Non-Contracted Solutions Come With Consequences

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Hungry for work, a service provider may submit a solution to your outsourcing problem before that problem’s contract was created and agreed to… placing you, the outsourcer, at a professional disadvantage.

It starts out with you making a job opportunity available, and then suddenly getting email messages that link to completed work offered without discussing requirements or payments. Why does this happen? And is it a legitimate outsourcing risk?

It’s Free (for a Fee)

Service providers in dire need of cash may provide non-contracted solutions in hopes of receiving a payment. The process is not unlike the webmaster who provides free PPC advertising space on his website in hopes of earning a commission, or the freelancer who participates in crowdsourcing in hopes of winning a financial reward.

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It sounds like a win-win situation, too. Through this approach, you could end up with a quality, inexpensive solution without having to encounter the dreaded vetting process. But you could also end up with something that disrupts your faith in humanity!

Non-Contract By-Products

Here are some hard-hitting problems with this approach.

1. You may feel obligated to accept and pay for work you don’t want. Worse, since no one discussed acceptable compensation, you could be goaded into paying a large sum of money for work that doesn’t even warrant a dime.
2. You may get a lot of crap submissions that aren’t worth the time it takes to look through. Part of the vetting process entails scrutinizing entire portfolios or work samples. It’s a required step that ensures you’ll eventually work with qualified individuals only. Browsing through random submissions, you lose control over what should rightfully occupy your time.
3. There’s no contract holding service providers accountable for problems their submissions may cause. One of the perks of contracting out work is the accountability it enforces. Without a contract, you can’t hold anyone accountable for shoddy work – nor can you demand a do-over or a refund. If a submission passes on a virus, for example, or corrupts important business data, and/or damages a piece of hardware, you (and you alone) are solely responsible for the consequences.
4. Accepting these submissions through an online outsourcing service is cause for account termination. To remain operable, outsourcing services charge users a fee of some sort – usually a percentage of a job. They can’t retrieve a fee out of $0.00, but that’s what you’ll ask them to do when you accept non-contracted work. It’s a risk these services simply don’t want to take, so they’ll remove users who operate outside of their fee-based business model.
5. It elicits unprofessional behavior. Without an incentive to pay, the temptation to walk off with a non-contracted, but working solution without proper compensation is too strong to ignore in an industry as large as this. It takes unethical outsourcing to a whole new level, and it can breed a reaction from self-important providers so disgruntled, you may have to employ some serious damage control after it’s all said and done.

Avoid these outsourcing risks at all costs. Either transition these types of offers to contracted job opportunities, or simply ignore them. Erring on the side of caution is just one golden rule of outsourcing, and you’ll be better off for following it.