Ideal Freelance Bid Responses & Ratings

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Have you given any thought as to how you’ll respond to freelance bids yet? If not, you’d better do it now. The internet has facilitated the act of bidding to a speed beyond belief. I’ve seen one poor outsourcer attract close to 170 bids in as little as two weeks. That’s too many bids to seriously consider and if you’re not careful, you’ll suffer from the same.

170 bids may not sound like a bad thing at first, until you realize the bulk of them won’t help you in the slightest. Some freelance bids will appear as though they were automatically generated by a poorly programmed robot. Others will appear as though they suffer from some weird, simplistic “I can do it” syndrome while a few may even look as they’re chapters of an unpublished book.

Plan Ahead!

Prevent an overload of irrelevant responses by crafting the ideal freelance bid before making your job opportunity public. In your notes, define the ideal candidate, list specific issues each bidder should address in his or her bid, make your budget limit loud and clear (that could get rid of probably half of the ones you don’t want right there), and provide specific instructions on how bids should be formatted.

Other things you’ll want to pay attention to include price and delivery estimates.

Jot down what the ideal bid response will look like. Note what the ideal service provider should say to you, and then plan to look for the same once you start getting bids. For each freelance bid that trickles into your inbox, use your favorite keyboard combination to search for relevant phrases like, “my Flash experience,” “see my online portfolio,” “PSD samples,” “award winning wallpapers,” etc.

Check Freelancer Ratings and Feedback

Now truth be told, anybody can claim anything in a bid and you’ll surely run into some real whoppers. This is what makes freelancer ratings and feedback so important. At almost every outsourcing service, you can try to verify what’s in a bid with provider ratings. You just have to be careful about how you interpret them since they’re not the same across the board.

Outsourcing Cartoon by Just Outsourcing

The ideal ratings system is a double-blind system because it prevents manipulative feedback.

In a double-blind rating system, neither the outsourcer nor the service provider can see what rating they’ve received until after both rated each other. That’s what makes it valuable.

Unfortunately, on sites without a double-blind rating system, an outsourcer and a service provider can see what they were rated, and then retaliate with undeserved feedback in return. That pretty much throws the opportunity for honesty out of the window, especially since people may give each other terrific ratings simply out of fear.

My advice? Stick with outsourcing services that use a double-blind ratings system. It reveals the candor you need to make professional hiring decisions, and you just won’t get that candor at services which deny its growth.

If you aren’t comfortable with what you see, skip on to the next freelance bidder and so on and so forth until you find a few feasible gems.