Techniques for Making a Successful Job Post

To initiate a successful engagement with an Elance service provider relies heavily on the initial job posting. Writing a clear job description, categorizing the posting correctly and maintaining reasonable expectations will profoundly impact your satisfaction and experience as a job poster or employer.

You need to have reasonable expectations. Asking for a clone of a complex site like eBay or Amazon for a few hundred dollars is definitely not a reasonable expectation. If your budget range is too low for the amount of work being requested, professional and experienced providers will not take your posting seriously, and you will receive a number of lower quality proposals. Choosing from those proposals may result in a project that will not meet your expectations.

If you have in mind a clear idea of what you want, and describe that idea in as much detail as possible, your results will stand a much better chance of satisfaction with no frustration. Having a project defined as, “I need a website to sell XYZ product” does not give the service provider enough information to really help building a proposal to deliver what you want. You have a better chance at winning in roulette than leaving so many details up to chance in a providers mind. Do the groundwork and put in some effort before making your post. Repeating an idea or requirement in a design specification or request will not hurt the effort, especially if the requirement is something critical or important to the project. Repetition is re-enforcement.

Next you will need to choose the correct categories and skill set when making your post. Choosing the right category is important since this determines what kind of providers will respond to your job posting. Listing the top skills your provider should have to complete the project will help a provider in determining whether or not they should respond to your post.

Expect a multitude of responses fairly quickly, often times within hours and certainly within a day. You will see a variety of prices, and of course it's not always the best route to go with the lowest cost provider. Review the ratings on each provider and take a look at their portfolio. One technique that many experienced job posters utilize is to re-word the job description and send it back out to your top choices as providers. This accomplishes two things, first it will verify that the provider clearly understands the project and secondly you can gauge their responsiveness to your query.

Once you select a provider and begin the engagement, be sure to keep the flow of communication active and frequent. Lack of communication is one of the top reasons of dissatisfaction and frustration with job engagements from both the providers and employers. Get status updates and provide feedback quickly, keeping the communication flowing and in the end you will get a great result!