We have all made freelance mistakes

All freelance buyers have made mistakes in the past. The mistakes are common when one is outsourcing freelancers for the first time. A single mistake can be expensive depending on the seriousness of your freelance projects. Even as a new buyer of services there are simple ways to avoid problems with freelance contractors.

I have made the following mistakes in the past.

1.
Escrowing the entire project amount
Various freelance job sites emphasize on setting milestones as soon as you select a winner. Even if the escrowed milestone payments show that you can be trusted they can hurt you badly as well. For instance, you might escrow the entire project money for a free lancer who just needed to win a project to disappear. Since you cannot access your money anymore and the service provider is away you are forced to hire someone else. What is more, you cannot be sure that the freelancer will come back to release your money.

2.
Hiring freelance workers who were more money-oriented
Freelancing is a two-way arrangement where a freelance provider accepts to work and a freelance buyer accepts to pay for good results. The problem arises when you hire someone who does a shoddy job and still insists on being paid for his or her time. These are the kind of freelancers who will never agree to start a project without escrow payments. Their trick is simple. They will submit useless work and send you like ten private messages each pressuring you to release the milestone. They won’t even give you enough time to review the results.

3.
Hiring online workers who just wanted to outsource my work
Although some freelance workers have very attractive profiles, not all of them earned even half the hundreds of reviews they already own. They simply win your project and use the same freelance job sites to outsource it to someone else. If you want your project to be completed by a team you can make that clear on the project page. A team is a group of online workers with common interests and goals. So a service provider who hires someone from the same job site and terminates the new worker’s services as soon as your project is over does not own a team. He or she uses someone else to create an attractive profile.

4.
Hiring online workers who used fake skills and experiences on their profiles
Freelance outsourcers ask for samples or example of past work. If buyers approve the proof sent to them they usually hire the respective owners right away. The problem arises when the chosen freelance programmer cannot produce the same results as is shown on the samples they claim to own. It is a good thing that now most freelance employment sites enable you to cancel the projects that are done poorly.

5.
Hiring providers who just cannot meet deadlines
A provider who cannot turn in work when you need it is a huge freelancing risk. He or she can make you lose money and the trust of your clients. Besides, they turn out to be a waste of time in regard to the growth of your business.

What about you
Have you made numerous freelance hiring mistakes as well?