Thanks for reading! I do almost all of my hiring from Upwork, although most of my freelance costs in 2018 were to hire a former colleague who went freelance.

Thanks for reading! I do almost all of my hiring from Upwork, although most of my freelance costs in 2018 were to hire a former colleague who went freelance. I've written posts about how I hired the blog's illustrator[0] and editor[1]. My screening process varies depending on the job I'm hiring for. The #1 thing I'm looking for is communication. I look hard at the quality of writing on their profile bio and cover letter. I've been hiring freelancers for several years (before I quit) and the most common reason it doesn't work out is that the freelancer is a bad communicator and we burn excessive time on miscommunication. When I find someone who has promise, I generally just hire them for a small job (capped at 5-10 hours) without a lot of interviewing. I have this theory (not rigorously tested) that putting developers through a lot of screening is counterproductive because the people who are good have lots of options and don't want to jump through lots of unpaid hoops for you. I don't have a defined trial period, but I just incrementally start giving them more responsibility and increase their hours cap. I do fixed costs if it's a job that has a very distinct deliverable (e.g. convert this AngularJS site to Angular7). But if it's just that I want someone to do some of the dev work on a project, I'll just pay hourly. Price is determined at the start. On Upwork, the freelancers bid on the job and that's the price you go with. If I work with someone for a long time, I increase their rate periodically. If I'm not happy with the work, I pay for the time they put in, but I end the contract. I only refuse to pay if they either fail to deliver or deliver something that's unusable. That's very rare, though. It's only happened to me once out of 50ish hires on Upwork.[2] [0]: https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/ https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/ [1]: https://mtlynch.io/editor/ https://mtlynch.io/editor/ [2]: https://mtlynch.io/upwork-scammer/ https://mtlynch.io/upwork-scammer/