 Hello there! So today's video is going to be about hiring freelancers. Now I'm assuming most of you watching this are freelancers, probably freelance translators or maybe other types of freelancers, and so you're used or you're working on getting hired and being a freelancer and making that a living. But chances are you're also gonna have to get stuff done. And at least when I was starting out, and I mean this is still the case, I think the best place to get stuff done is to hire other freelancers and to work with them. And so I've mentioned this several other times before, but by the way, I now, I mean I'm a freelance translator, but I also have an agency that I'm running and I still use freelancers for pretty much everything. From making the website to lead generation to obviously all the translations, copywriting for the for the logo and business card design, all that stuff. I work with freelancers all the time. And so I think it's the best place to find talent, because you find talent from all over the world and and it's great. On the other hand, you always hear horror stories and a lot of people have said they tried hiring freelancers or working with freelancers and it went terribly wrong and nothing got done and blah blah blah. And to them I usually say, because it's usually true, like 100% of the time that it doesn't work out with a freelancer, it's the fault of the person hiring. Because for various reasons, which I'll kind of get into. By the way, I have a course actually, you know, I have this course on become a freelance translator. I also have a course on hiring freelancers, where I talk about this and I go in, I go into it more in detail. Here I just kind of wanted to cover the basics, because I'm assuming if you are a freelancer, at some point in time you will want to either create a website or maybe design something, you know, from a business card to a brochure to something like that, or maybe you need help with some marketing or sales or SEO or lead generation or whatever it might be. And for anything like this, the best place is to find a freelancer, you know, and to find another freelancer who can, because agencies frankly cost way too much and I don't think they're hardly ever worth it. And freelancers, there's some really good freelancers out there. It's sometimes very difficult to find the good ones, but there are very good ones out there. And so, and I mean, that's what my course is about basically to find them. But actually, this video, okay, I know I'm mentioning the course because I'm going to mention obviously, but this video is standalone. I just want to give some tips and tricks for it. And so, yeah, let's get into it. Well, first of all, and I've mentioned this before as well. But since you're all freelancers, if you can find someone else who needs your services. So if you're a freelance translator and someone else is a website designer, and you can say, look, I can translate your website into whatever language, how about you make a website for me in exchange or something along those lines, then do that because that's great that way you don't have to pay money. And, you know, as long as that person is decent, then you'll be able to figure something out and work well together. And since you're both freelancers, many times you can find a way to work together. And so if you can do that, that's great. And I very much encourage that also because it helps freelancers helping each other always helps out over the long term as well. However, maybe you don't have someone or maybe you do know someone who's a website designer, but either they're too busy and they can't do it for whatever reason, or maybe you don't think they're all that good or you don't trust them. That's the case. And, you know, it's better to be honest with yourself and what you're doing than not. And so chances are at some point you might want to hire a freelancer. So let's get into it. And these are some tips and tricks for hiring freelancers and that I think everyone should keep in mind whether you are a freelancer or not, you should keep these in mind for hiring freelancers. First of all, I'm going to go through an example. Let's say it's hiring someone to make a website. And because this is something that I don't really know much about, but I've hired for this before. And so let me go through the steps that I think you should go through when you're hiring someone to make a website, even if just a web page or something along those lines. First of all, you should get to know something about the job itself. You should not hire blindly. And this is a, and you might think, oh, that's a waste of time. I'm hiring someone else to do the job. Why should I get to know the job? No, it's a waste of time to hire someone and not know what the crap you're hiring for. So get to know the job. And ideally, I like to take a couple hours, you know, take an afternoon, something like that, to try to do the job myself. That's the best way to learn about it. Not to read about it or this or that, but actually to try to do it myself and and see how far I can get and what and what gets stumps me. And at least then I get a bit more of a feel for the job itself. So this, by the way, and I mentioned this in my course as well, the ideal situation is actually to hire a freelancer for something you already know how to do. Ideally, if you're a translator, you could hire a freelancer to trans a freelance translator translating in your two languages, because at that point, you already know the job that needs to get done. And so you won't have any ambiguity when you hire them. And you can concentrate just on the type and quality of freelancer and the pitfalls there, because it's a lot to think about when you have to worry about the type of freelancer and the type of job that needs to be done and try to juggle those two. However, I realized that to hire someone to do a job that you already know how to do might seem a bit like a waste. So what I'm saying here, rather than that, if you can't do that, then at least try to get to know your job a bit more. If you want to make a new website, spend at least an afternoon going through what needs to be done, you need to register a domain, maybe through GoDaddy, then you need the hosting. And so what do we want for creating the website? Maybe you want WordPress or Squarespace or this and that and the other. Spend an afternoon going through these and trying to figure out how they work and seeing if you can get it work or not and something along those lines. Maybe you can even get it work. Chances are you can't, at least not at a professional level, but at least you get an idea of how it goes. And in fact, now when I ask for a website to be made, I ask for the designer to make it because the website designer at WorkWish is very good. But then, since it's WordPress, I know enough about WordPress that I can do the continuous updates after that. And so I just ask her to run me through it. And so from that point on, I can just update it myself. And that's the thing. You need to get a feel for what you're hiring for and at least try it yourself. So the first thing you should do when you're hiring someone for a job is to try that job yourself as much as you can. Obviously, if it's something, I don't know, legal, I don't know why you would hire freelance lawyer, but I mean, they exist. So maybe you will. Obviously, there is a bit harder to do it yourself, but at least do research about it and put yourself in their shoes as much as possible and get to know the job as much as you can within the time that you can. First thing, secondly, at this point, once you get a better idea of what you're doing, so in this example, it will be to create the website. Once you have a better idea of how to create this website, then you're ready to hire someone. And when you're ready to hire them, you should spell out what they need to do in detail. And I see way too many people when they try to hire freelancers, they kind of want to make them part of a team and get them excited and say, okay, I really want someone to do this and this is my vision and I want to do that. And I'd like to see someone who can join in almost to a tee the scariest freelancers away. In fact, just recently, it happened to anyway, a friend of mine who was looking at a freelancer and yeah, I ended up doing that and the freelancer got scared away. And it's because think put your I mean your freelancer. So hopefully this will be less of an issue for you. But you can put yourself into the freelancers shoes a lot more easily. When you get hired for a job, would you rather have someone that shares their vision? I mean, you know, I like that they share their vision. That's great. But it's got nothing to do with what I have to do if they say, look, I want this document translated because so this is my vision. I really want to do this website and I want to do this thing. And I want to have a business that runs this way and blah, blah, blah. And I'm looking not for a freelancer, but for a partner and I want you to be part of the team and and you know, together we can make really cool things happen and it will be awesome. It'll be awesome. Maybe this excites you but chances are if you're looking to do to do a translation, get paid and then find your next client, you know, you just feel like, dude, just tell me what to translate and then we're off to the races. So that's what you should do when you hire. Just list what needs to be done in detail and the way I describe it is like you're explaining it to a grade school or middle school or something like that. And I'm not saying talk down to them but just explain everything that needs to be done. As a translator myself, I appreciate it when they explain everything that needs to be done. They say I need this and this translated from this language to that language, this many words. I need it in Microsoft Word. I need it by this deadline, stuff like that, you know, everything like that. That helps a lot. At least even if it's something that's pretty obvious to me, at least I have it there in writing and so I'm happy about that. That's what you should be doing when you hire someone. You can do this either in the explanation when you first say what needs to be done and then I would repeat it then when you actually hire them and send the email, say okay, this is exactly what needs to be done. So just list out everything that needs to be done so there's no ambiguity. If you can, anyway, list what needs to be done as far as you can tell. If this is, so for this example, you're creating a website. You say, hi, I need someone to make a website. This will be for myself as a translator or as a freelance whatever. I need a website done. It'll probably require an about me page. It'll require a contact me page or something like that, whatever it is. By the way, your homework that you did before when you were researching how to do this, that would have helped a lot here because here you know exactly what you're looking for. Chances are you came across some other people's websites that you like and so you can even show examples and say I like this, I like that, but you can do that later when you get hired. For now, you just need to list or when you hire someone. For now, you just need to list everything that you want in detail. If you're wondering if you should put a detail or not, too much detail is better than not enough. So, sorry, this is just a long-winded way to say and basically bullet points give in detail what you want to give simple instructions. Include one other simple instruction. I usually recommend to do this to say when you respond to this, I usually ask when you respond to this, write something, something in your title, right? Website designer job in your title and in your email subject or whatever it might be. Ask them to do something simple, a very simple instruction. This shows that they're at least paying attention and they're not just firing off replies to everyone left and right. You want someone who actually read through the details and understood it. So, include something simple and don't make it a chore, don't make it something, something very simple. Just say, write your name in the subject or write something quote-unquote this in the subject, whatever it might be, something simple just to show that they're paying attention and that's a very easy way to weed out other people that you don't want. If you're hiring them on Upwork or Pros or whatever other website you're using, usually Upwork for stuff like a website, then yeah, it's very because you'll get so many people applying and that's a quick way to weed out the ones that aren't paying attention. And so then, so that's great. Then you've already weeded down and you have a couple people who are interested and who've applied to your job and so you can start trying to weed out the other and try to figure out which one's best. At this point in time I would look through, in fact, Upwork let's let's you do it when you're already searching for for translators or sorry for freelancers, but at this point I would already start looking through the freelancers experience and their ratings and so if they have high ratings, if they have quite a bit of experience that's better. If they have zero ratings and no experience that's not as good. It's a judgment call on your side but I would probably hire someone with more experience and who knows what they're doing and especially who gets good ratings. If you have someone with a lot of experience but bad ratings that's bad as well. That's in fact worse probably. So just look for someone and you know so take all this into account and then you've whittled it down to say 10 people I don't know. At this point you can message them back and what you can say is I like the website I like this and that done and ask them to explain how they'll get it done because this makes them explain what you've what you need but in their own words and that way you can be sure they understood. I usually try to do it I try to word it in a way that they're teaching me right because they know more about it than I do and so I'll say something I'll be like look I've been thinking about using wordpress and I like to do these pages and maybe use whatever plugin is that something that would work or how would you do it and that forces them to kind of explain oh yeah we could use that plugin but usually I just do this and that and that and anyway anyway it forces them to look at it and so you know that they have looked at it and they'll reply to you and you know that they've understood what you need done and that way you can it's another way to weed out people who obviously don't get it or who don't reply or whatever it is and so these ones at least you can keep track of the people who are on top of their game and who actually reply and who know what you want at this point you probably have whittled it down to say three to five or whatever number of people maybe two and at this point it's your judgment call it you know usually usually I don't even look at price until later on at this point is when I look into price if there's some outliers and prices way off in whatever direction then yeah I can cut them off right away but now is when I kind of look more at the price if I have these two or three people who all seem just as qualified and just as good and they have understood the job then I'll just look at the price and if one of them's 80 bucks one of them's a hundred I'll go with the 80 bucks maybe or maybe I think if it's worth a hundred and this one just seems that much more professional for whatever reason again like I said it's a judgment call so at this point you've picked someone so congratulations except one other thing and again I go all into detail and it's a lot more structured as well in my in my course but one other thing that you should keep in mind once you hire someone is to set a milestone if they can you you can say okay I need this website done how long will it take I don't know a month you'll be like okay how much can you get done in a week or three days or something like that can you at least have WordPress installed or something like that they're like yeah we can do that they're like okay can we check back in three days and see how it's going set a milestone of x number of days or a week or whatever it might be because even after all this there's still a chance that something got lost in translation and the maybe maybe you also I mean chances are you made the mistake because they know their job and you don't and so maybe you worded something a bit incorrectly and so they're going to start working on a job in the wrong direction and it's a lot better to catch that wrong direction within two three days than a whole month later on with a whole website done and it's completely wrong so you want to make sure things are kind of going okay I would set a milestone and see how things are going maybe set another one after that again it's a judgment call and it depends on many different factors that I won't get into now but I you definitely want to make sure that things are going in the right in the right direction and the way to do that is to send milestones it is not to bother the translator once they've already started once they've started and once you set that milestone let them do their job sit back trust them to do what they're good at don't be bothering them all the time every other day with oh did you do this oh by the way I really think I think no no no no no no let them do their job if you have thoughts or something you can give it after you've seen their job or their milestone or whatever it might be but let them do their job and don't bother them every day because that doesn't help anyone uh so yeah this is already way longer than I wanted it to be but hopefully it kind of helps in case you're hiring freelancers just for some preliminaries and uh some traps and things to keep track of because yeah you keep hearing about all these stories if you talk to people who hired freelancers many times they'll tell you some horror stories about what went wrong and quite frankly I think pretty much all the time is the fault of the person who hired because let's face it the person doing the job knows their job and the person who hired probably did something wrong asked for something wrong or anyway this the method that I described here can actually help you and it's definitely helped me get rid of a lot of the ambiguity and set things straight so you can actually have a successful time of hiring a freelancer and so yeah hopefully that helps you if you're ever hiring a freelancer and I assume at some point in time you will and uh anyway that's it for now thank you so much for watching my video please don't forget to click like if you do because this helps me with future videos because I know what works and what doesn't don't forget to subscribe if you haven't and you can get more videos about 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