work style as well as competency.

• Can he back up his skills? Does the candidate list 100 skills on has taken only 2 tests? Chances are, you need a well rounded resource. If he has taken tests in some subjects but not those that pertain to your job, don’t hesitate to ask him to complete other tests. It should take the provider only 30 minutes and it is both a sign of interest in the job as well as a yardstick for you to compare candidates.
• Does she have enough tests? Don’t just look at the test scores; make sure the candidate has a good range tests too. Note that we display the score and percentile (score better than X% of test takers), not the percentage (score X% correct).

A provider’s profile puts a lot of data at your fingertips, but to extract some of the best information, dig a bit below the surface. It’s worth the effort if it leads you to a provider good enough not only for this job, but for the one after that, and the one after that…

India’s Sun Softwares does graphic design and web development. It started with one person in 2003 and now employs 20. Owner and CEO Tarun Verma credits a lot of that growth to oDesk. Sun signed up as an oDesk provider in July 2006, but Verma says his company didn’t start using oDesk effectively until the following January. Today, about 60 percent of Sun Softwares’ work comes via oDesk buyers.

Q: It’s important for a provider to find a client he or she can work well with. Besides looking for a project that fits Sun Softwares’ expertise, what do you look for when you see a job post?
A: We try to look for projects that are required to be built from scratch using the latest technology, and we look at the client’s comments in the job postings. At times we see some harsh comments in the job post, and we tend to ignore those posts, as there are high chances of project failure due to the client’s attitude. Some job posts call only for bug fixing–we ignore them, as it’s difficult to take those projects to completion which are already in some kind of mess. We pursue the full projects and the projects with complete specifications. The projects which are posted with complete specifications show that the buyer is really keen and would be very good to work with, as the scope has been clearly defined.

Q: When you interview with a first-time client, how do you make sure you’re understanding the project requirements and the buyer’s needs?
A: We try to get detailed specifications from the buyer, URLs of example websites, wire diagrams of screens, expected time for completion, expected budget. If the client does not provide the complete details, then we build a prototype to make sure we are trying to do what client wants. It’s very important to get the complete picture that is in a customer’s mind to make sure the project gets to completion in time.

Q: How would you advise a new buyer who asked you how to find the best providers when several applicants may have good basic feedback scores?
A: My advice would be to look closely at the portfolio links, expertise of providers, other experiences and history on oDesk, rating and comments of buyers. Buyers can choose the best providers by looking for well-laid out profiles, a good history at oDesk, and good ratings and comments from past buyers.

For the full interview, click here.

The Vision: In 1996, Jan Zands was answering phones at a Hollywood studio, trying to manage the high volume of incoming and outgoing calls with paper and pen–an overwhelming challenge. “A film producer will make about 40 calls per day and receive another 40 per day — and in Hollywood, a lot of people don’t return calls,” Zands explains. “It’s necessary to have a good system for tracking calls and what they are about, but at the time no such software existed — I saw an opportunity that a lot of other companies could benefit from as well.”

Zands saw a way to build something better, and went into business building and installing FileMaker databases to handle call tracking. He soon realized that this was a cumbersome and expensive proposition for users. ìI needed to make it into a web-based application”, he said.

The Problem: Good programmers are hard to find. Starting in 2001, Zands tried newspaper ads and Craigslist postings, then costly consulting firms and Internet-based offshore companies. Repeatedly he’d hire programmers who seemed reliable, but would end up leaving their work incomplete. “My biggest challenge was finding programmers that were affordable, but also skilled enough to finish the entire job,” Zands said. “I was wading around in the ocean of providers for over five years until I found oDesk.”

The Solution: He found oDesk in April last year. “I went on oDesk and it was awesome! I posted my job and got about 20 responses within a day,” he said. “I was able to find people at the rate I needed and was also able to look at testimonials so I was certain that these people would finish the job.” That helped eliminate the biggest frustration he’d been experiencing. “It was so important to see on a provider’s profile that there were jobs with start dates, end dates and positive feedback.”

To date, Zands has hired 11 providers, in India and Ukraine, paying rates between $12 and $20 an hour. Exactly a year after joining oDesk, the project that had languished half a decade launched. The product is online now, offering a way to not only track the status of incoming and outgoing calls, but to instantly access the log of past calls to and from a client. The company boasts Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. and Fox Television Studios as clients.

Zands credits oDesk with helping his company get Phonesheet’s software and site out there, and with maintaining and improving both. He praises oDesk’s reliability, ease of use and easy, dependable payment options, but what matters most is what all that helped him make.

“The end result,” he says, “Is a great product.”

Most oDesk assignments start small–you hire a provider to complete a specific project. But when the provider proves he can be relied upon, you start giving him more hours and increasingly vital tasks. Soon you may find your remote provider fully integrated with your in-house staff, and that begins to change the relationship between buyer and provider.

We know–here at oDesk we hire providers to work with our in-house staff, and on some projects, one type of worker is virtually indistinguishable from the other (click here to read more about Team oDesk). Add to the mix workplace flexibility that allows traditional employees to telecommute instead of coming to the office each day and you’ve got a team requiring an entirely new set of management skills. Here are a few lessons we’ve learned on the job.

When you hire a provider to, say, write a discrete piece of code, you may not care when he does the work–as long as the Work Diary and memos look good, and you get good code on time. But when you need more real-time collaboration, you have to reach an agreement for the provider to be available during some or all of your business hours.

But how will he be available? Is IM enough? Does he need to have a Skype account? A webcam? When he’s out, will he leave an away message telling you what time he’ll be back? Will your in-house staffers do the same?

You trust your provider to work around his daily life. Maybe he doesn’t log on until after midnight, or frequently suspends sessions to handle family needs. Once he’s agreed to be available at set times, you have as much right to make sure he’ll have a distraction-free work environment as you do for the “in-house” telecommuter opting for a home office instead of a cubicle. Flexible freelancers are masters of clever workarounds, but as the team becomes more interdependent, everyone needs to understand that expectations evolve.

Of course, you’ll continue to manage your provider using oDesk Team–the Work Diary and payment functions are vital. But did you realize you can have your in-house staff logged into Team as well? Getting all the staff for various projects onto one Team page, so everyone can see who’s available and when, helps consolidate and improve management functions. Just go to My oDesk » Team Admin and invite them to become company users with Team Room access.

Integrating your remote providers into the company’s daily workflow can seem like a daunting move, but by thinking each challenge through, we’ve found that it’s easier than you’d expect for far-flung team members to become close colleagues.

Stuart Hibbert from icomplete was kind enough to interview with oDesk and share some of his insights into how to successfully use oDesk as a buyer. His interview was included in a recent oDesk newsletter.

Based in Swindon, England, icomplete.com was conceived by three founders who, after many years of running successful small businesses, wanted to pass on their knowledge to help other companies improve their image, save time, and increase profits.

Their Software-as-a-Service Business Suite incorporates CRM (contact management), calendar, task management, collaboration tools, telephony and website widgets, plus real-life personal assistants to answer calls and undertake tasks clients don’t have time or expertise to do themselves. The beta version is due out soon, to be followed by the commercial launch in the United Kingdom – starting at just £25 ($50) per month – there are no upfront costs, or contract tie-ins. An advertising-supported ‘free’ version will also be available worldwide (minus some of the enhanced features).

CEO Stuart Hibbert is responsible for the day-to-day running of the business and specifically the product and technical teams. “Ultimately,” he says, “the buck stops with me.”
As an oDesk buyer:

Hibbert has been using oDesk for nearly a year, hiring developers within several disciplines; Java, AJAX (JavaScript) and Asterisk; as well as product testing and technical writing. “We started off with just a couple of Java developers back in June 2007,” he says. “We wanted to understand how outsourcing would work for us and which service best suited our requirements. We initially worked with two remote management services, but we liked oDesk so much that we moved those developers over to oDesk too. Our team is now nine providers strong. We tend to have a regular stable of providers – however, for certain skills we do regularly post to the community at large to see if there is new talent available.”

Q: What has been the biggest challenge in using remote providers?
A: To date we have been using individual providers rather than teams, which we feel gives us more flexibility – but at the same time means that we are having to project manage everyone separately. Which, given different time zones (+9 hours in Sydney to -8 hours on the west coast of the United States), is quite challenging – but rewarding when we get it right.

Q: In what way has oDesk made it easier to manage remote workers?
A: Several ways:

* Hire – Instant access to a wealth of providers located around the world. We ask all providers to undertake tests in the field which is most closely associated to the position they are applying for. We read the feedback which has been provided by other buyers.
* Day to day management – The Work Diary is invaluable to us, allowing us to be able to manage remote workers efficiently.
* Payment – We don’t have to worry about the payments to providers who are located across the globe; oDesk manages this all for us.

Q: Do you manage all your oDesk staffers directly, or have you pulled back and hired a project manager through oDesk?
A: A combination really. So far I have managed directly, but as we are developing the business I find that I have less time available. So we have just promoted one of our providers to become team leader, someone who knew how we worked and could see the vision of what we wanted to achieve.

Q: Is it difficult to give up a certain amount of oversight and direct involvement?
A: Sure it was difficult. I am one of the founders of the business, so what we are doing is “my baby.” It is always difficult to give that up. But for the development of the business and for the good of the team, it is best.

Q: We’ve rolled out some new features lately to help with this process, such as Create Team. Is there anything you think oDesk should do in the future to help facilitate a buyer granting more autonomy to teams of workers?
A: More collaboration tools. Providers tend to use email as the primary way of communicating – which can take time for them to “construct” their thoughts logically. Tools that would help to decrease this time would be great. Also, a diary of when providers are ‘planning’ to work – this way buyers would have more visibility as to when providers would be working, especially on an international basis when you have things like different public holidays and such like – would help with current and future planning.

Q: What tips or advice would you have for someone considering signing up as an oDesk buyer?
A: My advice:

* Understand what you want to achieve – be as specific as possible in your briefing/specification.
* Put in proper project management – failure is usually as a result of buyers and providers not communicating effectively.
* Give your providers more than one task at a time – this way if they are waiting on anything, then they at least have another task to work on.

Q: From a buyer’s perspective, what advice would you give to a provider wanting to increase success through oDesk?
A: My advice:

* Get tested. If you say that something is your key competency, then find the associated test on oDesk and take it. Generally, if someone applies for a position, if they aren’t tested we will generally reject them without looking much further than that.
* Check that you match the skills that are being sought. If someone says that they are looking for you to have certification on a particular test or a certain amount of history and you haven’t, then you are more likely to be rejected.
* Make your cover letter specific to the role you are applying for. So many times do we receive generic cover letters which bear little or no resemblance to the position they are applying for.
* Do the best possible job that you can for the provider. They will then give you a glowing feedback report which will help you to secure future work easier.

Based in Swindon, England, icomplete.com was conceived by three founders who, after many years of running successful small businesses, wanted to pass on their knowledge to help other companies improve their image, save time, and increase profits.

Their Software-as-a-Service Business Suite incorporates CRM (contact management), calendar, task management, collaboration tools, telephony and website widgets, plus real-life personal assistants to answer calls and undertake tasks clients don’t have time or expertise to do themselves.

CEO Stuart Hibbert is responsible for the day-to-day running of the business and specifically the product and technical teams. “Ultimately,” he says, “the buck stops with me.”

As an oDesk buyer:

Hibbert has been using oDesk for nearly a year, hiring developers within several disciplines; Java, AJAX (JavaScript) and Asterisk; as well as product testing and technical writing. “We started off with just a couple of Java developers back in June 2007,” he says. “We wanted to understand how outsourcing would work for us and which service best suited our requirements. We initially worked with two remote management services, but we liked oDesk so much that we moved those developers over to oDesk too. Our team is now nine providers strong. We tend to have a regular stable of providers – however, for certain skills we do regularly post to the community at large to see if there is new talent available.”

Q: In what way has oDesk made it easier to manage remote workers?
A: Several ways:

• Hire – Instant access to a wealth of providers located around the world. We ask all providers to undertake tests in the field which is most closely associated to the position they are applying for. We read the feedback which has been provided by other buyers.
• Day to day management – The Work Diary is invaluable to us, allowing us to be able to manage remote workers efficiently.
• Payment – We don’t have to worry about the payments to providers who are located across the globe; oDesk manages this all for us.

Q: Do you manage all your oDesk staffers directly, or have you pulled back and hired a project manager through oDesk?
A: A combination really. So far I have managed directly, but as we are developing the business I find that I have less time available. So we have just promoted one of our providers to become team leader, someone who knew how we worked and could see the vision of what we wanted to achieve.

Q: Is it difficult to give up a certain amount of oversight and direct involvement?
A: Sure it was difficult. I am one of the founders of the business, so what we are doing is “my baby.” It is always difficult to give that up. But for the development of the business and for the good of the team, it is best.

Q: What tips or advice would you have for someone considering signing up as an oDesk buyer?
A: My advice:

• Understand what you want to achieve – be as specific as possible in your briefing/specification.
• Put in proper project management – failure is usually as a result of buyers and providers not communicating effectively.
• Give your providers more than one task at a time – this way if they are waiting on anything, then they at least have another task to work on.

Click here for the full interview.

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.

Sarah Lewis runs Abundant Media, Inc. (currently producing Findable Blogs) in Boise, Idaho, with two employees, about 15 contractors (more than two-thirds of them via oDesk). She also works as a provider on oDesk as a WordPress developer. With her experience on both sides of that relationship, she has recently written an e-book designed to help providers make the most of oDesk. “Making Money in Your Pajamas: A Freelancer’s Handbook from the oDesk Insider,” a practical, step-by-step guide to freelancing online using oDesk, with a particular focus on creating a profile that attracts buyers, and cover letters that win jobs.

Q: You’re both a provider and buyer on oDesk. In which role did you start, and how did you come to wear both hats?
A: I started as a buyer, looking for help with my quickly growing business. As I reviewed cover letters and profiles, I realized that many providers have excellent skills but don’t know how to best promote themselves. I knew what attracted me as a buyer, but I wanted to see if my observations were universal, so I initially set up my provider profile as an experiment (it worked; I applied for three jobs at higher-than-average rates and got two of them). Now I’m using my provider profile as an alternate marketing method.

Q: Having written an e-book for oDesk providers, what piece of advice do you think providers will find most surprising?
A: You don’t need to be the lowest bidder. Many freelancers try to compete on price, but that’s a mistake.

Q: Have you seen results with the techniques you’ve written about?
A: My book editor, an oDesk provider, made some changes this week to his profile based on the book’s advice, and has already seen increased interest from buyers.

Q: What’s the first giveaway, when dealing with a new provider, that this person is really sharp, or is really not what you’re looking for?
A: The speed and attention to detail in their communication. I usually have a good idea going in about their skills, but work ethic can be hit-or-miss. My pet peeve is providers who don’t read or follow instructions.

Click here for the full interview.

I just went out for a team lunch with our local team – 5 of us had a very nice lunch and talked and joked about family, golf, airplanes, dating, and Hillary Clinton. During the lunch, I thought of the other 8 people that are part of my team. 3 data entry professionals in Mohali, India; 1 work-at-home mom in Pune, India; 1 part-time community moderator in Omsk, Russia; 1 freelance newsletter writer in Oakland, CA; 1 copywriter / editor based in Oregon but traveling in Brazil; and 1 search marketing consultant working at home in San Francisco, CA. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have been in a similar situation.

Why should they be excluded? Do they have the same needs as the rest of us co-located workers that get to enjoy each other’s company and go out for a lunch or a happy hour? Of course they do. So what do you do for team-building for distributed teams. Here’s a few ideas:

1 ) Introduce everyone – Make sure that your remote team is well-connected with each other and with everyone in the organization that they need to be. It’s easy for a local employee to raise their hand and ask others for help, but if you are the primary point of contact for your remote contractor, you need to make sure they have multiple people that they can turn to for help. And have some fun with the intros – ask each team member to send an intro email that includes hobbies or a funny story.

2 ) Run a full group chat 24×7 - Almost all instant messenger platforms have group chat capability. Start a group chat and let it run all day long even if you’re not around. Your team can easily communicate with the rest of the group and make the occasional jokes and comments. If people aren’t around during the time of the chat, they can read it once they get back to their computer. Make sure everyone has personal photos in their instant messenger client.

3 ) Send around joke emails - Why not? You do it with local employees and old college buddies. Spend a little time thinking about your remote staff and send some articles, jokes, comics, funny videos that you think they might find amusing. If you’re using something like oDesk Team for automated time-tracking, you’re not paying for any non-work related time. Encourage a small amount of fun time as part of the weekly work schedule.

4 ) Hold a weekly team meeting – Even if you have your staff is working on completely different things, it’s nice to hear everyone’s voice on the same call. Hold a team meeting at the same time every week and use webcams and headsets via a Skype or Yahoo group conference call.

5 ) Send around a weekly newsletter – Recognize team members for any strong contributions that week. Recognize someone if it’s their birthday. Keep everyone on the same page by including an update from your end.

6 ) Have a photo share – Ask everyone to upload some photos of a weekend activity to Flickr or other photo-sharing site. Spend 20 minutes during a team meeting to let everyone describe a weekend activity.

7 ) Create a Facebook group – If you have enough people on your team, create a Facebook group and consider it your virtual water cooler.

8 ) Host an online game for your team – Play Scrabulous with your team. Play online chess, backgammon, etc. Challenge your team members to a game of Desktop Defender or share Line Rider creations.

9 ) Send around birthday cards – You all know virtual card sites. Any time a team member has a birthday, make sure everyone else on the team sends the brithday-girl or -boy a virtual card. It’s sure to brighten their day.

10 ) Hold a fantasy sports league – It brings together local offices, no reason it shouldn’t work in virtual offices. If you don’t want to do a full fantasy sports league, find something that’s a short-term contest and get everyone involved.

Buyers hiring their first remote providers might feel as though they’re going in blind. You find someone with a good rating, a profile listing the skills you need, and perhaps some encouraging scores on oDesk’s performance tests. But even after a chat or two, you’re still hiring someone half a planet away and entrusting him or her with tasks essential to your business. It’s an unnerving risk, a roll of the dice. But there’s no reason not to stack the odds in your favor.

When you buy a car, you test drive several before settling on the one for you. You don’t buy a house until you’ve had a good walkthrough – perhaps several. You don’t hire a new staff member without reading her resume, chatting on the phone, holding an in-person interview or two, and checking references. And you probably do it for several people before you settle on the right hire. It’s the same process with remote workers – only the strategies change. Instead of face-face communication, you use Web conferencing and Skype. Instead of seeing the person at work in the next office, you have the Work Diary. And instead of a three-step interview process that includes a technical test, you hire a few providers for a literal test drive. Contact a handful of likely candidates and give each a small trial before putting a long and vital project in anyone’s hands.

If you need a PHP programmer for a project that will take more than 1000 hours, you can’t afford to find out at hour 48 that you’ve hired the wrong person. Instead, contact three likely candidates and tell them you’re in the process of settling on the right provider. Hire each to do a simple project, something with a time limit of a few hours. It can be discrete pieces of your greater project or just a sample task. Ask for a Web page that will take input of name and gender and output “Hello, Mr. Smith.” Throw in a time-of-day element to get “Good evening, Ms. Jones.”

Make the test investment commensurate with the project’s scope. For a smaller project, use a simpler test. Hire your candidates to assess your site and suggest specific improvements. Give them, say, an hour or two to report how they’d make your site more useful to your customers, or more attractive, specifying how they’d carry out the effort, with cost/hour estimates. Their ability to grasp your objectives, communicate viable solutions, and demonstrate their level of detail and creativity may be as telling as their ability to provide clean, effective code.

Know what you’re looking for when you judge their introductory efforts:

• Is their work product clean, attractive, effective?
• Does it match your instructions?
• Was it timely? How did they compare with the estimates they gave or limitations you set?
• How was their communication during the project?
• Did they use the work diary well? How does their Work Diary look?

The process of hiring a remote provider requires you to refine the strategies you use to recruit an in-house employee, but there’s no reason to be any less careful and selective.

Dmitry Feduleev’s first experience with oDesk was as an employee of an affiliate. His employer, Deimand, worked mostly in its local market in Russia, but the small unit Dmitry was in also took jobs through oDesk. Last year, an entrepreneurial urge drove Dmitry to found his own company, BelVG, through which he manages a small team of mostly Facebook application developers working exclusively through oDesk. As both a current employee at Deimand and the owner of BelVG, Dmitry has a unique perspective on the oDesk provider’s experience.

Q: Last year, in addition to your Deimand work, you launched BelVG. How did that start?
A: When I started, I was working with just two of my mates, making one project for a U.S. customer. In May 2007, Facebook opened its developer’s area and I got my first BelVG project involving that. This thing interested me, and I asked my guys to learn it. We started to develop our first Facebook applications, and from there we started to grow. Now we have ten Facebook developers, three xHTML developers, and two designers.

Q: When you’re communicating with buyers, which methods are most useful for you – email, chat, Skype, etc?
A: Skype calls are the most useful things for getting whatever I want quickly, but usually it’s Yahoo chats, and email for storing all my to-do’s.

Q: As a business owner, how do you see the business climate for 2008?
A: I think this is going to be the year of business social networks, where people come not only for fun, but to make money. Also, the main streams of this year will include open social applications, Facebook applications with real substance – not only for fun – and ad startups based on this social stuff.

Read the full interview.

Nowadays, many engineering managers are already building highly distributed teams. Many are doing it for the first time. Many are getting cost-cutting pressure, but are scared to take the leap into an uncertain world of remote work.

Let these books be your guide. All these authors have helped blaze the path for others to get the most out of a distributed development team. oDesk recommends:

Happy Reading!

Thank you to everyone who attended our first Outsourcing Roundtable on January 9th! We had an interesting discussion about how to get started on outsourcing projects and the differences between “outsourcingâ€? and “remote managementâ€? while munching on some pizza.

One of the points made by our CEO, Gary Swart, is that while outsourcing typically refers to throwing an entire project over the wall to another company, remote management refers to maintaining control of a project while working with remote providers. The latter option is more appealing to companies who want to stay involved in all aspects of their operations, but who want to look for talent outside of their local community.

The focus of our conversation centered around staff augmentation/remote management for start-up companies. Several attendees were interested in growing their teams and discussed the difficulty of finding qualified local programmers. Never having outsourced anything before, they were eager to learn how to work with remote team members.

Bin Xu, our VP of Engineering, who, along with Odysseas Tsatalos, our CTO (and co-founder), manages a team of about 30 remote providers. One of the keys to working with a team that is both remote and local, Bin explained, is to manage everyone – whether they are working in Menlo Park or the Ukraine – the same way. He asks that his team members check in regularly and has meetings with the team leaders on a regular basis (Bin and Odysseas use Skype to conference in as many people as they can). 

One of our current oDesk Buyers, Carey Cook, who runs the site Vocabulary.com, added that one of the keys to successfully managing remote providers is to be as specific as possible when explaining the project’s requirements. He communicates regularly with his providers to ensure that the specifications he is looking for are understood. He underscored one of the things we’ve emphasized in the past: communication is critical, whether you’re working remotely or not. Regularly checking in and discussing the project’s progress can help clear up any small problems before they get bigger.

We’re looking forward to planning our next Roundtable. Let us know if you have any suggestions for upcoming topics!

It’s 2008. You probably have contractors in 6 different time zones. Development in Russia, QA in India, home-sourced Customer Support in Utah, and an SEO link-builder in the Philippines. How are you communicating with your team?

Here are the tools that I love:

Chat

Task Management

Documents

File Sharing

Screen Sharing

Other Useful Ones

A Webcam!

Guess what? Not every job succeeds.

Some recent articles cite very low general satisfaction rates with outsourced relationships:

IT World Canada has a nice article about satisfaction rates citing a drop from 50% to an abysmal 35% satisfaction rate.

TransWorldNews cites in their article, Buyer Viewpoint on Information Technology Outsourcing that “45% of the respondents claim that their ITO projects are either unsuccessful or partially successful.”

While nobody can ever completely avoid the chance of failure, there are plenty of things you can look for as ‘early warning’ signs. If you ignore these, chances are that you’ll soon be throwing good money after bad. If you heed these warning signs when you see them, you can adapt quickly and increase your chances of successfully course-correcting.

Now, please don’t let these issues scare you off from pursuing remote contractors to work on your jobs; these are intended to help reach successful outcomes. And fact is, these warning signs are relevant for in-house jobs as well as outsourced ones.

1 – Slowing response time – in my opinion, it should never take more than 1 business day to respond to email. If it suddenly starts taking longer, all is not well on the other end. Press the issue, find out why the responses are taking longer. Demand a faster response and make sure it’s just a temporary blip.

2 – Hesitation to show work – a manager should always be able to see the work in progress. There’s no such thing as “it’s not ready for you to see yet”. You’re an understanding manager, ask to see the work in progress and make sure you like where it’s going.

3 – Missed milestone – not the end of the world (I’ve heard some development projects aren’t always delivered on time), but if a milestone is missed, make sure you understand why. Probe into the root cause of the missed deadline. Was it too aggressive? Were new issues or requirements discovered? Were the reasons valid? If one is missed, discuss the issue openly with your provider and come to an agreement about why it was missed.

4 – Dramatic increase in hours per day – If the number of hours worked per day increases unexpectedly, it could be a sign of trouble. Maybe it’s crunch time and you don’t realize how far behind the development is on the job.

5 – Rapid decrease in hours per day – Same goes for rapid unexpected decreases in hours worked. Is there another job or other commitments that your provider has? Inquire. Make sure you know why?

6 – Increases in offline time – Only applies to work done on oDesk: has your provider been logging all of the time online with detailed work memos. Is this changing suddenly? Do you see more requests for offline time or less detailed work memos. As a manager, you should dig in and find out why.

7 – Requests for additional resources – working with an IT firm? Have a team working for months and then unexpectedly get a request from the company to add additional resources or change team members or even the team lead? This is often a bad sign. If it’s additional resources, it may be necessary to meet deadlines, but make sure you know why the initial plan isn’t working. If it’s a change in team members, this could lead to further delays as a result of a new ramp up time.

8 – Growing tensions – the worst possible flag. Are tensions increasing in your communication? Conversations shifting from chat to email to faxed correspondence? Tensions between manager and provider can flare up if a job is danger of failing. It’s critical to keep an open line of communication and maintain mutual respect to work together through the issues. If tensions are increasing, course correct immediately.

So, how do you identify these potential problems? Stay active in managing your team. Don’t be hands-off. Schedule a regular weekly or even daily meeting thru chat, phone, or web conference. Monitor work, progress, and productivity on a regular schedule. Set expectations from day 1 about how you and your providers will work together.

I have worked with hundreds of IT companies that are outsourcing some or all of their work. They don’t hesitate to call me when things are turning sour. I often tell people to “trust their gut”. If you have that funny feeling that things aren’t going well, investigate and find out what’s going on. If you’re not happy, make the tough decisions quickly rather than waiting and waiting for things to get worse.

Ready to optimize your site so that you get a notable increase in traffic? Here are some ways to boost your SEO. Want to learn more? We’ve also included a list of resources if you want to delve deeper.

1. Links! Links! Links!

– First, do your research. Use this cool backlink search tool to find out who is linking to you and what kind of anchor text they are using.

– Next, hire a provider to compile and organize a list of sites your competitors are linked to. Have the provider find the contact information for those sites.

– Finally, the pitch. Find a provider knowledgeable in SEO who can pitch your site to the owners of your competitor’s sites. SEO Moz, a blog on all things SEO has a great post on link building. Beware of spamming, though. Nobody likes that.

2. Blog Away. Write content that is interesting, controversial, or funny and people will link to you. Not the best writer? Find a blogger on oDesk. Find bloggers you like that talk about your industry and link to them. Most bloggers religiously check their backlinks, so they’ll link to you too if they like your site or product.

3. Make Your Anchor Text Relevant. Missing valuable keywords on your pages? Do you have a lot of “click here” and “learn more” links on your site? Hire a copywriter to get rid of them and include anchor text that is relevant and descriptive about your company and product.

4. Do Some On-Site Cleanup. Crawlers read text only, so make sure your text is positioned properly on the page so that it is easily read by users and crawlers. Use Semantic HTML and CSS to make sure crawlers have no problems finding the right content.

We’ve included only a tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO, but here are some resources to check out if you’re interested in learning more:

• Google Secrets
• SEO Moz
• SEO for Firefox
• Matt Cutt’s Blog (Google software engineer who works on search)

Does this all seem a little overwhelming to you? Don’t have time for SEO? There are SEO consultants on oDesk who can help you with many of these strategies. Or, submit questions to the people at SEO Forums to get some clarification.

It’s that time of the year. People are putting up the Christmas trees, hanging lights outside of their homes, shopping like crazy (or not)… and reviewing their plans for next year.

Yep, it’s time for companies to plan for 2008. Every business, large or small, looks for ways to improve their product and cut costs. While browsing through Business Week, I came across a great article on the topic: Ten Penny-Pinching Ideas for 2008 by Gene Marks. Among his suggestions (geared toward small businesses):

- Set up remote access (we think this is a great idea, too). If someone’s on the road or wants to work from home, they’ll have virtual access to the office.

- Create alerts. Remind yourself of when someone hasn’t paid, when you need to pay bills, when you need to check up on a project or meet a deadline.

- Invest in smartphones (particularly if you have remote workers). Keep in touch no matter where you are (a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it.)

Some suggestions we would like to add:

- Outsource your company’s T-Shirt design. oDesk recently needed some new designs for our swag, and rather than bog down our Marketing department, we hired a provider to do the job. About 15 hours and $150 later, we had seven designs to choose from and our provider is now building us a custom Printmojo store.

- Do your own marketing. Check out the Duct Tape Marketing Blog for ideas and tips. Hire a provider to create professional looking HTML newsletters or write press releases and then post them yourself on sites such as this one.

- Outsource your customer service. Staffing a live chat system like phplive.com can be a burden, but plenty of stay-at-home moms and dads in the U.S. have excellent English skills and are looking for work. Consider bringing in reps at $8-$20 an hour to meet your customer service needs.

- Create a blog. Not too familiar with the blogging world? No big deal. Find a Wordpress developer to set up your blog and customize your theme. Content is always king, so make sure you find a writer who really knows your subject.

Good luck on the planning. We hear eggnog and a little bit of mulled wine can go a long way on helping you get through the holidays

We’ve all been there. It’s a gorgeous day outside, the sun is shining, birds are singing, and you have to go to work. You pick up the phone, practice your best hoarse, scratchy voice, and when the voice on the other line says hello, you launch into your spiel:

“Yes, cough, cough. How are you doing, sir? Me? Well, I have a terrible cold today, cough, cough. Odd, isn’t it? No, no, I didn’t feel bad yesterday, it must be one of those 24-hour bugs that’s going around. Probably best to stay home, so as not to get the other employees sick.”

Your way of looking at it: Hey, I’m just taking it easy for one day, right? No big deal.

Your employers’? Absence Abuse.

Business Week has a great article out right now by Michelle Conlin looking at the problem of absenteeism at work. According to the research cited in the article, only about 85% of labor costs pay for actual work. The rest is vacation and those “sick” days everyone takes every once in a while.

But too many “sick” days has become an issue for some companies and they’ve begun to take action. Some have begun monitoring carefully who’s been calling in sick and how often. In some workplaces, if you call in sick too many times, disciplinary actions begin.

There are many reasons people call in sick. Some are genuinely ill, others just need a day off. But some employees are simply dissatisfied with their jobs and are loathe to go to work. The article mentions the experience of one unit within a manufacturing company that was calling in sick significantly more often than other units within the same firm. The culprit ended up being the manager, whom many employees disliked (and thus took sick days to avoid). Once the problem was identified through focus groups and the company took steps to resolve it, absenteeism dropped. But the company would have been slower to identify and resolve the issue had it not been keeping track of sick days.

So as a company, how do you lower your absenteeism rate? One solution is to allow your workers to work from home. Research by staffing agency Randstad shows that productivity for home-based agents is up to 45% higher than for on-site employees — and that some of this increased productivity is accounted for by reduced employee absenteeism (for more, see World of Work, 2007).

Home-based workers are also more likely have higher job satisfaction, up to 25% higher as compared to in-office employees. As we saw from the experience of the manufacturing company with the large absenteeism rate in the one unit, unhappy workers are more likely to skip work.

The idea of suddenly allowing their employees to work from home with no oversight makes some managers a little wary. Understandably, of course. If your workers still manage to surf YouTube at work, what’s to keep them from doing that at home all the time on the company’s dime?

That’s where the beauty of the oDesk Work Diary comes in. When an employee is logging in time remotely, managers have access to screenshots of the employee’s monitor at 10 minute intervals. Keystrokes and mouse clicks record activity levels. It offers managers peace of mind: when Johnny says he’s “working from home,” he really is working from home, (and his Work Diary shows it), he’s not watching football.

Easy enough for everyone to understand: if you’re working, you’re getting paid. If you’re watching football (unless you happen to be a referee!), you’re not.

Offshoring, Homeshoring… Seems like these days you can add -shoring to anything and make it a buzz word. But what do all of these terms mean? Here’s our little guide to the world of remote work:

Outsourcing – Asking an expert (or a firm with experts) outside of your company to do something for you more efficiently and in a more cost-effective way than if you were doing it yourself. Companies outsource all sorts of tasks, from software development to network administration to graphic design. But outsourcing isn’t limited to business tasks — my personal favorite is the guy who outsourced his dating life.

Should you do it? Perhaps you’re thinking about redesigning your website. Could someone with more technical expertise do it better?

Offshoring — Essentially the same thing as outsourcing, except that this refers to when the work or product is done by someone in another country. But Thomas Friedman would agree, if someone can get quality work done better and faster, it doesn’t matter whether they’re in Minnesota or Moldova.

Should you do it? Establishing a clear communications strategy is the best way to ensure your offshored projects will be successful. You’ll have to consider time zone, language, and cultural differences.

Nearshoring — Much like offshoring, but instead of outsourcing to people anywhere in the world, outsourcing to people who are working nearby (in a nearby country, for instance). Some companies want to work with providers who have a similar culture, share a similar language or are in the same time zone.

Should you do it? Depends. If working with someone in the same time zone is essential, this might be the thing for you.

Homeshoring — Outsourcing your work to someone within your own country. People prefer working from home for a variety of reasons. Some want to avoid commuting, others have children they’re taking care of at home. Companies such as Jet Blue became well-known for their homeshoring strategies, but you don’t have to be a big corporation to take advantage of skilled workers who prefer to work from home.

Should you do it? Need someone in your timezone? Country? Can you deal with a flexible schedule?

Crowdsourcing — Ah, the power of the crowd. Why use one mind when you can use many? Essentially, this refers to having a crowd of people work together to produce a product. A great example: Wikipedia.

Should you do it? Netflix did. They posted a $1M prize for anyone who could improve their DVD rental system. Cons? You can’t have everyone sign a contract or an NDA.

Farmshoring – Moving jobs from urban centers to rural communities.

Should you do it? We believe it doesn’t matter where you work, but whether you have (a) the skills to do it (b) the tools to do it (c) the motivation to do it.

Tim Ferriss, an enterprising entrepreneur that claims to work only four hours per week, recently published a book about how he does it.

It’s an interesting read. We’re not entirely convinced he only works four hours per week but he offers some sound advice on streamlining operations, being more productive, and enjoying the life you have now instead of waiting until retirement. One of the keys to success that Tim recommends is outsourcing anything that can be done for less than half of what it would cost you to do it yourself (or that you don’t know how to do yourself). He includes everything from typical business activities like customer service, web development and administrative tasks, to checking email, cooking and even online dating.

Tim is new to oDesk but we introduced ourselves to him last week, and he’s going to test us out. He included oDesk in a recent blog post about “Extreme Personal Outsourcingâ€? and we hope to hear more from him in the future. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about how you might be able to save some time at work or outsource your love life, check out .

Posting a job, interviewing candidates, and picking the right one is always a challenging process. I’ve been a hiring manager about 5 times for local positions, but that was easy. Hiring for a remote or offshore position is much harder. All of the conventional wisdom is useless when hiring for remote positions.

You get the bonus challenges of:
-Managing timezone differences
-Working thru cultural and language differences
-Verifying the authenticity of your info
-Dealing w/o back-channel references (usually the best source of info)

In the past 2 1/2 years of working with oDesk buyers and providers, I’d like to think that I’ve learned a thing or two about the process of interviewing remote contractors.

Do’s

Don’ts

then what about a video spec?

One new oDesk buyer used a short video to explain the requirements for her fixed price job.

She needs someone that knows Joomla, is looking to spend around $100, and has received 5 candidates so far.

Being a good project manager is a lot about being a good communicator – so we think this is a great idea.

By the way, we also used Camtasia (the video capture software used above) to make our demo and our video tutorials.

Our founder Odysseas wrote this email to the oDesk Engineering team. It offers his perspective on using webcams while working on oDesk.

From: Odysseas Tsatalos
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 10:11 AM
Subject: our teamroom

Take a look at our teamroom.

https://url.odesk.com/t0lw

Every morning when I login – seeing our team, seeing the faces of our team makes me smile.

It makes a huge difference to make our extremely distributed team become connected.

When i see myself without the webcam shot I feel loosing my identity in the team I i feel like a computer and not a person.

Thats why even though I work from a laptop and I need to carry a webcam wherever I go – I keep on trying to carry it around.

Maybe one day Dell laptops will come with built-in cams just like these cool apple machines do…

We were talking with Stratis that opening up the odeskdev stream of teamroom/snapshots/webcam to the public could become a strong driver for the adoption of the webcam, memos etc.

Our own best practices can help create momentum and make everybody’s workplace better.

odysseas

-
Abid Mohsin

Here is a great piece by Adrian Bye on 10 tips for Internet Project Management.

His first 3 tips:

1. Give people a small test project, to see how they perform
2. Use a wiki
3. Use an instant messenger service

We couldn’t agree more. Let us know what you think.

Alright, so you’ve found the oDesk user you want to connect with for an interview. Chances are that he/she is not in the same timezone as you. The thought process goes thus:

“I am GMT minus this, and he is GMT plus that… say what?”

Here comes Google Maps to the rescue. I check the Google Maps Mania blog once in a while for cool mashups, and found these two that could help oDesk users working across multiple timezones.

• Qlock – World Clock: Has day/night shadows on the map, plus you can download it to keep it on your desktop (I haven’t tried that)
• GChart – What time is it?: Shows the current time, pictures, blogs and currency for any point you click on the map

We have some other resources in the Calendar and Timezones section of our Handbook.

-
Abid Mohsin

oDesk is proud to announce the beta launch of oDesk Skill Tests. Providers on our network can take the more than 100 technical and business skills tests for FREE. After a provider has taken the tests, he/she can add the scores to their oDesk Profile and leverage the test scores to get jobs on oDesk. The test scores are included in the profiles, allowing a person looking at the profile to objectively measure the strength of the provider’s skills. For e.g., take a look at Jeff K’s beta profile here .

The tests are prepared by experienced professionals with several years of experience in their technical domains under ISO 9001-2000 specifications. The questions have been through several rounds of analysis by experts to help build well balanced, comprehensive, and meaningful tests.

5 reasons fo Providers to take oDesk Tests:

1. Make more money. Buyers use test scores to make hiring decisions. Having oDesk Tests on the Profile increases chances of getting a job and get higher rates.
2. Show off skills. oDesk Tests cover a wide range of skills including ASP.Net, C, C++, PHP, Java, English language and many more. All tests are developed under ISO 9001-2000 specifications. See a full list here.
3. Taking tests is simple. Most tests take 40 minutes to complete and are automatically added to the oDesk Profile. The entire process is streamlined through the oDesk website, no need to go to other websites or create extra logins.
4. Retake tests. Provider can retake any test after 14 days. If the provider’s skills improve, he/she can retake the test to show the best score for each test on the oDesk Profile.
5. Complete control. After the provider completes a test, he/she has the choice to add the score to the Profile, or not show it and retake the test later. Taking the tests is completely risk-free.

For oDesk buyers, oDesk test scores will enable them to make intelligent hiring decisions. A buyer can use the test scores on the providers profiles to search, rank and sort when they are looking to hire someone for a job opening. A buyer can also have providers take tests as a requirement for selection to thier job opening.Take a look here to see a couple of comments by buyer on how eagerly they are waiting for this feature.

All oDesk Tests are available for free for Providers and do not require anything other than being logged into the oDesk account (Click here to go to the “My Tests” page on our beta site and click on “Qualification Tests�? to get started).

The feature is currently in beta and will be released in early August.

No other competitor has this powerful combination: free skills tests and top jobs from all over the world!

Many oDesk buyers have rewarded providers with bonus payments for exceptional work.

A few statistics on bonuses:

• Biggest bonus payment: $1,200
• Smallest bonus payment: $20
• Average bonus payment: $250

When bonuses have been awarded:

• Early completion of project
• Exceptional contribution to project
• Annual bonus
• Birthday gift

How bonuses have been used:

• A bonus awarded to an affiliate was used to have a dinner party for the team
• A bonus awarded to a freelance provider was used to buy a new computer
• A bonus awarded to a freelance provider was used to buy his child some birthday gifts

If you’re a buyer and would like to give your provider a bonus, submit a help ticket (click Help in the upper right of any page) and oDesk will process the bonus along with the provider’s next monthly payment. Please include in the help ticket the provider’s name and the bonus amount. There is a 10% payment processing fee added to the bonus amount.

Thanks,

Josh Breinlinger

Since I’m in the business of remote collaboration, I’ve attempted numerous different ways to collaborate with remote teams over the past year and a half.

These have included a variety of both synchronous and asynchronous methods including voice calls, Skype calls, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, Webex, oDesk Share, chat conferences, email lists, webcams, and screensnaps. Screensnaps (or web-based screenshots – see example here: http://url.odesk.com/y0ut ) have become one of my favorite tools for communicating with remote individuals. What I’ve found interesting in the last few months is that it’s become the tool of choice even for communication within our own office. They are extremely efficient in quick communication of bugs, ideas, spreadsheets, documents, UI designs, and more. I’ve found that it’s a great replacement for emailing files around for feedback, since often I just need feedback from a peer on one particular aspect of a spreadsheet. I can take a screensnap, ping the URL to my colleague through chat, and get the feedback immediately through our chat conversation. It’s also the best tool that I’m aware of for reporting bugs – I could of course take a full-size screenshot, turn it into a .jpg, and email it to QA; but it’s much faster and easier to take a screensnap and send just the URL.

Another important metric that we track at oDesk is the usage of all of the tools within the suite of management tools that we provide. Within our own company, screensnaps have gone up in usage more than any other feature over the past several months. This is nice confirmation that it is indeed one of the most effective collaboration tools out there today. Check out our usage statistics over the past 6 months. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the least used features by our other users, and I believe that many more users could benefit from using this feature.

If you want to use screensnaps, you must have either oDesk Team or Share running on your computer, and then click Ctrl-Alt-S to capture the entire screen or Ctrl-Alt-A to capture just the active window (default settings – you can change the shortcuts in the Preferences menu). This will upload the screenshot along with your comments to a secure server and automatically copy the URL into your clipboard. Just hit Ctrl-V in an email or chat to send the URL to someone else for their review. Alternatively, you can right-click on the systray icon of either client application and select ScreenSnap.

Thanks,

Josh Breinlinger

First, I want to thank all of the oDesk users for your active participation in the launch of our feedback system. We’re proud to make the system fully public for the first time starting today.

To go along with the launch, I thought I’d share with you some of our interesting findings from the first two months of feedback scores submitted through the system. We’ve now been collecting feedback at the end of each assignment on a 1 to 5 scale (5 being the best) in six different categories including skills, quality, availability, deadlines, communication, and cooperation.

One of the first things we noticed is that there is a high correlation between feedback on assignments and the average pay rate for that provider. See for yourself.

I also wanted to show you a distribution of all of the feedback scores collected to date. Notice that a number of providers have perfect scores on feedback. If the above chart is any indication, these providers with perfect 5s may have very lucrative opportunities ahead of them.

One last important note. I would like to remind all users to be thoughtful when leaving feedback. Your rankings and comments will have a profound impact on the person you are evaluating, and it’s important that you provide careful assessments of performance.

Josh Breinlinger

At oDesk, we work with offshore teams as a matter of course. The issue we continually face is how do you manage and measure the performance of your remote team. Sure, screenshots of what they are doing gives you a sense of what they are working on but it is hard to talk to their co-workers, peers, etc.

With most local teams you can set a series of milestones and checkpoints and manage to those deliverables. With a remote team, that becomes problematic due to the distance and lack of regular visibility into their work. Many software development shops keep a staff of programmers/QA onsite to review all code checked in and bugs reported by the remote team. While this level of management works, the reality is that many small companies who wish to offshore do not have programming expertise onsite.

To maximize the working relationships we have, here are a few of the things we believe are key to a successful outcome.

Communication:

First and foremost is communication. If you are not constantly in the loop with your offshore team, you are out of the loop. And with a team 8k-10k miles away, being out of the loop is not good for business.

At oDesk, we utilize several modes of communication. Email, IM chat, Skype Voice and IM Chat conference. We keep a Skype chat conference open and active during the hours we share with our offshore QA team as a open line of communication. It is amazing how freely information began flowing once we started that. I can come in and review the chat of the previous 2-3 hours and see any issues and how/if they were resolved. Our teams use Skype voice chat several hours per day. In fact there have been active Skype voice calls lasting several hours.

Assigning Tasks:

Having clearly defined tasks in key in managing remote teams. We assign tasks via Bugzilla for writing/updating automated testing scripts, regression testing, and back end api testing. These tasks are then broken down to their components and assigned to individual QA Engineers. Once a task is complete it is marked as resolved, and checked into SVN. (if applicable)

Metrics:

We have also determined that the standard metrics of test case writing, defect reporting and management, as well as the updating of the automated testing scripts offer us a good place to start.

We track metrics such as:

• Defects logged per hour of testing
• Test Cases written/modified per week
• Ratio of valid vs. invalid Defects

Using these metrics not only gives us a peek into the quantity but also the quality of work vis a vie auditing defects, and test cases.
We also keep track of test case files by requiring them to be checked into SVN. This allows us to track progress on the file from revision to revision. It also gives us the ability to do forensic work if we think we missed a very obvious bug or a feature was added that was not covered in a test case.

Inclusion:

We include representatives from our offshore teams in our local Engineering meetings. This gives them the chance to interact with the team, make suggestions, and participate in the decision making process. This has the effect of making them a real part of the team and it shows in how they respond to the job at hand.

Conclusion:

This is just a few of the things we do but there is one underlying theme. Visibility breeds accountability. It also let’s people know you are not just interested in getting your project done, but also in helping them be more successful.

For more info on this and other QA/Project Management related issues check out:

http://www.stickyminds.com

http://qaforums.com