The first impression you leave on a potential employer when looking for work online is not your resume or user profile, but rather your cover letter.  Resumes and profiles are succinct listings of professional accomplishment, but don’t say much about an applicant’s personality, work ethic, interests and talents.  Therefore, a cover letter is your place to shine.

A cover letter should ALWAYS accompany a resume or link to an online profile.  Lack of a cover letter leaves buyers with the impression that the applicant is lazy or that he or she isn’t really that interested in the position.  On the opposite side of the spectrum, endless cover letters that read like a provider’s autobiography are unlikely to be read in their entirety.  Employers are generally busy people, who don’t have time to comb through a long letter and pick out the few facts about an applicant that interest them.

An applicant has an average of 20 seconds to wow an employer.  It is, therefore, the provider’s responsibility to completely read through a job description and respond to it with a letter that consolidates all of his or her professional training and experience relevant to the job.  The letter should also be used to answer any questions posed in the job listing.  A well written and pertinent cover letter demonstrates that an applicant has fully read and understood the job description and is confident of his or her ability to carry out the duties required of the position.

Cover letters should be dynamic and specific to each job position and buyer.  They should also be as concise and a maximum of one page, although half a page is the recommended length.  Limiting paragraphs to one to four sentences also makes the cover letter easy for potential employers to skim and process.

Personal introduction: start your cover letter by sparking the buyer’s interest instantly:
• Briefly introduce yourself
• Mention the position for which you are applying.
• Transition into describing the traits, qualities and experiences that will make you stand apart from other providers.

Example:
I am an expert web designer interested in the web development job you’ve posted.  I am certified in five different programming languages, and am an expert in Dreamweaver and Photoshop.  I have designed and built 80 websites to date.

Qualifications: The second section should be used to delve a little deeper into professional and academic qualifications.  Stress accomplishments rather than explaining your duties and responsibilities in past positions.

Example:
I have a Masters degree in Computer Sciences from Harvard and have worked in this field for 10 years.  I worked three years for Accenture, where I was promoted to Lead Programmer within one year of joining the company.  In 2006, I started my own web design and IT consuling firm, which currently has completed 60 jobs for 45 clients in 12 countries.

Fit: you want to demonstrate your knowledge of the company and the position being filled.  Explain why you are suited to working with the company and to the position advertised.

Call for action: end your cover letter should incite the buyer to take action:
• Request an interview.
• Ask the employer if he or she would be interested in seeing additional samples of work.
• Let the employer know that you are available to answer any questions or clarify anything that may be left unclear (although your letter should leave everything crystal clear).

Etiquette:
• If the job posting provides a name, address the letter to that individual.
• Unless you’re confident you know their gender, don’t take for granted that the person reading your letter is male; be gender neutral.
• Always re-read and check your letter for typos and grammatical mistakes.

If you follow these suggestions and don’t clutter your letter with unnecessary information, you are more likely to compose a concise, informative and successful cover letter.  It’s your personal marketing piece; treat it as such!

-Justine Bayod Espoz, Guest Blogger

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

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.

Gemma Baltazar is a freelance provider on oDesk and writes her own blog at the Lady Programmer. We’ve invited her to write this guest post.

When I first got into oDesk, I did not have an oDesk work history and a feedback to complete my profile. I started out with a poorly written profile because I was in a rush to apply to jobs, hoping that there might be some buyer who might be willing to take chances on my skills.

As days and weeks went on, no buyer came in and took the time to interview me. Soon, I realized that these buyers are not willing to invest on a provider who seemed to be less serious in taking a job. With so many providers applying for a particular job in oDesk it seemed to me that I was left out to providers with proven track record in oDesk.

I was wrong.

How did able to get my first interview? After much thought I decided to take a day off from applying jobs to polish my profile. I made it as complete as possible to make it stand out among the rest. Here are the things that I did to make my profile speak:

1. Create an attractive one-line title. Having an attractive title is a must because this is the first thing that a buyer sees in his or her candidate list. Buyers tend to click on more intriguing titles and check out what is in store.

2. Have a clear objective. The objective is the next big thing that buyers read. A good objective for me is the one that puts the buyer’s need in mind. Customer satisfaction, quality work and timely delivery are some powerful words that put a buyer at full attention.

3. Show yourself. If you are an independent freelancer, then it is best to show up a picture of yourself - not those types that look good in social networking sites - but the ones that seem to project professionalism. If you are convinced that you do not look good, then go for “symbolic images”. If you are a programmer, then a stock image of a computer screen filled with code can be a suitable avatar. A writer can choose to represent himself with a stock image of a pen and a paper. I have yet to see a funny or interesting caricature of a provider who plans to “sell” his services in the graphics or design category. I think logos are best suited for provider teams.

4. Take tests. Prove to the buyer by measuring your skills. oDesk offers plenty of these for free. Brainbench can also be another good option to go for specialized skills, or if you want to take one step further.

5. Write down relevant skills and experience. Actually, I gained experience from three fields - I was an engineer, an IT specialist and an active blog writer. I decided to “sell” my skills as an IT specialist by doing programming jobs, so I downplayed (but mentioned) my experience as an engineer and a blog writer. I believed in putting the focus into one particular area that I wanted to pursue in oDesk.

6. Complete your portfolio. This is the biggest mistake that I had made at the beginning. In my excitement to hitch a job, I lost precious time in applying to jobs and I got one rejection after another. Completing the portfolio is time consuming, but the effort paid well. If you think you cannot be able to put in something to the portfolio, then coming up with some sample work can be a good option.

7. Preview your profile. Even with a very complete profile, it is best to work with the design of the profile. I made sure that my profile looks good at a glance especially those ones that involve writing some detailed description, such as narrating the details of my past employment experience.

8. Don’t forget to ask for some feedback. The oDesk community is the place to go to ask for some constructive criticism. Do not forget to post your profile permalink so that everyone can take a good look.

The profile is indeed a very valuable tool in showing the buyers what you are made of. With so many providers, I always had in mind that buyers will simply skim through my profile.

I think it would be a lot easier if you think of your profile as a product brochure that needs to be done. If you are to sell a product to a customer through that brochure what are the things that must be included to entice the customer to buy that product?

As part of our ongoing marketing efforts at oDesk, we have a pretty substantial Google Adwords campaign set up. I was reviewing some of the data today and we noticed that for all campaigns, the conversion ratios (% of visitors that sign up for an account) were highest on Saturdays. A little unexpected, but an interesting finding. Google allows you to tailor your campaigns by automatically adjusting your bid amounts by day of week. Seems like it would be appropriate to increase our bid amounts on Saturdays so we capitalize on this increased conversion ratio. Or maybe not?

I was wondering why conversion ratio was higher on the weekend so I decided to take a look at oDesk data for job postings over the last few months. I took a look at over 10,000 jobs posted and analyzed results based on a few simple criteria.

First, I wanted to understand the distribution of types of jobs posted by day. I put together all the results in Excel and did a pivot table on the day of week. Note that for all of the following charts, 1 = Monday, 7 = Sunday. This first chart shows the total ratio of fixed price jobs posted on the oDesk network by the day of week. Sundays apparently have the highest percentage of fixed price jobs.

Ok, so clearly there is a small bias toward fixed price jobs on the weekends. What about job size? The following chart shows the average estimated hours for hourly jobs (estimated hours = estimated workload in hours per week * estimated duration in weeks). Note that durations over 100 weeks are rounded down to 100 weeks. Clearly, hourly jobs tend to be smallest on Sundays.

Ok, we’re starting to see a trend here. Let’s take a look at Fixed Price jobs. I looked at a chart of Fixed Price job size by day of week posted. You can see in this next chart that the budgets tend to be smaller than the average (the average being 100%) on Friday thru Sunday.

So, jobs that are posted on the weekend tend to be smaller and more urgent than the rest of the jobs posted. Now, remember that the conversion ratio was highest on Saturdays. The way I read this data is that if you’re looking for urgent work, you’re more willing to try anything to get the job done so you’ll convert to a user at a higher rate than normal. Now the last step is to look at the relative value of a customer that signs up for our network by day of week. If the “weekend warrior” types do indeed have small, urgent jobs then they should have a lower lifetime value than the average.

While there is not a huge difference, I think the findings are pretty interesting. Note for providers -> if you’re looking for the best jobs available - make sure you’re looking Mon - Fri.

Very recently, one of oDesk’s product architects based here in Menlo Park posted a job opening on our site to find an additional engineer to add to our growing team. He received a number of candidates and then had to screen and interview to find the top provider to join the team.

He found all of the profile information helpful, and reviewed feedback scores, requested oDesk tests, and looked for personalized cover letters of individuals that seemed truly motivated to do the job.

Once he had narrowed the list down to just a couple candidates. He researched their work history in more detail. He ultimately chose a particular candidate in India largely based on an example of his work. Now, this wasn’t a web developer, so he couldn’t review a portfolio of websites. He also wasn’t able to review prior code because much of it is proprietary for other clients. So, it came down to reviewing prior work on open-source projects.

Why should you care about open-source work?

1) It’s completely open. You can review the exact code, revisions, and comments made by the individual contributor.
2) It shows motivation. Open-source work doesn’t pay, so if a provider has dedicated some of their personal time to contribute to an open-source project, it demonstrates a high-level of personal motivation.
3) It demonstrates knowledge of relevant technology. For oDesk, and for almost any small tech company these days, open-source technology is critical to business operations. It’s important for any engineers to be familiar with a good number of open-source tools.

So, if you are a provider and looking to build out a robust online profile, consider finding an interesting open-source project and contributing however you can. You will always be able to share this work with anyone and demonstrate your performance. Head on over to SourceForge and figure out how you can contribute.

On the flip-side, check out what John Resiq from Mozilla has to say about Interviewing for Open-Source.

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!

There’s always been some discussion about whether or not portraits are important for the provider profiles. I firmly believe that they are - and I’m happy to see some providers have used the portrait to really market themselves well. Consider these portraits:

- This says to me that the provider is professional, can functionally use Photoshop, and gives me a sense of his style.

- I like this one. It shows both individualism as well as the corporate brand of the oDesk affiliate company.

- Another well done portrait showcasing the company name and brand as well as the individual.

- This one makes me feel like she’s already thinking about my design.

- Ok, this guy knows his stuff, a true computer geek with disassembled parts in the background.

- Nice touch, but would prefer more of the face. If I’m looking for an animator, I’m intrigued.

- A bit impersonal since no face, but I like the clever sense of style.

- Hmm. Nothing like showing off a little local scenery I suppose.

- Professional, casual, sincere. I get a sense of the individual as well as the workplace. Quite nice.

Compare the portraits above to this one:

What do you think potential buyers would prefer?

So, upload a portrait. Exercise some creativity, but keep it personal and individual. You only have a brief second to impress buyers in the search results and a good intriguing portrait can capture that attention.

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.