This post contains links and descriptions about platforms and methods for finding sub-contractors. As the school develops it’s plan to start a web development business we might need to outsource tasks that we are unable to complete in-house. What follows is my break down of our options.

Micro-job Marketplace

Micro-job marketplaces are web platforms that connects people who do things with people who need things done. The platform will often limit the price that any task can be done for (like all jobs cost $5) it also manages the transaction between client and seller.

Fiverr

Fiverr.com is one of the most famous sites out there, it has a wide range of talent and categories with many people offering services for $5. Seems to me like the go to place for small gigs.

There are some alternatives from a blog post but most of these look a bit weird and are kind of empty.

The whole mico job site thing makes me feel weird, it feels a bit exploitative and I don’t really trust people who would value their work so low to do good work.

Freelance Sites

Finding freelance talent is typically fairly difficult, it’s hard to know how well someone does something and how well you will work together.

Elance-odesk.com

This is the top result on Google for “hire freelance”. They recently teamed up with o-desk, from their about:

Elance-oDesk is reinventing the way we work. Today, more than 2 million businesses tap into Elance and oDesk to find, hire, and pay the world’s best freelancers, making it easier than ever to build successful companies and thriving careers.

Here are their numbers (as they report them):

Guru.com

According to their website:

2 million people have used Guru.com to complete more than 800,000 jobs worth a total of more than $200 million.

 

Freelancer.com

Here’s how it works according to this gif from their website:

Here’s how the describe themselves:

Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing, outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace by number of users and projects. We connect over 13,184,510 employers and freelancers globally from over 247 countries, regions and territories. Through our marketplace, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software development, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering, the sciences, sales and marketing, accounting and legal services.

And of course… Craigslist

A good local option is to post gigs on craigslist.org. This is how I got my start freelancing and I’m sure we could find some decent talent and make local connections.