How to Find Great Online Employees
In the last decade, the business world has moved from the “real world” to the “online world,” with many people managing their businesses and their careers from the comfort of their own home. In today's world, a person can literally make a living without ever leaving the house. If you are on the lookout for new employees, virtual recruiting could be just the thing you need. Highly qualified employees are right at your fingertips, and there are many benefits to both employee and employer to working in a virtual world.
How Virtual Hiring Benefits Both Parties
For the online employee, working from home can bring many benefits, the first of which is the money saved. When working from home, an employee does not have to travel to get to work, and thus can save a great deal on gas, and wear and tear on their automobile. For the employee who is also a parent, the cost of childcare can be eliminated by managing time to take care of the kids and work at home. Business suits and ties for men and work dresses, make-up, and shoes for women are not a daily requirement when working in the virtual world, and therefore a good chunk of change can be saved there as well. It is easy to see how working from home can be beneficial for the employee, but how does it benefit the employer?
Employers know that a happy worker is usually a better worker. By making it possible for an employee to work from home, the employer can enjoy a much more productive worker. Since the employee is able to work at their own pace, without the distractions of the office, they can get more done. While an office normally only offers the opportunity to work between 9am and 5pm, a work-at-home employee can work literally any time. If a writer is awake at 3 am and cannot sleep, he or she can write a few articles, a few pages of that book, etc. The same is true of web page creators, editors, and many other virtual employees. And the fact that the employee can save so much money by working at home means that they are willing to work for less money than if they had to make the daily commute to the office. So now that we see how beneficial hiring people online can be, how can we get started?
Recruiting Employees in an Online World
Often, when companies are looking for good help online, they will post a job advertisement on such sites as Monster, HotJobs, Yahoo, or CareerBuilder.com. All of these are terrific places to place an ad for a job which can be done by online employees. Job postings may range from a temporary, one-time job for a fixed rate to a full time position…complete with benefits. People from literally anywhere in the world may apply to your job posting, giving you a much better chance of finding the perfect choice for your job.
It is very important to make sure that your job posting stay current and up to date. They should seem inviting, making the job opportunity sound exciting and beneficial to the employee. Explain to the potential applicants why you would be terrific to work for, and make it clear what the job entails. Remember, this virtual world opens a great deal of opportunities to the employee as well, so you must make them see why they should choose you to work for.
Social Networking and Job Outsourcing Sites
In recent years, social networking has also become a great source of potential employees for the online world. LinkedIn, or even Facebook and Twitter can open new opportunities for those who are looking for skilled workers from home. In many cases, such as with online writers, these sites may even offer the chance for the potential employer to get a peek at the employee's online work. By following an online professional on Twitter or “liking” their fan page, the employer can get a peek at the links which the employee posts from their articles and other works.
There are many other sites that were created exclusively for job outsourcing. A few of these are Odesk, Elance, Guru, Vworker, and Freelancer.com. These sites offer the chance for business and hiring managers to locate highly skilled professional freelancers who have their resume pretty much posted on their profile. While all of these sites serve the same purpose, they all have varying platforms for matching employee to employer.
In these sites, as in most online job outsourcing sites, the employer simply posts their job online, and waits for applicants to “bid” on the job. You can then negotiate the price with different employees and find the perfect one for the job at hand. By looking over their work history, you can easily see which employees have better satisfied their previous employers, and what kind of experience they have. Once an agreement is made on the cost of the job and what the job entails, you can simply click “hire” on the site, and that employee now works for you. A small percentage, normally 10% to 15% of the money that you pay the employee will be paid to the site. And both you and the employee are ready to go!