How to Write an Outsourcing Ad

Writing an ad to find new staff and team members, can be a tricky thing if you haven’t done it before. In this post I’ll give you some key outlines that you can use as guides and also give you some example adds that I’ve used in the past to hire people.

The first thing you need to consider, is that your ad must clearly state what the result is that you want from the person that you’re going to be hiring. This should be different depending on whether you’re hiring someone toproduce a specific task that they’ll do once and it’s a once off job compared to if it’s going to be an ongoing job, that will be looking to hire someone full-time.

Either way though your ad must make it very clear as to not only what the person needs to do in this position, but also what the result you will expect from them will be.

If you’re planning on hiring someone to do a website, you need to be clear about whether you expect them to do design or just the programming. [To get a good result in this situation, you're better to hire one person to do the design work and another to do the programming.]

Where people run into problems with outsourcing workers, often occurs because they haven’t been clear about what was expected from the person they were going to hirer at the start. If you are hiring someone to do all parts of the job, then you need to make sure that is clearly outlined within the ad.

Your ad should be clear and upfront about what you expect to pay for the service. Often this is done on online sites by choosing a range in which you expect bids to be. This is always just a guide and I’ve often found that it’s often a bit better to underestimate what you think the price should be and let the people applying bid what they think is an appropriate price if its higher.

You also need to be very clear about either any bonuses that will be attached on work being delivered by a certain time, or to a certain standard. For example if you’re hiring someone purely to do SEO work on a certain keyword for a certain site, there’s nothing wrong with telling them that there is a bonus if they can get you tonumber one in the search engine rankings.

Another thing you need to think about constantly when writing your outsourcing ad, is that you need to sell the job as much as you would be selling any of your products or services. This is especially true for full time positions.

By taking the extra time to make the job sound interesting, appealing and rewarding, you will often attract a far higher class of candidate than just merely stating the criteria they need to have. One of the best ways to do this is to mention that they are joining a team. People like that aspect of knowing that they belong to a team, the can achieve things far bigger than themselves.

Any specific qualifications that you need the person to have, or ability to use, eg. any programming languages or pieces of software, you need to state clearly in the ad long before you ever get to the screening process.

My experience here has told me there are two types of people, those who underestimate their skills with a certain programming language or piece of software, and those who overestimate their skills. When you’re screening people (with a hiring questionnaire ) make sure you have some preprepared questions, I will establish whether they’re in the former group or the latter. Also by stating this early in your ad you will often eliminate tyre kickers, who apply for every job that is for “web design” etc.

If you’re hiring someone for a one-off job it’s often good to add a phrase like “this will be an easy job for someone who knows what they’re doing “. This often gives candidates the impression that you understand clearly what it is that needs to be done and the amount of work that is required to do it. It also tends to stop people bidding with unrealistic and exorbitant prices hoping that you don’t know anything about the skill set that you’re trying to hire.

Overall your ad needs to stand out, it needs to be clear about what’s required, it needs to dissuade tire kickers and it needs to attract the right quality people who will then go into your screening process before they do an interview with you.

Below I’ve put some examples of ads that I’ve used in the past hiring people with different skills, please fill free to use these or a change them as much as you want, when hiring people. Some of them are from quite a few years ago and while the content may be a little bit out of date, but they give you an example of what you should be looking for.

I am looking for a person to make a simple php/ ajax page that scrapes information from google.comand http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ it will have a simple input of a keyword and a domain and then it will deliver the following results back: a grid with the results showing the URL (and below that all URLs from that domain that are in the top 100), the position in google.com, the number of links (data from siteexplorer), the number of links with that keyword as their anchortext and the % of overall links that have that anchor text.

For someone who knows php well and understands scraping this should be a simple exercise.

I am using this as a simple project to look for php programmers to code a big project pls see the pic of what the page should look like.

If you have more questions pls contact me.

I am looking for a talented, fast and reliable ghost writer to write a number of reports and white papers.

You need to have a good ability to learn a new subject quickly and then write a detailed report on the topic.

The White Papers will be in the vicinity of 10,000 words and will contain a number of chapters.

As well as the white papers you will be writing some web content and magazine articles.

You need to be able to deliver a draft very quickly and then be able to revise it once given feedback.

You must have flawless English skills and the ability to write in both a conversational and business manner.

Please don’t apply if you aren’t an English Native Speaker.

You also should have some business eduction or background.

If you are successful at writing quality content I have a lot of work for you.

Please don’t apply if you are only able to work for a short time each day I am looking for someone who can deliver in a quick time frame.

We need someone to create accounts for different bookmarking sites, blogging sites, microbloging sites and others.

We need to hire someone to make 100+ accounts for five different people. For example: WordPress – five accounts under five different names, usernames. So that means if we target 100 accounts for John Doe and there are five John Doe that would total to 500.

We will provide all information needed to sign up for blogging sites, microblogging sites and others.

Each account must contain an uploaded Bio and anchortext backlink. These will be provided for you.

The selected freelancer will then verify/confirm all accounts.

All links of successful accounts made will be copied and pasted in an excel file for us to check.

For every successful account created, XX cents USD is the max we will pay.

Please bid for 200 accounts

This is an easy job for someone who has created accounts before.

We are looking for someone that we can work with on an ongoing basis.