I know a lot of designers in the New York area, so frequently people ask me for references. But lately it’s very hard to find freelancers or anyone between jobs. The industry is booming, but the traditional place-an-ad, receive-a-million-resumes (or not), and interview-a-dozen-people way of finding someone is fairly inefficient.
The globalization of the programming industry has resulted in oDesk, a website that allows employers to post a contract description which applicants from around the world then bid on. The site also facilitates payment transfers and tracking the work by taking screen shots of the programmers computer every 10 minutes.
It would be trickier to hire designers and field researchers this way, but I’m betting it will happen eventually.
I think http://designoutpost.com/ is one of the more intruguing design freelance markets I’ve seen. *Everyone* gets to see the rival pitches and the work in progress. In fact it becomes a public celebration of all the designers’ creativity.
Much better than some Orwellian camera looking over your shoulder. :-(
another good one for designers is http://www.guru.com
Check http://www.freelr.com which is a new Social Networking site for webmasters and Programmers.
While sites like elance, guru, rentacoder, odesk all charge for connecting webmasters with programmers Freelr is a free alternative which is easier to use and creates a more exciting user experience. With Freelr users can interact freely with each other in an open-market, which is impossible with the other sites mentioned…..