I have had quite a bit of success using these services.
Here are a few of my tips:
1. As jasonkester said, wait at least a week before you start looking at proposals and making your decision. You get a lot of crap in the first few days, and you want to give the "good" people enough time to find and read it.
2. Be really clear and specific with your RFP. Go in into as much detail as possible, and look for responses that indicate that they have read it. Also, make sure you use a descriptive headline. You're competing with quite a few people, so you want your project to stand out.
3. Ask a few specific questions in your description. This is not only a great way to start to grasp their domain knowledge, but you also can filter out people who haven't read it (similar to #2).
4. When you have narrowed down your selection to 3 or 4, send them an even more detailed description of your project and arrange a Skype call. It's easy to be deceptive via email, but if you have someone on the phone you can quickly gauge how competent they are on the fly. Treat it like a real phone interview for a job you've had in the past, except you are the interviewer.
Comments
I have had quite a bit of success using these services.
Here are a few of my tips:
1. As jasonkester said, wait at least a week before you start looking at proposals and making your decision. You get a lot of crap in the first few days, and you want to give the "good" people enough time to find and read it.
2. Be really clear and specific with your RFP. Go in into as much detail as possible, and look for responses that indicate that they have read it. Also, make sure you use a descriptive headline. You're competing with quite a few people, so you want your project to stand out.
3. Ask a few specific questions in your description. This is not only a great way to start to grasp their domain knowledge, but you also can filter out people who haven't read it (similar to #2).
4. When you have narrowed down your selection to 3 or 4, send them an even more detailed description of your project and arrange a Skype call. It's easy to be deceptive via email, but if you have someone on the phone you can quickly gauge how competent they are on the fly. Treat it like a real phone interview for a job you've had in the past, except you are the interviewer.
Good luck!