One of the biggest challenges is that hiring managers often rely on the impressions gathered in a face-to-face interview when deciding whether to trust a potential employee or contractor. It's not very scientific, but it's how people begin to establish trust.
If you're in Miami -- or Mumbai -- and your potential client is in Seattle, you're at a disadvantage. How do you build trust when you can't meet face-to-face?
One technique we recommend is what we call the Test Drive.
Say you're a software programmer trying to convince a potential client to hire you for a job that would require hundreds of hours of work, or thousands of dollars. Suggest a trial project, perhaps a discreet component of the bigger job, or a separate task that can be done in a few hours. A redesign of an online shopping cart, say. Or just a sample test -- maybe a Web page that will take input of name and gender and output "Hello, Mr. Smith." Throw in a time-of-day element to get "Good evening, Ms. Jones."
Failing that, maybe they'd hire you to spend an hour or two looking at their website or their software and suggesting how you'd improve the next iteration. Why should either of you go to this extra step, and for the client, the extra cost? Here are five irrefutable reasons:
1. It's hard to commit a thousand-dollar project to a stranger; the test drive is a relatively cheap way to stop being a stranger. If the client likes you enough to be talking, but is still on the fence, the best thing they can do is get to know your work style under real conditions.
2. They're still getting something useful -- they can assign you work they really need done, and you get paid for your time.
3. It can be a bargain -- you might consider knocking 20 percent off your normal rate for the couple hours you spend on this test. It shows you're sharing the risk, that you're serious about winning the job, and it improves the value proposition of the test project.
4. It saves time. Is the client spending valuable time on multiple rounds of interviews? Is he going back and forth between top candidates? If you take a small sample project and run with it, you're getting work done, the client can go back to getting work done, and what you produce is a better measure of your value than four rounds of phone interviews and portfolio reviews.
5. It's real. Every hiring manager has hired someone who aced the interview but turned out to be a nightmare to work with. They've all hired someone whose references or portfolio were stellar, but whose real work product was a disappointment. Or, maybe they've passed over a fantastic person who just happens not to interview well. This won't be the artificial environment of an interview or a cherry-picked portfolio piece. This will prove exactly what your work is like -- and what you're like to work with -- under real conditions.
When the client agrees, make the most of the opportunity. Get a very clear idea of the parameters up front, be communicative -- but not obsessive -- during the work process, and whatever the deadline is, beat it by a respectable margin. We've found that the overall process of hiring a remote provider isn't that much different than hiring in-house staff, but there are definitely some tricks that can help you shine from a distance.
