As an entrepreneur running a small online business, eventually, you’re going to reach the point (if you haven’t already) where you can’t handle full business operations by yourself.
When this happens, you’re going to need to hire someone who can help you along. At the same time, you may not yet be in a financial position to hire a full time or even a part-time employee either with a salary.
What’s the solution in this case? Simple: you need to hire a freelancer, someone who you can assign work to as needed.
If funds are particularly tight, it will almost always be smarter to hire a freelancer from a foreign country, because they can perform high-quality work at a much lower price than you could with someone who lives in the United States or Canada. These are the top tips you’ll want to take before/when hiring a freelancer from a foreign country:
Look at their resume and work experience
When you post your job on a freelance website or anywhere else, you’re going to receive proposals from various freelancers around the world. You’ll need to start narrowing down your list of proposals, and you can start doing that by looking at their resume and work experience. If they don’t have much experience in your industry, they’re probably not a good fit.
Analyze their samples
Freelancers who know what they’re doing will send you samples of their past work. Analyze these samples closely and look for the quality of what they can produce. This will help you to narrow your list down even further.
Get payment issues squared away
By this point, you should have limited your list down to 2-3 candidates, and you can choose between them by assigning paid test work first.
This is when you’ll need to figure out any payment issues, since paying anyone who lives in a foreign country means you’ll need to convert money into their currency before you can send it. The easiest way to do this will be through a remittance service of some kind, which is much cheaper than other options such as brokers or bank wire transfers.
Assign test work first
To finally narrow your selection, you’ll need to assign paid test work to your freelancers. This is your last chance to gauge the quality of content or work that they can produce before you make a formal decision.
Based on the results of the test work, it should be very easy to choose a freelancer at that point, because someone’s work quality should be higher than the others. You can also pay attention to how professional the freelancer is in their communication with you as well (such as through e-mail or through the phone).
Hiring a foreign freelancer
If or when you ever need to hire a foreign freelancer, the above tips will help you to find the very best freelancer you need.