How Do You Find a Good Employee?

[benitez17]

In general, my goal when I buy a website is to automate the processes behind it (or buy a site that doesn't need much attention) so I can effectively ignore it and move on to the next project while collecting money from my existing sites, and that has been working out pretty well for me so far.

However, I have now reached the point where I am passing up a lot of quality opportunities solely because I don't have time for them, a couple of my websites are not reaching their full potential due to some neglect on my part, and there are a few new ideas that I have that are languishing because I can't make time to implement them. In the past, I have tried to hire contractors to do work as needed, but haven't seen very positive results, so I have avoided hiring someone on a long term basis.

I know some of you here have hired contractors and/or employees to mange some aspects of your business. How did you find these employees or firms, and how do you manage them successfully? I am specifically looking for someone who can write content, upload files, promote sites, and manage blogs at the moment, but any general advice, suggestions, or references are appreciated.

[Clinton]

Good question .. and a problem I face myself. While there's always elance, rentacoder, virtual PA type services, they are more useful for one off jobs rather than a long term working relationship.

My experience has been that you hardly ever get someone who's spot on. You spend lots of time answering questions, correcting their mistakes, tweaking their work till they are right for the job ... and they leave to do something else. That applies to those taken on for writing work, SEO work, managing your website - everything! Or at least in my experience. I'd dearly love to have someone to take over a few hundred finance sites in a link feeder network and I'd like them to do everything from renewing domains to keeping up-to-date with fees for hundreds of hosting accounts to monitoring the site monitoring scripts ...to a few other bits and pieces. But I'd have to devise a system to structure the work and a system to monitor that it's being done. I'll have to then fine tune the system and correct mistakes he's made. It'll be a few months before the candidate can be left to get on with the job but in that time I'd have spent tens of thousands of dollars of my own time all of which is time down the drain if he ups and leaves.

And it's not even a matter of money - I pay them well and treat them well.

Maybe the trick is to have very, very specific jobs and clean documentation for each and have different people serving each job. But I feel uncomfortable with treating them like replaceable cogs in a machine.

I'm looking for exactly what benitez17 is looking for. Am interested in your replies.

[Jen]

lol, i've been in a similar boat with the design side of things. Having our programmer Dan inhouse is great as I can just leave him to it, but also oversee everything.

Maybe it might be worth us taking a look at whether we can offer what you're looking for? We might need some guidance to get things going the way you want to, but we're looking at taking on more regular work so we can provide better long term results rather than the one-off job.

Not sure, but you can always email me full details and see what we can work out? I'm trying to grow our team so it makes sense to me to take on the work, plus we might have some extra ideas we can implement into the sites for you...

will let you know if i come up with anything else though!
Jen

[benitez17]

Jen, do you have any experience providing services like the ones I am looking for, or are you looking to expand your offerings? I don't need any long term design work, and I am a computer engineer, so I don't need any programming assistance. I'm basically looking for a good part time VA that can promote my sites and keep them updated, so it's really a data entry job.

I'd also be interested in finding a partner or two, but that's probably a separate topic.

[Clinton]

I have used the new member, Ajeet (see post here) in the past for article marketing type stuff - to find authors, organise them, proof their writing, monitor their work...

We did discuss at one point me financing him setting up an operation in India with full time employees etc., but never got around to doing it. He may have some suggestions, I'll point him to this thread.

[kmander]

I've done my fair share of outsourcing over the years - but mostly small little projects. I've found one designer/programmer that I use for my larger projects - he's relatively expensive but worth every penny.

Here are some tips that I posted onto my blog: http://www.keithmander.com/?p=243 ("OUTSOURCING TIPS ‘N TRICKS").

[Ajeet]

I have used the new member, Ajeet (see post here) in the past for article marketing type stuff - to find authors, organise them, proof their writing, monitor their work...
We did discuss at one point me financing him setting up an operation in India with full time employees etc., but never got around to doing it. He may have some suggestions, I'll point him to this thread.

Hi Clinton,

Yeah, I still remember the work I did for you; on two separate occasions. The problem I faced was quite similar to the one listed in this thread. I was using freelancers to subcontract parts of the work. And that was a pain.

But I know of people who are managing to do this. I think that the key is that there needs to exists a substantial difference in the worth of a task to the two parties. For e.g., almost every one on this forum writes well. But I am sure that most of us employ writers. That is the differential in worth I am talking about.

Another equally important matter is that contractor being sought should be substitutable. If I need a Joomla expert to keep a project going, I will need to occasionally pay through my nose.

Here is an hypothetical example that might work. Suppose, you want to have someone keep your wordpress sites running, and are willing to be 1.5 to 2 times the usual market rate, then there might be something I can help you with. To elaborate, keeping wordpress sites running could mean:

* purchasing / renewing domains
* keeping hosting accounts going (paying / renewing / transferring)
* installing/upgrading WP / plugins etc
* Posting original content periodically (with pictures that do not land us in a copyright mess)
* Building deeplinks to all new content using article marketing, social media, squidoo kind of stuff

Assuming that the number of sites was large, there could be a business proposition here.

In the above picture, the only thing that I cannot see being done easily is deleting spam comments! If the number of blogs was 100, each with 100 posts, we could easily be looking at 10000 comments a day!

[Clinton]

Yes, on both occasions last year I recall the trouble you had with the freelancers. But if you remember, way back in 2007 it worked pretty smoothly for many months (with the article + spinning contracts). I recall we were both happy with the four figure monthly business we were doing. What changed? Sub contractors more unreliable? More people working for themselves?

I think that the key is that there needs to exists a substantial difference in the worth of a task to the two parties.

Brilliant observation!

With the blog comments, I don't know if that's so much of a problem. The network I bought recently had several hundred blogs and the "Please Moderate" Wordpress emails I was getting everyday were in the thousands. Per day. I've now finally turned off the email notification on all the main blogs, tightened up who can post and reduced the comment time to one day (comments automatically closed within one day of the post going live).

kmander, there are some good tips in that article. I particularly liked the idea of videoing.

[Ajeet]

way back in 2007 it worked pretty smoothly for many months (with the article + spinning contracts). I recall we were both happy with the four figure monthly business we were doing. What changed?

One of the biggest difference is that in 2007, I was using full time employees who sat in the same office that I use. You would recollect that the prices were much higher then. This allowed for the use of full time employees. Today, prices of most services have fallen so low that the overheads associated with full-time employees cannot be justified.

@kmander: good article

[benitez17]

One of the biggest difference is that in 2007, I was using full time employees who sat in the same office that I use. You would recollect that the prices were much higher then. This allowed for the use of full time employees. Today, prices of most services have fallen so low that the overheads associated with full-time employees cannot be justified.

@kmander: good article

That's interesting. Has the price for the same quality of service fallen, or are there just a lot of people flooding the market with junk so the average price for the services is lower? I have actually seen higher prices being offered for well written content compared to a year ago.

I have tried using elance, oDesk, and others with varying levels of success, and I have found a single, semi-reliable writer who declines a fair amount of the work I offer him, despite the fact that I am willing to pay above market rates and I offered him bonuses just for on time completion of a task (which he usually fails to collect).

It's sad that this is the best guy I have found. A couple of the writers I tried to use sent me content that looked like it had been written by someone who was just picking words out of an English dictionary at random, a couple were OK writers but highly unreliable, and a couple started out fine and then just vanished.