Outsourcing Pandemonium!

Not sure if it is the right section for this post. If not, Mods, plz move to appropriate section.

That said, I sometimes outsource people to do some marketing tasks for me and other stuff. I pay per hour.

What I noticed is that many of them abuse it and take like ages to get a simple job done. IE. spending more hours and getting more payment.

I was trying to come up with a good solution to force them get the job done within a suitable time-frame. I can no more tolerate BS.

What would be a good way, or maybe incentive, to achieve that? Any Ideas?

flat rate?

I'm outsourcing in the Phillipines, I hire someone from bestjobs.ph, I hire them for a month with the expectation of a full time position. And I will honor that if they do well, if they don't I could do one of two things...

1. Don't pay them (but I will)
2. Hire someone else

With #2 being the way I'd go. Right now I've hired one... fired her, hired her brother who it seems is doing well at the moment.

Oh yeah... I do not pay in advance, only at the end of the agreed upon time. So I still might be out money, but only the amount agreed to at the beginning.

LostShootingStar said:

flat rate?

Click to expand...

Maybe when outsourcing a task, say you'll pay $X per hour and this job should take you no more than X hours.

kinda reminds me of automotive repair manuals. I haven't opened one for ten years, but they used to list out the steps for say, replacing a clutch, it would have the expected number of hours it should take for the for the job

Use odesk
Outsourcers must run the odesk soft while they work so you can exacly see how much hours they worked AND you can have screenshot and videos of their screen while they work

use a check-in and check-out policy.

give them tasks to check in & out, set time limits etc and if they are over, if they are over, they don't get paid any more than if it was on time. If it's early make them eligible for a bonus!

But that odesk seems pretty cool!

Here's what I do:

1. Assign various tasks each with a time limit on it.

2. Have the freelancer (FL) check in when s/he's done OR when the time is up.

3. If I see they've done a good job within a reasonable time frame I let them continue. If not, I say thank you pay whatever little cash I have to pay them and fire them.

This way, I don't risk much money, and I show them I know my stuff so they don't come up and say something like they've worked 8 hours on a 10 minute project.

Thanks everyone ...

- I can't give a flat rate

- I can't just not pay them OR pay lesser amount ... in short, I can't "piss them off" due to blackhat activities they are helping me with and not wanting to risk them reporting me. I can only pay less when they agree that they took longer than required.

- pizza9012, your suggestion seems to be a good one. I however tried a diff version, "it won't take you long ... I'll be here online throughout the whole time in case you need some help, but can only stay for no more than one hour" .. took him three hours to get it done! Came up with excuses that the pages took longer to load, and some errors in them.. blabla. Perhaps I should be more upfront.

As for the time-limits, I didn't try that, but I made it clear for them that I'll be testing their performance in the first task.

I'm kindda leaning towards zozor's recommendation. Infact I've already downloaded and trying to configure another similar tool called Yuugo or something. Maybe that's the only way to scare them.

Yeah odesk is really good its far better than getafreelancer and rates seems cheap (alot of people work for 1$ an hour) so I advise you to use it

It's important to specify the time limit on the task. Something like "do this that and that and stop if it takes you longer than x hours"