So You Want to Outsource: 5 Things You Need to Know

We live in a global economy. Never before has it been possible, let alone practical, to work with a team from around the world. In today's global job force, more employers than ever are deciding to look outside their companies to hire competent employees to do jobs that are too expensive, or too labor intensive to do in-house. For example, hiring someone to make you lists of potential clients to email might be a job that you could fulfill in-house by paying an employee $12 per hour, or you could outsource this sort of data mining job.

This is the world we live in. We now have the option to send these sorts of tasks, as well as countless others, such as: virtual assistants, book keeping, data organization, telemarketing, or even design and development - to other countries for a fraction of what we'd pay by keeping the extra salary on the books for an employee from the United States.

The problem is, most write this off completely after hiring a few bad seeds and completely miss out on these sorts of opportunities. I fell firmly in this camp myself once, but I've since perfected the techniques for hiring and managing overseas workers. Here's what I recommend:

Hire Smart

When using freelancing sites, hire those with the most feedback. When using oDesk for example, you can sort not only by overall rating, but total number of hours worked. The freelancers with these "aged" profiles and tons of feedback not only give you a chance to see what others thought about working with them, but they also make the freelancer less likely to be a dud, as they risk an account they've worked months - or years - on building feedback.

Skip Email Exchanges

Schedule quick chats or video chats with your overseas employees. Email exchanges lead to a lot of waiting around while you're waiting on one party to answer. In addition, they're often confusing as there is no visual element to help describe what you are looking for. Instead, I use Start Meeting's screen share in order to chat with freelancers. This allows them to better grasp the ideas I'm presenting without an endless exchange of email.

Check In Regularly

To some freelancers, deadlines are merely a suggestion. Stay on top of things by scheduling daily, or weekly chat sessions in order to stay on top of projects and deadlines. Schedule milestones rather than a one-off completion date so that you can check the progress as you go rather than being surprised at the end.

Reward Them

While you're hopefully able to pay the freelancer a better wage than they'd make somewhere else, you can get even more out of them by offering bonuses of some sort. Maybe a fixed bonus for completing milestones, or a performance bonus if they set "X" number of appointments each week.

Following these simple tips can keep your outsourcing plans on track. I should also mention that it should remain a goal of yours to keep your best outsourced employees, and regular pay raises are often enough to keep them working hard, and with your company. 

Good luck, and if you have any additional tips, please share them in the comments.