December 5th, 2007
Should You Use Job Boards To Grow Your Freelance Business?
This morning I looked in my RSS reader and saw there is an article at FreelanceSwitch on getting the winning bid on a freelance job auction. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that niche job boards have started showing up more frequently on some of the sites I frequent. 37Signals has one. I think Lifehacker has one. I started wondering if these are good places for a freelancer to get work.
Let me begin by saying that while I have used Monster to get a position as an employee before, I have never used an auction site to get a contract job. When I was first starting my freelance business, I investigated Elance as a possible means of getting work. I eventually decided that people posting jobs on Elance were primarily interested in finding the lowest bidder. I’m sure there are exceptions, but that was the vibe I got.
Since I’m not interested in positioning myself as the low-cost provider of web design services, I decided it made more sense for me to find a niche and collaborate with other businesses.
Some of these new job boards have a slightly different approach. A site like Elance is built entirely around the idea of bidding for jobs. For FreelanceSwitch, the job board is a secondary feature. The biggest part of the site is a blog that writes informative, useful posts for freelance developers. As a broad generalization, the people bidding on that job board are going to be the freelancers who regularly read that blog.
I suspect it also means that people posting jobs are looking for someone who shares the same values as FreelanceSwitch. Cost is still going to be one of the primary considerations, but I imagine that someone posting a job there is more likely to be receptive to the other things you might bring to the table: code that is easy to maintain, an enjoyable user experience, or even just professionalism in your interactions.
I still don’t recommend anyone try to build a business off of a job site such as Elance. It’s just too hard to grow a small operation when you have to be the cheapest game in town. I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand, though, the idea of building one through a niche job board that is attached to a quality blog. I think you have a better chance of finding a client who is willing to listen to why you’re worth more than Brand X.
Dec 10th, 2007
8:46 am
I tried a freelance job board once at the begininning of my career… woudln’t recommend them. My main issue with them is that I think they devalue the work of the individual. I found, on the boards I reviewed, that the price awarded was horribly low.
Dec 10th, 2007
11:51 am
Raquel, I’m assuming that you were on the board looking at marketing jobs. As tough as it is to demonstrate why you’re worth more money as a programmer in that environment, I can’t imagine trying to do it as a marketing specialist.
Dec 29th, 2007
1:46 pm
We find a lot of work on freelance job boards. It’s true, many potential clients are looking for great work at a discounted price. My experience with freelance boards has been crappy – clients expect way more than they’re willing to pay for. It’s much better to deal with a client who understands what I can do within the budget.
Furthermore, people of other cultures with different living standards are also bidding. I know a brilliant programmer in India selling his skills for $3/hour (that’s a lot to him too..) where I’d be losing my shirt at that rate. But the global economy of the interweb may drive the cost of development down on these job boards. It’s great for consumers, but what about us bill-paying freelancers?
The best bet for freelancers IMHO is to impress local clients so they keep coming back with new ideas.
Dec 31st, 2007
11:10 am
@Kris: I totally agree. The only way I can imagine competing with bidders who have a lower cost of living is if the project is so similar to something that I’ve written in the past, that I can reuse nearly all of the code. That means I would need to have an incredibly large and well organized library of code snippets, and/or I would need to spend a lot of time sifting through job postings to find the ones I could turn a profit on.