7/05/2006

Experiment: Recruiting a global development team (part I)

On Monday night, July 3rd, I posted a description to Guru (see below) to find a qualified web-development team to help me with a series of Internet Property Development initiatives. I tailored the description to the ideal Cheap Revolution development team (for my needs). Twenty four hours later, I had 21 respondents (nearly 1 per hour).

I thought it might be interesting to track our progress in evaluating and applying these vendors to my current projects. I also sent the description to a few vendors that I've already worked with (two are local to my area). It will be interesting to see how they respond as well.

I've been scanning the responses, circling their Guru rating, the country of origin, the size of the development team and the skills they have. I'll probably have my intern, Ryan, help evaluate some of the sites that they've worked on - as there are now hundreds of URLs to review.

So far, the global representation is:
US: 8
Canada: 1
Romainia: 1
Ukraine: 1
India: 8
Pakistan: 2

Note that I also put three questions at the bottom of the post to provide some initial screening detail. Many of the respondents ignored the questions and sent me boilerplate. That makes it easy to screen them out. The last question was:

"How large is your team and how are they benefitting from this type of project work (I want to work with companies that care about their employees)"

As Ghandi said, Commerce without Morality is one of the seven worldly blunders. Hoping to avoid that...

The Guru Post follows for those interested ...

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Project Budget: Between $2,500 and $5,000
1099 Tax Service: Yes
Qualifications and Experience Required

Primary Skill: Web Development/Programming
Location Requirements

Must Work on Premises? No
Files / Description / Questions

Uploaded File(s): No files uploaded
Description: My company works with Internet and Software entrepreneurs seeking to create web applications and dynamic, web environments.

We are seeking a development partner to work on a series of projects.

The ideal partner has the following characteristics:
- ability to create web interfaces (strong ui design is a plus)
- comfort in creating multi-function sites with some subset of membership management, blogs, community support (chat, newsgroups, etc.), eCommerce/shopping carts (merchant accounts a plus), content management
- ability to create custom database driven applications as portions of the sites
- willingness to collaborate with my company project manager(operating as the General Contractor)on final product
- good written communication skills, functional oral communication skills (English)
- ability to work with lightweight, agile methodology
- willingness to provide frequent, lightweight (bullet item emails are fine) updates
- proficiency with open source or inexpensive software frameworks (Microsoft ok)
- capacity to handle projects on a full-time basis
- cost competitive

The right company will collaborate with us on our US-based clients to create sites such as (representing current clients or prospects)
- An online community of investors for a specific niche marketplace
- A personalized content medical site with community support
- An eCommerce and blogging site for an artist
- A social networking site built around a certain kind of financial transaction (paypal or credit card)

If you read this far and are thinking "this describes my company perfectly!", then please contact me and tell me why this describes your firm.

Best regards,
Skip Shuda
Employer Questions: (1) Why are you the ideal candidate for this project?
(2) What kinds of sites do you have experience with (send samples site names if you have them)?
(3) How large is your team - and how are they benefitting from this type of project work? (I'm interested in working with firms that care about their employees.)

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