00:00 Jacalyn Holsted,: Hello, you’re listening to On Point Conversations. My name is Jacalyn Holsted, I am a marketing and content strategist and consultant. I work with small to large companies, medium-sized companies also that are looking for ways to enhance their online and digital environment as well as branding and also developing content that targets their consumers, potential consumers, and also putting systems in place that helps them to do this more effectively. I also work on marketing programs and projects in order to help my clients grow and develop. Today, I want to talk about one of the areas that I get involved in, and that I also do is hiring, selecting and hiring consultants or freelancers. I just did a blog post on my website, which is onpointthinking.com.  The blog post is titled 11 best practices for selecting and hiring a consultant or freelancer. I’ll be covering most of those points in this particular podcast, but you can also go there and you see them in writing as far as what those points are.

01:19 JH: While, your projected needs may be only for a short time, taking the time to really select appropriate vendors or resources, personnel resources, really in the process, in my experience, saves time, money, frustration, stress and disappointments. I hire outside consultants and freelancers for my own company, and then I also hire them for my clients. I can be the project manager in the middle of it, but sometimes it makes more sense to provide them that resource directly. And I have found that in my experience, I’ve learned and I really continue to learn the best practices for selecting and hiring those outside consultants, and you get the rush that if you have a successful project outcome, and there’s no surprises, no bad surprises, people are happy about what they achieved and what they found, and they work together really well, so it’s not one person dominating, it’s not one vendor, whatever dominating, but the team works together very well.

02:32 JH: In the past, I have been asked to talk to clients, a potential client who’s asked me to come in because they’re very unhappy with their earlier consultant and the project outcome. And so when I come in, it’s a result sometimes of maybe they rushed to hire someone, there was no time, we’re in a society now and a business that moves very quickly, or the team, that person turned out to be the really wrong fit, and that could be because of the rush job done to hire that person, or just because there wasn’t a clear understanding of what the company actually needed. The outside vendor promised too much, maybe they couldn’t even achieve it or never achieve it.  There were surprise added costs, all of a sudden at the end of the project or there were added costs that come in that weren’t anticipated.

03:29 JH: And when that happens to a potential client and they call me in, it’s starting from scratch, basically. Sometimes it’s helpful and you can redo the project, you can take in the project or whatever was started and change course. Most of the time it takes a restarting all over again, and depending on what the client needs, it could be that it’s hiring those additional resource or resources again, but at a different people, different personnel. But this action almost always leads… It does lead actually to increased costs and also time. So you wanna start at the beginning with a better foundation for selecting your outside consultants or vendors or gig workers or freelancers. And when I talk about this gig economy, it has to do with people that are brought in on a short-term basis. They might be brought in for just one project, they might be brought in seasonal. There might be a reason that the company need someone right now with this expertise and they don’t have it in-house. It could be related to someone being off, on leave or something. So there are all kinds of reasons that companies do bring in an outside resource, but don’t plan on hiring that person full-time.

04:48 JH: The first thing to do is start by really analyzing, articulating, and I suggest writing down what you need with regards to your projects, the skills you need, the pain levels, are you looking for a website developer, a website designer, an art director? Keep in mind too, that if you’re not familiar with titles, that’s no problem, actually, because you wanna start in this approach with what skills are you looking for. So you might be looking to have a new logo done. Well, what skill do you need in that logo? A designer or an illustrator? You wanna look at what that means, and you also wanna really define what your pain points are. There’s a reason you’re looking for an outside consultant, what is that? It could even be a situation where you say, “Well, we’re getting visitors to our site, but they’re not buying online,” or there’s… People are dropping off, there could be very basic things you start with and you could put your… Start putting your list together of things that your company could use to enhance what you’re doing.

05:54 JH: So I always really feel that a successful project starts with the beginning and the basics of what it really is that you’re looking for and what you need. If you have a team, if you’re not a sole proprietor, if you have a team, then I suggest engaging your team and talking openly and candidly about the issues and what outside resources might be good for your company. Now, unless you’re planning to hire an agency, which is not really the way… Necessarily, the way the things are done right now, you might be hiring more than one freelancer or gig worker, so you wanna look at all the places that you could possibly… The things that you need. Then what you wanna do after you’ve engaged your team, you will probably have a list that’s way bigger than what you had anticipated, then that’s the time to prioritize the list by what’s most valuable and the most profitable to your company. Also, what your budget limitations are. We don’t have unlimited budgets, nobody does, even very large companies don’t have unlimited budgets.

06:57 JH: And you wanna look at your timeline, what do you need to accomplish? And now hopefully, there’s been enough planning ahead, which is what I do with strategies that you’re not rushed, but things change, and we particularly know that marketing changes quickly, and so there’s… Sometimes there is a rush when you don’t even mean to have a rush to get to market or to change something or to do something digital. So keep in mind that your best consultants, if they’re too busy, then they’re not your best consultants, if they can’t do it in your timeline, or if they are too expensive. So we wanna look at where that point is, where it fits with what you need. And there’s also the timeline with what you need, and there’s also the aspect of money.

07:46 JH: So now that you’ve defined the project or at least defined the tasks, you can look at the scope and budget limits. Again, as I said, nobody has unlimited budgets and a rough schedule. Maybe there’s a drop-dead date, maybe it’s… You have to have it done by a certain date. So you have to backtrack from that and see what you can do, it might even be you break up those tasks. So it’s very… Getting more specific here, so that when you do bring someone in, you can be more specific about what you’re looking for, and they can be more specific in what they’re providing, and then you can see where they meet in the middle. So knowing what you need is very critical and knowing how much budget you have is important and knowing your schedule requirements. Now, on that same vein, you may have to compromise on the deliverable day. You may find somebody that is really the person you want and you’re gonna have to wait for them if they’re busy or work within their timeline, or maybe tasks or some of the tasks that they might do that someone else could do so that they can do it for you. So it depends, and this all depends on who you need and what you’re looking for.

08:57 JH: And again, keep in mind, when you’re talking to consultants, I’m a little bit ahead here, but when you’re interviewing or talking to them, you need to listen to what they have to say, because as being in a company might not realize that the timeline for a logo, it takes time, there’s a creative incubation time, it’s not just putting it on paper and giving it to you, so listen to what they have to say and take what they have to say and as long as you’re talking to… I usually take to interview five to 10 people for a particular task or a particular… It depends on the project and how involved it is too, and what you need to do, but that allows you also to get the perspective of the different sources of what you might and might not be able to do. So, because I’ve done this for quite a while. I generally have a pretty good contact list of people to hire within the marketing or creative area, meeting people like website developers and designers and illustrators and photographers, but when I don’t… When a contact list doesn’t have that vendor, or that person in there, then I use, I go to my trusted personnel, personal references and referrals, so I seek out people I trust and appreciate and know that they know what they’re doing and ask them for referrals or references.

10:18 JH: I use my own observations. I am also one to go do a lot of online searching, and then it also gives me an idea of, will this person fit into this company, will they not fit, the work that they’ve done, is it along something that would work on the same time or on the same look, maybe similar looks. So you can see a lot from an online search, organizational groups are another one, there might be a group that you can find that you can go and spend some time out to see who’s in that group, then…

10:50 JH: You really wanna narrow down your candidate list because you could end up getting into this tunnel of many candidates and you don’t wanna do that, as I said, I limit mine to five to 10, and in our current COVID-19, it’s gonna be a Zoom meeting or a online meeting, whether you use GoToMeeting or Zoom, I generally do Zoom, but anyway, whatever you choose as your primary interview mechanism, it’s gonna be online probably, most likely. With that being the case, you wanna make sure you have your technical resources, maybe you have a technical resource available, or if you’re one, then you know basically how to combat things that, bad reception, maybe the internet freezes all the things that you can run against across… If you’re interviewing with a team, I generally like to start first with them before you interview anybody is to make sure your team knows the rules and etiquette of online interviewing, it’s a little bit different than conducting meetings.

11:49 JH: You wanna have an agenda, gather all the questions upfront that you might get from your team members, so you can put it together so that you can put them into categories, and you can also eliminate redundant questions. Use things like hand-raising or chat, when you’re doing the Zoom meetings with your team members so that you’re not talking over each other and making any consultant uncomfortable too, and you wanna have a moderator, you might be that moderator who then calls on people and then that’s the interviewer, a person being interviewed. Talk and it allows them enough time to answer the questions.

12:28 JH: Now, in a one-to-one, or even in a setting where you’re not necessarily doing Zoom, I used to feel like you could ask a lot of questions, I still think you can on the Zoom meetings, but let’s give them time to answer, really be cognizant of not talking over each other, and if you can just call on people as you… As you’re going through the questions so that they can answer, ask their question and then you move on to the next one. You want people to have not only the background and experience possibly of what you’re looking for, but the soft skills, and that includes communication skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to work with you and your team. I check references and I ask for feedback from other clients who’ve used their services.

13:22 JH: If you have any concerns about the vendor-specific capabilities, just be candid, voice your concerns to them now, they possibly can answer them, or maybe they’ll say, “Oh, I’m not the best resource. Let’s try it, you know, I have someone that I can refer you to.” And also, of course, remember the vendor or the person… A person being interviewed, putting their best foot forward. So just be, observe and listen. Now also, I have hired recently some… Well, not just recently, but through my experience, people that are new, like photographers that are new to the photography gig, not new, in the fact that they haven’t done photos before they have the equipment, they’ve done photos, I’ve seen they’ve done photos, but they’re kind of still a little new to the industry and I have had really good luck with that. Mostly what I do is I still check with other references, I look at their online, their personnel, person, their website, their portfolio, what they do online, I talk to people, and then I generally like to encourage my clients and also I like to do a small project to begin with.

14:35 JH: Not a huge project, where we’re investing a lot of time and money, and it’s really a major project, but trying people, trying out the situation with a smaller project, if you can. Make sure you know who your day-to-day contact is gonna be, if you’re doing a project that’s longer in duration and a couple of days or something that takes longer, because in an unforeseen emergency you do, you might get someone else for your day-to-day contact, but you wanna ask them specifically because you really do only want one contact to go through so that there’s communication, less communication issues, there’s less work for you to do, if there is a team and they have other people with them, they can do status reports and put everybody on there, but it’s still one person that you’re able to communicate your issues with or the things, the timelines and things that you need to do with that person.

15:32 JH: ‘Cause getting a new person up to speed if that person that’s through regular day-to-day contact is not available and they just move you to somebody else, their assistant or something you could lose that communication in the process. If you’re really doing something pretty involved, a new product, introduction, that’s very crucial. They’re all crucial, but really look at the experience and try not to be this vendor’s guinea pig, if you see that they’ve never done some project as big as yours… Again, if you can start with a small… If you can start with a small project, try that, if you can’t, then probably go on to the next person. And you’re also reviewing vendors work, so you know if they’re gonna be in that experience or they’re gonna have the experience that you’re looking for. On the same vein, confirm who’ll be doing the work. Sometimes I’m hired as a marketing consultant, and I’m very upfront with what vendors or what people I’m using that I might bring in that project, and confirm for yourself who’s gonna be doing the work. Some of the clients that I work with don’t really care, and I guess if it’s, the project is successful, that’s fine, I tend to care just because I wanna know where this project is going, and when I work with very confidential information, I really wanna know where it’s going and who’s, how’s it being parceled out and the kinds of things like that, that could be a confidentiality issue.

17:05 JH: Another issue is, when a consultant is hired and they hire a team, I don’t do this, but when they hire a team, they might expect that each of those vendors is gonna send you an invoice separately, which can get very… Number one, confusing, number two can add costs, so you wanna really… I do upfront, say if you’re hiring outside vendors then and outside, other outside resources that invoicing comes through one party, and it is already in the estimate, it isn’t a separate cost.

17:37 JH: As I just said a little while ago, test, test, test, if you can… If you can, maybe you wanna hire a copywriter, but you wanna maybe have them for one blog post or one piece of work rather than hiring them on a yearly contract, and you try and see how it works, or I just recently tried a new transcriber, so rather than saying, I want you to transcribe all my podcasts for the next three months, I’ve said, “Let’s try one” and it’s just kind of a trial thing, and that way you could tell whether you feel that it’s working, it’s gonna work or if they’re reservations can you talk about those reservations, or you can also see if it’s not going to work, ’cause it’s in your best interest to really make sure that this runs as smoothly as you can… You’ll have enough things with a project that can go wrong, or things in the environment, or things with your marketing environment or things in the… Were all to happen. And…

18:30 JH: So it’s best if you can try and keep your project, things that are, systems and things in your project and keep them on a very basic level so that you’re not dealing with those kinds of issues that you don’t have to. Now, by this point, you’ve agreed to a budget, and again, a budget can change, and I have had clients make big changes and expect the budget to stay the same. In the beginning you need to say exactly what this budget covers, if there are additional changes, then those will be additional change orders or change costs, and you need to let the client know ahead of time, that’s what I would tell the vendors that this cost is coming, and do they… Then they can make a decision of, do they wanna do it or do they not wanna do it? So it is more in their hands to control that, pull strings.

19:19 JH: I also always look for check points, some of the clients I have worked with just wanna hand over the project and be done with it and let it go and come back when it’s done. I have found that to be… Have some problems with it because you can think you know exactly what it’s gonna look like, ’cause in your head, you’ve got this certain thing that you see, but when you actually see the project, if you’ve waited till the very end… It may not at all be what you’re looking for, so I would say that periodically, I do status meetings once a week, but again, it very much depends on your projects, you can do that more often, if you’re doing something really on a fast track, you may wanna have a meeting every day at the beginning of the day. So you wanna really be sure that you’re not surprised, and again, make it very clear with the vendor or the consultant that if there is a project change and it results in a cost change, that they are allowed to make that decision before you spend the money. I stay involved in the projects just in order to keep things on more of a course, and then when there are course corrections, they can be made very quickly and more in a timeframe that works within that project. The other part here is a final product ownership, and that to me, to agree, I think of illustrators, I think the photographers, and there are other people too, where you would want to know what your ownership is, music.

20:51 JH: Do you own that piece of music for everything that you wanna use it for? You don’t even know yet where you’re gonna use it, did you buy it out? Right. The photography. Did you buy out, right? I generally buy photography and music out, right. It can be more expensive, but it’s easier than having to go back and forth when you wanna change and then re-negotiating how much it’s gonna cost for that particular piece. With photography, I really only do that if it’s a photo shoot that it’s gonna be used long-term, there are photo shoots, a new product introduction, you might only use one of those photos for a long period of time, it might be just that photo with our fashion shoot even, a fashion shoot, you probably, next year you’re not gonna be using that same fashion, you’re gonna be doing something else, so how much timeline do you need for those particular ownership rights?

21:44 JH: Also define upfront what you expect is ongoing support, now that has more to do with website development. In this COVID-19, we’re seeing a huge drop, a huge increase in online buying, and so when you are… If you’re doing your site, which I did during this COVID-19, I worked with a designer and developer to redo my site, and I negotiated ongoing support for at least the next six months so that when I can… When I work with the site, maybe I need some additional education, maybe something that’s in there doesn’t work properly, and I need to have them redo it or maybe something, when I look at the analytics isn’t producing the way I want it to produce, so I wanna still keep working with them, and then also there’s technical issues, maybe an update messed something up or something like that.

22:36 JH: So it’s keeping a way to have a… Just a cushion there of technical support or some support for a period of time. I use a formal contract, I recommend my clients do. I generally do the contracts if they don’t have them, and I get pretty much everything I can in writing with dates and signatures from the clients or all the people who are gonna be involved in that particular project. My contract has a scope… On the first page, a scope of the projects, it very generally lists the deliverables, the agree to budget schedule, and then I ask the consultant or vendor to also give me a deliverable timeline. So rather than just, we will have it done at such and such a time, there are steps involved. So the first draft for maybe it’s copy, first draft will be done on a certain date, I expect it to be done and I’d see it on my desk, unless told otherwise that there was a change because there was a… Something else happened, that changed that direction.

23:43 JH: Keep a record of all your interactions as well as your agreement, but save emails, text, voice messages, just so they’re there, and so you can see, sometimes someone will feel like they gave some instruction and it never came through or it wasn’t really clear or there was a misinterpretation, communication is really a key factor here as it was with so many things, so that’s why I do regular update meetings, I keep emails and I’m diligent about reading them and going through them so I understand, I believe from my end what’s being done. It’s also a way to go back if something happens in the project that I hope it doesn’t to you, but something happens, it kind of made it a little messy, and then you have some proof that it was in fact, something was said or something wasn’t said. I think keeping really open communications, you’ve chosen the best person you know of, and you’re gonna keep open communications with them or that team that you’ve hired, you’re gonna go along and have them be very open with what’s happening, you want transparency, information, you don’t need to know every detail of everything, ’cause things go wrong on projects in the background that you really don’t need to know because they don’t affect the outcome, it’s something that the consultant or the vendor or the gig worker can handle, and so you don’t wanna know every detail, but you keep in mind that you want open communication and wanna know what’s going on, and also wanna see the progress.

25:25 JH: Things can change quickly in this environment too, so having those regular communication, whether it’s through Slack, whether you do a Zoom meeting, whether you… Whatever way you and the consultant, and that’s another thing you need to define, I define upfront, what is the best way to get a hold of the consultant, what is the best means of communication and how does it work within also either my clients or my particular way of doing things. I hope that all helps you, if you have more questions or you want to give me some more feedback on this area, maybe some of your experience, you can go to my onpointthinking.com website and send me through the contact form, whatever you want. I read all of those, I get all the contact forms and I do go through them, and I do answer them if there’s a question or if there’s a need, or if you have a podcast idea, I’m always looking for podcast ideas and I’ll appreciate them.

26:26 JH: You are listening to On Point Conversations, and my name is Jacalyn Holsted.

00:00 Jacalyn Holsted, Hello, you’re listening to On Point Conversations. My name is Jacalyn Holsted, I am a marketing and content strategist and consultant. I work with small to large companies, medium-sized companies also that are looking for ways to enhance their online and digital environment as well as branding and also developing content that targets their consumers, potential consumers, and also putting systems in place that helps them to do this more effectively. I also work on marketing programs and projects in order to help my clients grow and develop. Today, I want to talk about one of the areas that I get involved in, and that I also do is hiring, selecting and hiring consultants or freelancers. I just did a blog post, and you can go to my website, which is onpointthinking.com. And I posted a blog just this week, a blog post that’s called 11 best practices for selecting and hiring a consultant or freelancer. I’ll be covering most of those points in this particular podcast, but you can also go there, and you see them in writing as far as what those points are. And I’m expanding on them in my podcast today.

01:19 JH: Well, your projected needs may be only for a short time, taking the time to really select appropriate vendors or resources, personnel resources, really in the process, in my experience, save time, money, frustration, stress and disappointments. I have experienced, and I do select hiring work with outside consultants and freelancers for my own company, and then I also hire them for my clients when those expertise would be better done directly with the client, I can be the project manager in the middle of it, but sometimes it makes more sense to provide them that resource directly. And I have found that in my experience, I’ve learned and I really continue to learn the best practices for selecting and hiring those outside consultants, and you get the rush that if you have a successful project outcome, and there’s no surprises, no bad surprises, people are happy about what they achieved and what they found, and they work together really well, so it’s not one person dominating, it’s not one vendor, whatever dominating, but the team works together very well.

02:32 JH: So, in the past, I have been asked to talk to clients, a potential client who’s asked me to come in because they’re very unhappy with their earlier consultant and the project outcome. And so when I come in, it’s a result sometimes of maybe they rushed to hire someone, there was no time, we’re in a society now and a business that moves very quickly, or the team, that person turned out to be the really wrong fit, and that could be because of the rush job done to hire that person, or just because there wasn’t a clear understanding of what the company actually needed. The outside vendor promised too much, maybe they couldn’t even achieve it, could never achieve it, or they made a commitment they couldn’t achieve. There were surprise added costs, all of a sudden at the end of the project, there is these new costs that come in that weren’t anticipated.

03:29 JH: And when that happens to a potential client and they call me in, it’s starting from scratch, basically. Sometimes it’s helpful and you can redo the project, you can take in the project or whatever was started and change course. Most of the time it takes a restarting all over again, and depending on what the client needs, it could be that it’s hiring those additional resource or resources again, but at a different people, different personnel. But this action almost always leads… It does lead actually to increased costs and also time. So, you want to start at the beginning with a better foundation for selecting your outside consultants or vendors or gig workers or freelancers. And when I talk about this gig economy, it has to do with people that are brought in on a short-term basis. They might be brought in for just one project, they might be brought in seasonal. There might be a reason that the company need someone right now with this expertise and they don’t have it in-house. It could be related to someone being off, on leave or something. So, there are all kinds of reasons that companies do bring in an outside resource, but don’t plan on hiring that person full-time.

04:48 JH: The first thing to do is start by really analyzing, articulating, and I suggest writing down what you need with regards to your projects, the skills you need, the pain levels, are you looking for a website developer, a website designer, an art director? Keep in mind too, that if you’re not familiar with titles, that’s no problem, actually, because you want to start in this approach with what skills are you looking for. So, you might be looking to have a new logo done. Well, what skill do you need in that logo? A designer or an illustrator? You want to look at what that means, and you also want to really define what your pain points are. There’s a reason you’re looking for an outside consultant, what is that? It could even be a situation where you say, “Well, we’re getting visitors to our site, but they’re not buying online,” or there’s… People are dropping off, there could be very basic things you start with and you could put your… Start putting your list together of things that your company could use to enhance what you’re doing.

05:54 JH: So, I always really feel that a successful project starts with the beginning and the basics of what it really is that you’re looking for and what you need. If you have a team, if you’re not a sole proprietor, if you have a team, then I suggest engaging your team and talking openly and candidly about the issues and what outside resources might be good for your company. Now, unless you’re planning to hire an agency, which is not really the way… Necessarily, the way the things are done right now, you might be hiring more than one freelancer or gig worker, so you want to look at all the places that you could possibly… The things that you need. Then what you want to do after you’ve engaged your team, you will probably have a list that’s way bigger than what you had anticipated, then that’s the time to prioritize the list by what’s most valuable and the most profitable to your company. Also, what your budget limitations are. We don’t have unlimited budgets, nobody does, even very large companies don’t have unlimited budgets.

06:57 JH: And you want to look at your timeline, what do you need to accomplish? And now hopefully, there’s been enough planning ahead, which is what I do with strategies that you’re not rushed, but things change, and we particularly know that marketing changes quickly, and so there’s… Sometimes there is a rush when you don’t even mean to have a rush to get to market or to change something or to do something digital. So, keep in mind that your best consultants, if they’re too busy, then they’re not your best consultants, if they can’t do it in your timeline, or if they are too expensive. So, we want to look at where that point is, where it fits with what you need. And there’s also the timeline with what you need, and there’s also the aspect of money.

07:46 JH: So now that you’ve defined the project or at least defined the tasks, you can look at the scope and budget limits. Again, as I said, nobody has unlimited budgets and a rough schedule. Maybe there’s a drop-dead date, maybe it’s… You have to have it done by a certain date. So, you have to backtrack from that and see what you can do, it might even be you break up those tasks. So it’s very… Getting more specific here, so that when you do bring someone in, you can be more specific about what you’re looking for, and they can be more specific in what they’re providing, and then you can see where they meet in the middle. So, knowing what you need is very critical and knowing how much budget you have is important and knowing your schedule requirements. Now, on that same vein, you may have to compromise on the deliverable day. You may find somebody that is really the person you want and you’re going to have to wait for them if they’re busy or work within their timeline, or maybe tasks or some of the tasks that they might do that someone else could do so that they can do it for you. So, it depends, and this all depends on who you need and what you’re looking for.

08:57 JH: And again, keep in mind, when you’re talking to consultants, I’m a little bit ahead here, but when you’re interviewing or talking to them, you need to listen to what they have to say, because as being in a company might not realize that the timeline for a logo, it takes time, there’s a creative incubation time, it’s not just putting it on paper and giving it to you, so listen to what they have to say and take what they have to say and as long as you’re talking to… I usually take to interview five to 10 people for a particular task or a particular… It depends on the project and how involved it is too, and what you need to do, but that allows you also to get the perspective of the different sources of what you might and might not be able to do. So, because I’ve done this for quite a while. I generally have a pretty good contact list of people to hire within the marketing or creative area, meeting people like website developers and designers and illustrators and photographers, but when I don’t… When a contact list doesn’t have that vendor, or that person in there, then I use, I go to my trusted personnel, personal references and referrals, so I seek out people I trust and appreciate and know that they know what they’re doing and ask them for referrals or references.

10:18 JH: I use my own observations. I am also one to go do a lot of online searching, and then it also gives me an idea of, will this person fit into this company, will they not fit, the work that they’ve done, is it along something that would work on the same time or on the same look, maybe similar looks. So, you can see a lot from an online search, organizational groups are another one, there might be a group that you can find that you can go and spend some time out to see who’s in that group, then…

10:50 JH: You really want to narrow down your candidate list because you could end up getting into this tunnel of many candidates and you don’t want to do that, as I said, I limit mine to five to 10, and in our current COVID-19, it’s going to be a Zoom meeting or an online meeting, whether you use GoToMeeting or Zoom, I generally do Zoom, but anyway, whatever you choose as your primary interview mechanism, it’s going to be online probably, most likely. With that being the case, you want to make sure you have your technical resources, maybe you have a technical resource available, or if you’re one, then you know basically how to combat things that, bad reception, maybe the internet freezes all the things that you can run against across… If you’re interviewing with a team, I generally like to start first with them before you interview anybody is to make sure your team knows the rules and etiquette of online interviewing, it’s a little bit different than conducting meetings.

11:49 JH: You want to have an agenda, gather all the questions upfront that you might get from your team members, so you can put it together so that you can put them into categories, and you can also eliminate redundant questions. Use things like hand-raising or chat, when you’re doing the Zoom meetings with your team members so that you’re not talking over each other and making any consultant uncomfortable too, and you want to have a moderator, you might be that moderator who then calls on people and then that’s the interviewer, a person being interviewed. Talk and it allows them enough time to answer the questions.

12:28 JH: Now, in a one-to-one, or even in a setting where you’re not necessarily doing Zoom, I used to feel like you could ask a lot of questions, I still think you can on the Zoom meetings, but let’s give them time to answer, really be cognizant of not talking over each other, and if you can just call on people as you… As you’re going through the questions so that they can answer, ask their question and then you move on to the next one. You want people to have not only the background and experience possibly of what you’re looking for, but the soft skills, and that includes communication skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to work with you and your team. I check references and I ask for feedback from other clients who’ve used their services.

13:22 JH: If you have any concerns about the vendor-specific capabilities, just be candid, voice your concerns to them now, they possibly can answer them, or maybe they’ll say, “Oh, I’m not the best resource. Let’s try it, you know, I have someone that I can refer you to.” And also, of course, remember the vendor or the person… A person being interviewed, putting their best foot forward. So just be, observe and listen. Now also, I have hired recently some… Well, not just recently, but through my experience, people that are new, like photographers that are new to the photography gig, not new, in the fact that they haven’t done photos before they have the equipment, they’ve done photos, I’ve seen they’ve done photos, but they’re kind of still a little new to the industry and I have had really good luck with that. Mostly what I do is I still check with other references, I look at their online, their personnel, person, their website, their portfolio, what they do online, I talk to people, and then I generally like to encourage my clients and also I like to do a small project to begin with.

14:35 JH: Not a huge project, where we’re investing a lot of time and money, and it’s really a major project, but trying people, trying out the situation with a smaller project, if you can. Make sure you know who your day-to-day contact is going to be, if you’re doing a project that’s longer in duration and a couple of days or something that takes longer, because in an unforeseen emergency you do, you might get someone else for your day-to-day contact, but you want to ask them specifically because you really do only want one contact to go through so that there’s communication, less communication issues, there’s less work for you to do, if there is a team and they have other people with them, they can do status reports and put everybody on there, but it’s still one person that you’re able to communicate your issues with or the things, the timelines and things that you need to do with that person.

15:32 JH:  Because getting a new person up to speed if that person that’s through regular day-to-day contact is not available and they just move you to somebody else, their assistant or something you could lose that communication in the process. If you’re really doing something pretty involved, a new product, introduction, that’s very crucial. They’re all crucial, but really look at the experience and try not to be this vendor’s guinea pig, if you see that they’ve never done some project as big as yours… Again, if you can start with a small… If you can start with a small project, try that, if you can’t, then probably go on to the next person. And you’re also reviewing vendors work, so you know if they’re going to be in that experience or they’re going to have the experience that you’re looking for. On the same vein, confirm who’ll be doing the work. Sometimes I’m hired as a marketing consultant, and I’m very upfront with what vendors or what people I’m using that I might bring in that project and confirm for yourself who’s going to be doing the work. Some of the clients that I work with don’t really care, and I guess if it’s, the project is successful, that’s fine, I tend to care just because I want to know where this project is going, and when I work with very confidential information, I really want to know where it’s going and who’s, how’s it being parceled out and the kinds of things like that, that could be a confidentiality issue.

17:05 JH: Another issue is, when a consultant is hired and they hire a team, I don’t do this, but when they hire a team, they might expect that each of those vendors is going to send you an invoice separately, which can get very… Number one, confusing, number two can add costs, so you want to really… I do upfront, say if you’re hiring outside vendors then and outside, other outside resources that invoicing comes through one party, and it is already in the estimate, it isn’t a separate cost.

17:37 JH: As I just said a little while ago, test, test, test, if you can… If you can, maybe you want to hire a copywriter, but you want to maybe have them for one blog post or one piece of work rather than hiring them on a yearly contract, and you try and see how it works, or I just recently tried a new transcriber, so rather than saying, I want you to transcribe all my podcasts for the next three months, I’ve said, “Let’s try one” and it’s just kind of a trial thing, and that way you could tell whether you feel that it’s working, it’s going to work or if they’re reservations can you talk about those reservations, or you can also see if it’s not going to work, because it’s in your best interest to really make sure that this runs as smoothly as you can… You’ll have enough things with a project that can go wrong, or things in the environment, or things with your marketing environment or things in the… Were all to happen. And…

18:30 JH: So, it’s best if you can try and keep your project, things that are, systems and things in your project and keep them on a very basic level so that you’re not dealing with those kinds of issues that you don’t have to. Now, by this point, you’ve agreed to a budget, and again, a budget can change, and I have had clients make big changes and expect the budget to stay the same. In the beginning you need to say exactly what this budget covers, if there are additional changes, then those will be additional change orders or change costs, and you need to let the client know ahead of time, that’s what I would tell the vendors that this cost is coming, and do they… Then they can make a decision of, do they want to do it, or do they not want to do it? So, it is more in their hands to control that, pull strings.

19:19 JH: I also always look for check points, some of the clients I have worked with just want to hand over the project and be done with it and let it go and come back when it’s done. I have found that to be… Have some problems with it because you can think you know exactly what it’s going to look like, cause in your head, you’ve got this certain thing that you see, but when you actually see the project, if you’ve waited till the very end… It may not at all be what you’re looking for, so I would say that periodically, I do status meetings once a week, but again, it very much depends on your projects, you can do that more often, if you’re doing something really on a fast track, you may want to have a meeting every day at the beginning of the day. So you want to really be sure that you’re not surprised, and again, make it very clear with the vendor or the consultant that if there is a project change and it results in a cost change, that they are allowed to make that decision before you spend the money. I stay involved in the projects just in order to keep things on more of a course, and then when there are course corrections, they can be made very quickly and more in a timeframe that works within that project. The other part here is a final product ownership, and that to me, to agree, I think of illustrators, I think the photographers, and there are other people too, where you would want to know what your ownership is, music.

20:51 JH: Do you own that piece of music for everything that you want to use it for? You don’t even know yet where you’re going to use it, did you buy it out? Right. The photography. Did you buy out, right? I generally buy photography and music out, right. It can be more expensive, but it’s easier than having to go back and forth when you want to change and then re-negotiating how much it’s going to cost for that particular piece. With photography, I really only do that if it’s a photo shoot that it’s going to be used long-term, there are photo shoots, a new product introduction, you might only use one of those photos for a long period of time, it might be just that photo with our fashion shoot even, a fashion shoot, you probably, next year you’re not going to be using that same fashion, you’re going to be doing something else, so how much timeline do you need for those particular ownership rights?

21:44 JH: Also define upfront what you expect is ongoing support, now that has more to do with website development. In this COVID-19, we’re seeing a huge drop, a huge increase in online buying, and so when you are… If you’re doing your site, which I did during this COVID-19, I worked with a designer and developer to redo my site, and I negotiated ongoing support for at least the next six months so that when I can… When I work with the site, maybe I need some additional education, maybe something that’s in there doesn’t work properly, and I need to have them redo it or maybe something, when I look at the analytics isn’t producing the way I want it to produce, so I want to still keep working with them, and then also there’s technical issues, maybe an update messed something up or something like that.

22:36 JH: So, it’s keeping a way to have a… Just a cushion there of technical support or some support for a period of time. I use a formal contract; I recommend my clients do. I generally do the contracts if they don’t have them, and I get pretty much everything I can in writing with dates and signatures from the clients or all the people who are going to be involved in that particular project. My contract has a scope… On the first page, a scope of the projects, it very generally lists the deliverables, the agree to budget schedule, and then I ask the consultant or vendor to also give me a deliverable timeline. So rather than just, we will have it done at such and such a time, there are steps involved. So, the first draft for maybe it’s copy, first draft will be done on a certain date, I expect it to be done and I’d see it on my desk, unless told otherwise that there was a change because there was a… Something else happened, that changed that direction.

23:43 JH: Keep a record of all your interactions as well as your agreement, but save emails, text, voice messages, just so they’re there, and so you can see, sometimes someone will feel like they gave some instruction and it never came through or it wasn’t really clear or there was a misinterpretation, communication is really a key factor here as it was with so many things, so that’s why I do regular update meetings, I keep emails and I’m diligent about reading them and going through them so I understand, I believe from my end what’s being done. It’s also a way to go back if something happens in the project that I hope it doesn’t to you, but something happens, it kind of made it a little messy, and then you have some proof that it was in fact, something was said or something wasn’t said. I think keeping really open communications, you’ve chosen the best person you know of, and you’re going to keep open communications with them or that team that you’ve hired, you’re going to go along and have them be very open with what’s happening, you want transparency, information, you don’t need to know every detail of everything, cause things go wrong on projects in the background that you really don’t need to know because they don’t affect the outcome, it’s something that the consultant or the vendor or the gig worker can handle, and so you don’t want to know every detail, but you keep in mind that you want open communication and want to know what’s going on, and also want to see the progress.

25:25 JH: Things can change quickly in this environment too, so having those regular communication, whether it’s through Slack, whether you do a Zoom meeting, whether you… Whatever way you and the consultant, and that’s another thing you need to define, I define upfront, what is the best way to get a hold of the consultant, what is the best means of communication and how does it work within also either my clients or my particular way of doing things. I hope that all helps you, if you have more questions or you want to give me some more feedback on this area, maybe some of your experience, you can go to my onpointthinking.com website and send me through the contact form, whatever you want. I read all of those, I get all the contact forms and I do go through them, and I do answer them if there’s a question or if there’s a need, or if you have a podcast idea, I’m always looking for podcast ideas and I’ll appreciate them.

26:26 JH: You are listening to On Point Conversations, and my name is Jacalyn Holsted.

00:00 Jacalyn Holsted, Hello, you’re listening to On Point Conversations. My name is Jacalyn Holsted, I am a marketing and content strategist and consultant. I work with small to large companies, medium-sized companies also that are looking for ways to enhance their online and digital environment as well as branding and also developing content that targets their consumers, potential consumers, and also putting systems in place that helps them to do this more effectively. I also work on marketing programs and projects in order to help my clients grow and develop. Today, I want to talk about one of the areas that I get involved in, and that I also do is hiring, selecting and hiring consultants or freelancers. I just did a blog post, and you can go to my website, which is onpointthinking.com. And I posted a blog just this week, a blog post that’s called 11 best practices for selecting and hiring a consultant or freelancer. I’ll be covering most of those points in this particular podcast, but you can also go there, and you see them in writing as far as what those points are. And I’m expanding on them in my podcast today.

01:19 JH: Well, your projected needs may be only for a short time, taking the time to really select appropriate vendors or resources, personnel resources, really in the process, in my experience, save time, money, frustration, stress and disappointments. I have experienced, and I do select hiring work with outside consultants and freelancers for my own company, and then I also hire them for my clients when those expertise would be better done directly with the client, I can be the project manager in the middle of it, but sometimes it makes more sense to provide them that resource directly. And I have found that in my experience, I’ve learned and I really continue to learn the best practices for selecting and hiring those outside consultants, and you get the rush that if you have a successful project outcome, and there’s no surprises, no bad surprises, people are happy about what they achieved and what they found, and they work together really well, so it’s not one person dominating, it’s not one vendor, whatever dominating, but the team works together very well.

02:32 JH: So, in the past, I have been asked to talk to clients, a potential client who’s asked me to come in because they’re very unhappy with their earlier consultant and the project outcome. And so when I come in, it’s a result sometimes of maybe they rushed to hire someone, there was no time, we’re in a society now and a business that moves very quickly, or the team, that person turned out to be the really wrong fit, and that could be because of the rush job done to hire that person, or just because there wasn’t a clear understanding of what the company actually needed. The outside vendor promised too much, maybe they couldn’t even achieve it, could never achieve it, or they made a commitment they couldn’t achieve. There were surprise added costs, all of a sudden at the end of the project, there is these new costs that come in that weren’t anticipated.

03:29 JH: And when that happens to a potential client and they call me in, it’s starting from scratch, basically. Sometimes it’s helpful and you can redo the project, you can take in the project or whatever was started and change course. Most of the time it takes a restarting all over again, and depending on what the client needs, it could be that it’s hiring those additional resource or resources again, but at a different people, different personnel. But this action almost always leads… It does lead actually to increased costs and also time. So, you want to start at the beginning with a better foundation for selecting your outside consultants or vendors or gig workers or freelancers. And when I talk about this gig economy, it has to do with people that are brought in on a short-term basis. They might be brought in for just one project, they might be brought in seasonal. There might be a reason that the company need someone right now with this expertise and they don’t have it in-house. It could be related to someone being off, on leave or something. So, there are all kinds of reasons that companies do bring in an outside resource, but don’t plan on hiring that person full-time.

04:48 JH: The first thing to do is start by really analyzing, articulating, and I suggest writing down what you need with regards to your projects, the skills you need, the pain levels, are you looking for a website developer, a website designer, an art director? Keep in mind too, that if you’re not familiar with titles, that’s no problem, actually, because you want to start in this approach with what skills are you looking for. So, you might be looking to have a new logo done. Well, what skill do you need in that logo? A designer or an illustrator? You want to look at what that means, and you also want to really define what your pain points are. There’s a reason you’re looking for an outside consultant, what is that? It could even be a situation where you say, “Well, we’re getting visitors to our site, but they’re not buying online,” or there’s… People are dropping off, there could be very basic things you start with and you could put your… Start putting your list together of things that your company could use to enhance what you’re doing.

05:54 JH: So, I always really feel that a successful project starts with the beginning and the basics of what it really is that you’re looking for and what you need. If you have a team, if you’re not a sole proprietor, if you have a team, then I suggest engaging your team and talking openly and candidly about the issues and what outside resources might be good for your company. Now, unless you’re planning to hire an agency, which is not really the way… Necessarily, the way the things are done right now, you might be hiring more than one freelancer or gig worker, so you want to look at all the places that you could possibly… The things that you need. Then what you want to do after you’ve engaged your team, you will probably have a list that’s way bigger than what you had anticipated, then that’s the time to prioritize the list by what’s most valuable and the most profitable to your company. Also, what your budget limitations are. We don’t have unlimited budgets, nobody does, even very large companies don’t have unlimited budgets.

06:57 JH: And you want to look at your timeline, what do you need to accomplish? And now hopefully, there’s been enough planning ahead, which is what I do with strategies that you’re not rushed, but things change, and we particularly know that marketing changes quickly, and so there’s… Sometimes there is a rush when you don’t even mean to have a rush to get to market or to change something or to do something digital. So, keep in mind that your best consultants, if they’re too busy, then they’re not your best consultants, if they can’t do it in your timeline, or if they are too expensive. So, we want to look at where that point is, where it fits with what you need. And there’s also the timeline with what you need, and there’s also the aspect of money.

07:46 JH: So now that you’ve defined the project or at least defined the tasks, you can look at the scope and budget limits. Again, as I said, nobody has unlimited budgets and a rough schedule. Maybe there’s a drop-dead date, maybe it’s… You have to have it done by a certain date. So, you have to backtrack from that and see what you can do, it might even be you break up those tasks. So it’s very… Getting more specific here, so that when you do bring someone in, you can be more specific about what you’re looking for, and they can be more specific in what they’re providing, and then you can see where they meet in the middle. So, knowing what you need is very critical and knowing how much budget you have is important and knowing your schedule requirements. Now, on that same vein, you may have to compromise on the deliverable day. You may find somebody that is really the person you want and you’re going to have to wait for them if they’re busy or work within their timeline, or maybe tasks or some of the tasks that they might do that someone else could do so that they can do it for you. So, it depends, and this all depends on who you need and what you’re looking for.

08:57 JH: And again, keep in mind, when you’re talking to consultants, I’m a little bit ahead here, but when you’re interviewing or talking to them, you need to listen to what they have to say, because as being in a company might not realize that the timeline for a logo, it takes time, there’s a creative incubation time, it’s not just putting it on paper and giving it to you, so listen to what they have to say and take what they have to say and as long as you’re talking to… I usually take to interview five to 10 people for a particular task or a particular… It depends on the project and how involved it is too, and what you need to do, but that allows you also to get the perspective of the different sources of what you might and might not be able to do. So, because I’ve done this for quite a while. I generally have a pretty good contact list of people to hire within the marketing or creative area, meeting people like website developers and designers and illustrators and photographers, but when I don’t… When a contact list doesn’t have that vendor, or that person in there, then I use, I go to my trusted personnel, personal references and referrals, so I seek out people I trust and appreciate and know that they know what they’re doing and ask them for referrals or references.

10:18 JH: I use my own observations. I am also one to go do a lot of online searching, and then it also gives me an idea of, will this person fit into this company, will they not fit, the work that they’ve done, is it along something that would work on the same time or on the same look, maybe similar looks. So, you can see a lot from an online search, organizational groups are another one, there might be a group that you can find that you can go and spend some time out to see who’s in that group, then…

10:50 JH: You really want to narrow down your candidate list because you could end up getting into this tunnel of many candidates and you don’t want to do that, as I said, I limit mine to five to 10, and in our current COVID-19, it’s going to be a Zoom meeting or an online meeting, whether you use GoToMeeting or Zoom, I generally do Zoom, but anyway, whatever you choose as your primary interview mechanism, it’s going to be online probably, most likely. With that being the case, you want to make sure you have your technical resources, maybe you have a technical resource available, or if you’re one, then you know basically how to combat things that, bad reception, maybe the internet freezes all the things that you can run against across… If you’re interviewing with a team, I generally like to start first with them before you interview anybody is to make sure your team knows the rules and etiquette of online interviewing, it’s a little bit different than conducting meetings.

11:49 JH: You want to have an agenda, gather all the questions upfront that you might get from your team members, so you can put it together so that you can put them into categories, and you can also eliminate redundant questions. Use things like hand-raising or chat, when you’re doing the Zoom meetings with your team members so that you’re not talking over each other and making any consultant uncomfortable too, and you want to have a moderator, you might be that moderator who then calls on people and then that’s the interviewer, a person being interviewed. Talk and it allows them enough time to answer the questions.

12:28 JH: Now, in a one-to-one, or even in a setting where you’re not necessarily doing Zoom, I used to feel like you could ask a lot of questions, I still think you can on the Zoom meetings, but let’s give them time to answer, really be cognizant of not talking over each other, and if you can just call on people as you… As you’re going through the questions so that they can answer, ask their question and then you move on to the next one. You want people to have not only the background and experience possibly of what you’re looking for, but the soft skills, and that includes communication skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to work with you and your team. I check references and I ask for feedback from other clients who’ve used their services.

13:22 JH: If you have any concerns about the vendor-specific capabilities, just be candid, voice your concerns to them now, they possibly can answer them, or maybe they’ll say, “Oh, I’m not the best resource. Let’s try it, you know, I have someone that I can refer you to.” And also, of course, remember the vendor or the person… A person being interviewed, putting their best foot forward. So just be, observe and listen. Now also, I have hired recently some… Well, not just recently, but through my experience, people that are new, like photographers that are new to the photography gig, not new, in the fact that they haven’t done photos before they have the equipment, they’ve done photos, I’ve seen they’ve done photos, but they’re kind of still a little new to the industry and I have had really good luck with that. Mostly what I do is I still check with other references, I look at their online, their personnel, person, their website, their portfolio, what they do online, I talk to people, and then I generally like to encourage my clients and also I like to do a small project to begin with.

14:35 JH: Not a huge project, where we’re investing a lot of time and money, and it’s really a major project, but trying people, trying out the situation with a smaller project, if you can. Make sure you know who your day-to-day contact is going to be, if you’re doing a project that’s longer in duration and a couple of days or something that takes longer, because in an unforeseen emergency you do, you might get someone else for your day-to-day contact, but you want to ask them specifically because you really do only want one contact to go through so that there’s communication, less communication issues, there’s less work for you to do, if there is a team and they have other people with them, they can do status reports and put everybody on there, but it’s still one person that you’re able to communicate your issues with or the things, the timelines and things that you need to do with that person.

15:32 JH:  Because getting a new person up to speed if that person that’s through regular day-to-day contact is not available and they just move you to somebody else, their assistant or something you could lose that communication in the process. If you’re really doing something pretty involved, a new product, introduction, that’s very crucial. They’re all crucial, but really look at the experience and try not to be this vendor’s guinea pig, if you see that they’ve never done some project as big as yours… Again, if you can start with a small… If you can start with a small project, try that, if you can’t, then probably go on to the next person. And you’re also reviewing vendors work, so you know if they’re going to be in that experience or they’re going to have the experience that you’re looking for. On the same vein, confirm who’ll be doing the work. Sometimes I’m hired as a marketing consultant, and I’m very upfront with what vendors or what people I’m using that I might bring in that project and confirm for yourself who’s going to be doing the work. Some of the clients that I work with don’t really care, and I guess if it’s, the project is successful, that’s fine, I tend to care just because I want to know where this project is going, and when I work with very confidential information, I really want to know where it’s going and who’s, how’s it being parceled out and the kinds of things like that, that could be a confidentiality issue.

17:05 JH: Another issue is, when a consultant is hired and they hire a team, I don’t do this, but when they hire a team, they might expect that each of those vendors is going to send you an invoice separately, which can get very… Number one, confusing, number two can add costs, so you want to really… I do upfront, say if you’re hiring outside vendors then and outside, other outside resources that invoicing comes through one party, and it is already in the estimate, it isn’t a separate cost.

17:37 JH: As I just said a little while ago, test, test, test, if you can… If you can, maybe you want to hire a copywriter, but you want to maybe have them for one blog post or one piece of work rather than hiring them on a yearly contract, and you try and see how it works, or I just recently tried a new transcriber, so rather than saying, I want you to transcribe all my podcasts for the next three months, I’ve said, “Let’s try one” and it’s just kind of a trial thing, and that way you could tell whether you feel that it’s working, it’s going to work or if they’re reservations can you talk about those reservations, or you can also see if it’s not going to work, because it’s in your best interest to really make sure that this runs as smoothly as you can… You’ll have enough things with a project that can go wrong, or things in the environment, or things with your marketing environment or things in the… Were all to happen. And…

18:30 JH: So, it’s best if you can try and keep your project, things that are, systems and things in your project and keep them on a very basic level so that you’re not dealing with those kinds of issues that you don’t have to. Now, by this point, you’ve agreed to a budget, and again, a budget can change, and I have had clients make big changes and expect the budget to stay the same. In the beginning you need to say exactly what this budget covers, if there are additional changes, then those will be additional change orders or change costs, and you need to let the client know ahead of time, that’s what I would tell the vendors that this cost is coming, and do they… Then they can make a decision of, do they want to do it, or do they not want to do it? So, it is more in their hands to control that, pull strings.

19:19 JH: I also always look for check points, some of the clients I have worked with just want to hand over the project and be done with it and let it go and come back when it’s done. I have found that to be… Have some problems with it because you can think you know exactly what it’s going to look like, cause in your head, you’ve got this certain thing that you see, but when you actually see the project, if you’ve waited till the very end… It may not at all be what you’re looking for, so I would say that periodically, I do status meetings once a week, but again, it very much depends on your projects, you can do that more often, if you’re doing something really on a fast track, you may want to have a meeting every day at the beginning of the day. So you want to really be sure that you’re not surprised, and again, make it very clear with the vendor or the consultant that if there is a project change and it results in a cost change, that they are allowed to make that decision before you spend the money. I stay involved in the projects just in order to keep things on more of a course, and then when there are course corrections, they can be made very quickly and more in a timeframe that works within that project. The other part here is a final product ownership, and that to me, to agree, I think of illustrators, I think the photographers, and there are other people too, where you would want to know what your ownership is, music.

20:51 JH: Do you own that piece of music for everything that you want to use it for? You don’t even know yet where you’re going to use it, did you buy it out? Right. The photography. Did you buy out, right? I generally buy photography and music out, right. It can be more expensive, but it’s easier than having to go back and forth when you want to change and then re-negotiating how much it’s going to cost for that particular piece. With photography, I really only do that if it’s a photo shoot that it’s going to be used long-term, there are photo shoots, a new product introduction, you might only use one of those photos for a long period of time, it might be just that photo with our fashion shoot even, a fashion shoot, you probably, next year you’re not going to be using that same fashion, you’re going to be doing something else, so how much timeline do you need for those particular ownership rights?

21:44 JH: Also define upfront what you expect is ongoing support, now that has more to do with website development. In this COVID-19, we’re seeing a huge drop, a huge increase in online buying, and so when you are… If you’re doing your site, which I did during this COVID-19, I worked with a designer and developer to redo my site, and I negotiated ongoing support for at least the next six months so that when I can… When I work with the site, maybe I need some additional education, maybe something that’s in there doesn’t work properly, and I need to have them redo it or maybe something, when I look at the analytics isn’t producing the way I want it to produce, so I want to still keep working with them, and then also there’s technical issues, maybe an update messed something up or something like that.

22:36 JH: So, it’s keeping a way to have a… Just a cushion there of technical support or some support for a period of time. I use a formal contract; I recommend my clients do. I generally do the contracts if they don’t have them, and I get pretty much everything I can in writing with dates and signatures from the clients or all the people who are going to be involved in that particular project. My contract has a scope… On the first page, a scope of the projects, it very generally lists the deliverables, the agree to budget schedule, and then I ask the consultant or vendor to also give me a deliverable timeline. So rather than just, we will have it done at such and such a time, there are steps involved. So, the first draft for maybe it’s copy, first draft will be done on a certain date, I expect it to be done and I’d see it on my desk, unless told otherwise that there was a change because there was a… Something else happened, that changed that direction.

23:43 JH: Keep a record of all your interactions as well as your agreement, but save emails, text, voice messages, just so they’re there, and so you can see, sometimes someone will feel like they gave some instruction and it never came through or it wasn’t really clear or there was a misinterpretation, communication is really a key factor here as it was with so many things, so that’s why I do regular update meetings, I keep emails and I’m diligent about reading them and going through them so I understand, I believe from my end what’s being done. It’s also a way to go back if something happens in the project that I hope it doesn’t to you, but something happens, it kind of made it a little messy, and then you have some proof that it was in fact, something was said or something wasn’t said. I think keeping really open communications, you’ve chosen the best person you know of, and you’re going to keep open communications with them or that team that you’ve hired, you’re going to go along and have them be very open with what’s happening, you want transparency, information, you don’t need to know every detail of everything, cause things go wrong on projects in the background that you really don’t need to know because they don’t affect the outcome, it’s something that the consultant or the vendor or the gig worker can handle, and so you don’t want to know every detail, but you keep in mind that you want open communication and want to know what’s going on, and also want to see the progress.

25:25 JH: Things can change quickly in this environment too, so having those regular communication, whether it’s through Slack, whether you do a Zoom meeting, whether you… Whatever way you and the consultant, and that’s another thing you need to define, I define upfront, what is the best way to get a hold of the consultant, what is the best means of communication and how does it work within also either my clients or my particular way of doing things. I hope that all helps you, if you have more questions or you want to give me some more feedback on this area, maybe some of your experience, you can go to my onpointthinking.com website and send me through the contact form, whatever you want. I read all of those, I get all the contact forms and I do go through them, and I do answer them if there’s a question or if there’s a need, or if you have a podcast idea, I’m always looking for podcast ideas and I’ll appreciate them.

26:26 JH: You are listening to On Point Conversations, and my name is Jacalyn Holsted.

00:00 Jacalyn Holsted, Hello, you’re listening to On Point Conversations. My name is Jacalyn Holsted, I am a marketing and content strategist and consultant. I work with small to large companies, medium-sized companies also that are looking for ways to enhance their online and digital environment as well as branding and also developing content that targets their consumers, potential consumers, and also putting systems in place that helps them to do this more effectively. I also work on marketing programs and projects in order to help my clients grow and develop. Today, I want to talk about one of the areas that I get involved in, and that I also do is hiring, selecting and hiring consultants or freelancers. I just did a blog post, and you can go to my website, which is onpointthinking.com. And I posted a blog just this week, a blog post that’s called 11 best practices for selecting and hiring a consultant or freelancer. I’ll be covering most of those points in this particular podcast, but you can also go there, and you see them in writing as far as what those points are. And I’m expanding on them in my podcast today.

01:19 JH: Well, your projected needs may be only for a short time, taking the time to really select appropriate vendors or resources, personnel resources, really in the process, in my experience, save time, money, frustration, stress and disappointments. I have experienced, and I do select hiring work with outside consultants and freelancers for my own company, and then I also hire them for my clients when those expertise would be better done directly with the client, I can be the project manager in the middle of it, but sometimes it makes more sense to provide them that resource directly. And I have found that in my experience, I’ve learned and I really continue to learn the best practices for selecting and hiring those outside consultants, and you get the rush that if you have a successful project outcome, and there’s no surprises, no bad surprises, people are happy about what they achieved and what they found, and they work together really well, so it’s not one person dominating, it’s not one vendor, whatever dominating, but the team works together very well.

02:32 JH: So, in the past, I have been asked to talk to clients, a potential client who’s asked me to come in because they’re very unhappy with their earlier consultant and the project outcome. And so when I come in, it’s a result sometimes of maybe they rushed to hire someone, there was no time, we’re in a society now and a business that moves very quickly, or the team, that person turned out to be the really wrong fit, and that could be because of the rush job done to hire that person, or just because there wasn’t a clear understanding of what the company actually needed. The outside vendor promised too much, maybe they couldn’t even achieve it, could never achieve it, or they made a commitment they couldn’t achieve. There were surprise added costs, all of a sudden at the end of the project, there is these new costs that come in that weren’t anticipated.

03:29 JH: And when that happens to a potential client and they call me in, it’s starting from scratch, basically. Sometimes it’s helpful and you can redo the project, you can take in the project or whatever was started and change course. Most of the time it takes a restarting all over again, and depending on what the client needs, it could be that it’s hiring those additional resource or resources again, but at a different people, different personnel. But this action almost always leads… It does lead actually to increased costs and also time. So, you want to start at the beginning with a better foundation for selecting your outside consultants or vendors or gig workers or freelancers. And when I talk about this gig economy, it has to do with people that are brought in on a short-term basis. They might be brought in for just one project, they might be brought in seasonal. There might be a reason that the company need someone right now with this expertise and they don’t have it in-house. It could be related to someone being off, on leave or something. So, there are all kinds of reasons that companies do bring in an outside resource, but don’t plan on hiring that person full-time.

04:48 JH: The first thing to do is start by really analyzing, articulating, and I suggest writing down what you need with regards to your projects, the skills you need, the pain levels, are you looking for a website developer, a website designer, an art director? Keep in mind too, that if you’re not familiar with titles, that’s no problem, actually, because you want to start in this approach with what skills are you looking for. So, you might be looking to have a new logo done. Well, what skill do you need in that logo? A designer or an illustrator? You want to look at what that means, and you also want to really define what your pain points are. There’s a reason you’re looking for an outside consultant, what is that? It could even be a situation where you say, “Well, we’re getting visitors to our site, but they’re not buying online,” or there’s… People are dropping off, there could be very basic things you start with and you could put your… Start putting your list together of things that your company could use to enhance what you’re doing.

05:54 JH: So, I always really feel that a successful project starts with the beginning and the basics of what it really is that you’re looking for and what you need. If you have a team, if you’re not a sole proprietor, if you have a team, then I suggest engaging your team and talking openly and candidly about the issues and what outside resources might be good for your company. Now, unless you’re planning to hire an agency, which is not really the way… Necessarily, the way the things are done right now, you might be hiring more than one freelancer or gig worker, so you want to look at all the places that you could possibly… The things that you need. Then what you want to do after you’ve engaged your team, you will probably have a list that’s way bigger than what you had anticipated, then that’s the time to prioritize the list by what’s most valuable and the most profitable to your company. Also, what your budget limitations are. We don’t have unlimited budgets, nobody does, even very large companies don’t have unlimited budgets.

06:57 JH: And you want to look at your timeline, what do you need to accomplish? And now hopefully, there’s been enough planning ahead, which is what I do with strategies that you’re not rushed, but things change, and we particularly know that marketing changes quickly, and so there’s… Sometimes there is a rush when you don’t even mean to have a rush to get to market or to change something or to do something digital. So, keep in mind that your best consultants, if they’re too busy, then they’re not your best consultants, if they can’t do it in your timeline, or if they are too expensive. So, we want to look at where that point is, where it fits with what you need. And there’s also the timeline with what you need, and there’s also the aspect of money.

07:46 JH: So now that you’ve defined the project or at least defined the tasks, you can look at the scope and budget limits. Again, as I said, nobody has unlimited budgets and a rough schedule. Maybe there’s a drop-dead date, maybe it’s… You have to have it done by a certain date. So, you have to backtrack from that and see what you can do, it might even be you break up those tasks. So it’s very… Getting more specific here, so that when you do bring someone in, you can be more specific about what you’re looking for, and they can be more specific in what they’re providing, and then you can see where they meet in the middle. So, knowing what you need is very critical and knowing how much budget you have is important and knowing your schedule requirements. Now, on that same vein, you may have to compromise on the deliverable day. You may find somebody that is really the person you want and you’re going to have to wait for them if they’re busy or work within their timeline, or maybe tasks or some of the tasks that they might do that someone else could do so that they can do it for you. So, it depends, and this all depends on who you need and what you’re looking for.

08:57 JH: And again, keep in mind, when you’re talking to consultants, I’m a little bit ahead here, but when you’re interviewing or talking to them, you need to listen to what they have to say, because as being in a company might not realize that the timeline for a logo, it takes time, there’s a creative incubation time, it’s not just putting it on paper and giving it to you, so listen to what they have to say and take what they have to say and as long as you’re talking to… I usually take to interview five to 10 people for a particular task or a particular… It depends on the project and how involved it is too, and what you need to do, but that allows you also to get the perspective of the different sources of what you might and might not be able to do. So, because I’ve done this for quite a while. I generally have a pretty good contact list of people to hire within the marketing or creative area, meeting people like website developers and designers and illustrators and photographers, but when I don’t… When a contact list doesn’t have that vendor, or that person in there, then I use, I go to my trusted personnel, personal references and referrals, so I seek out people I trust and appreciate and know that they know what they’re doing and ask them for referrals or references.

10:18 JH: I use my own observations. I am also one to go do a lot of online searching, and then it also gives me an idea of, will this person fit into this company, will they not fit, the work that they’ve done, is it along something that would work on the same time or on the same look, maybe similar looks. So, you can see a lot from an online search, organizational groups are another one, there might be a group that you can find that you can go and spend some time out to see who’s in that group, then…

10:50 JH: You really want to narrow down your candidate list because you could end up getting into this tunnel of many candidates and you don’t want to do that, as I said, I limit mine to five to 10, and in our current COVID-19, it’s going to be a Zoom meeting or an online meeting, whether you use GoToMeeting or Zoom, I generally do Zoom, but anyway, whatever you choose as your primary interview mechanism, it’s going to be online probably, most likely. With that being the case, you want to make sure you have your technical resources, maybe you have a technical resource available, or if you’re one, then you know basically how to combat things that, bad reception, maybe the internet freezes all the things that you can run against across… If you’re interviewing with a team, I generally like to start first with them before you interview anybody is to make sure your team knows the rules and etiquette of online interviewing, it’s a little bit different than conducting meetings.

11:49 JH: You want to have an agenda, gather all the questions upfront that you might get from your team members, so you can put it together so that you can put them into categories, and you can also eliminate redundant questions. Use things like hand-raising or chat, when you’re doing the Zoom meetings with your team members so that you’re not talking over each other and making any consultant uncomfortable too, and you want to have a moderator, you might be that moderator who then calls on people and then that’s the interviewer, a person being interviewed. Talk and it allows them enough time to answer the questions.

12:28 JH: Now, in a one-to-one, or even in a setting where you’re not necessarily doing Zoom, I used to feel like you could ask a lot of questions, I still think you can on the Zoom meetings, but let’s give them time to answer, really be cognizant of not talking over each other, and if you can just call on people as you… As you’re going through the questions so that they can answer, ask their question and then you move on to the next one. You want people to have not only the background and experience possibly of what you’re looking for, but the soft skills, and that includes communication skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to work with you and your team. I check references and I ask for feedback from other clients who’ve used their services.

13:22 JH: If you have any concerns about the vendor-specific capabilities, just be candid, voice your concerns to them now, they possibly can answer them, or maybe they’ll say, “Oh, I’m not the best resource. Let’s try it, you know, I have someone that I can refer you to.” And also, of course, remember the vendor or the person… A person being interviewed, putting their best foot forward. So just be, observe and listen. Now also, I have hired recently some… Well, not just recently, but through my experience, people that are new, like photographers that are new to the photography gig, not new, in the fact that they haven’t done photos before they have the equipment, they’ve done photos, I’ve seen they’ve done photos, but they’re kind of still a little new to the industry and I have had really good luck with that. Mostly what I do is I still check with other references, I look at their online, their personnel, person, their website, their portfolio, what they do online, I talk to people, and then I generally like to encourage my clients and also I like to do a small project to begin with.

14:35 JH: Not a huge project, where we’re investing a lot of time and money, and it’s really a major project, but trying people, trying out the situation with a smaller project, if you can. Make sure you know who your day-to-day contact is going to be, if you’re doing a project that’s longer in duration and a couple of days or something that takes longer, because in an unforeseen emergency you do, you might get someone else for your day-to-day contact, but you want to ask them specifically because you really do only want one contact to go through so that there’s communication, less communication issues, there’s less work for you to do, if there is a team and they have other people with them, they can do status reports and put everybody on there, but it’s still one person that you’re able to communicate your issues with or the things, the timelines and things that you need to do with that person.

15:32 JH:  Because getting a new person up to speed if that person that’s through regular day-to-day contact is not available and they just move you to somebody else, their assistant or something you could lose that communication in the process. If you’re really doing something pretty involved, a new product, introduction, that’s very crucial. They’re all crucial, but really look at the experience and try not to be this vendor’s guinea pig, if you see that they’ve never done some project as big as yours… Again, if you can start with a small… If you can start with a small project, try that, if you can’t, then probably go on to the next person. And you’re also reviewing vendors work, so you know if they’re going to be in that experience or they’re going to have the experience that you’re looking for. On the same vein, confirm who’ll be doing the work. Sometimes I’m hired as a marketing consultant, and I’m very upfront with what vendors or what people I’m using that I might bring in that project and confirm for yourself who’s going to be doing the work. Some of the clients that I work with don’t really care, and I guess if it’s, the project is successful, that’s fine, I tend to care just because I want to know where this project is going, and when I work with very confidential information, I really want to know where it’s going and who’s, how’s it being parceled out and the kinds of things like that, that could be a confidentiality issue.

17:05 JH: Another issue is, when a consultant is hired and they hire a team, I don’t do this, but when they hire a team, they might expect that each of those vendors is going to send you an invoice separately, which can get very… Number one, confusing, number two can add costs, so you want to really… I do upfront, say if you’re hiring outside vendors then and outside, other outside resources that invoicing comes through one party, and it is already in the estimate, it isn’t a separate cost.

17:37 JH: As I just said a little while ago, test, test, test, if you can… If you can, maybe you want to hire a copywriter, but you want to maybe have them for one blog post or one piece of work rather than hiring them on a yearly contract, and you try and see how it works, or I just recently tried a new transcriber, so rather than saying, I want you to transcribe all my podcasts for the next three months, I’ve said, “Let’s try one” and it’s just kind of a trial thing, and that way you could tell whether you feel that it’s working, it’s going to work or if they’re reservations can you talk about those reservations, or you can also see if it’s not going to work, because it’s in your best interest to really make sure that this runs as smoothly as you can… You’ll have enough things with a project that can go wrong, or things in the environment, or things with your marketing environment or things in the… Were all to happen. And…

18:30 JH: So, it’s best if you can try and keep your project, things that are, systems and things in your project and keep them on a very basic level so that you’re not dealing with those kinds of issues that you don’t have to. Now, by this point, you’ve agreed to a budget, and again, a budget can change, and I have had clients make big changes and expect the budget to stay the same. In the beginning you need to say exactly what this budget covers, if there are additional changes, then those will be additional change orders or change costs, and you need to let the client know ahead of time, that’s what I would tell the vendors that this cost is coming, and do they… Then they can make a decision of, do they want to do it, or do they not want to do it? So, it is more in their hands to control that, pull strings.

19:19 JH: I also always look for check points, some of the clients I have worked with just want to hand over the project and be done with it and let it go and come back when it’s done. I have found that to be… Have some problems with it because you can think you know exactly what it’s going to look like, cause in your head, you’ve got this certain thing that you see, but when you actually see the project, if you’ve waited till the very end… It may not at all be what you’re looking for, so I would say that periodically, I do status meetings once a week, but again, it very much depends on your projects, you can do that more often, if you’re doing something really on a fast track, you may want to have a meeting every day at the beginning of the day. So you want to really be sure that you’re not surprised, and again, make it very clear with the vendor or the consultant that if there is a project change and it results in a cost change, that they are allowed to make that decision before you spend the money. I stay involved in the projects just in order to keep things on more of a course, and then when there are course corrections, they can be made very quickly and more in a timeframe that works within that project. The other part here is a final product ownership, and that to me, to agree, I think of illustrators, I think the photographers, and there are other people too, where you would want to know what your ownership is, music.

20:51 JH: Do you own that piece of music for everything that you want to use it for? You don’t even know yet where you’re going to use it, did you buy it out? Right. The photography. Did you buy out, right? I generally buy photography and music out, right. It can be more expensive, but it’s easier than having to go back and forth when you want to change and then re-negotiating how much it’s going to cost for that particular piece. With photography, I really only do that if it’s a photo shoot that it’s going to be used long-term, there are photo shoots, a new product introduction, you might only use one of those photos for a long period of time, it might be just that photo with our fashion shoot even, a fashion shoot, you probably, next year you’re not going to be using that same fashion, you’re going to be doing something else, so how much timeline do you need for those particular ownership rights?

21:44 JH: Also define upfront what you expect is ongoing support, now that has more to do with website development. In this COVID-19, we’re seeing a huge drop, a huge increase in online buying, and so when you are… If you’re doing your site, which I did during this COVID-19, I worked with a designer and developer to redo my site, and I negotiated ongoing support for at least the next six months so that when I can… When I work with the site, maybe I need some additional education, maybe something that’s in there doesn’t work properly, and I need to have them redo it or maybe something, when I look at the analytics isn’t producing the way I want it to produce, so I want to still keep working with them, and then also there’s technical issues, maybe an update messed something up or something like that.

22:36 JH: So, it’s keeping a way to have a… Just a cushion there of technical support or some support for a period of time. I use a formal contract; I recommend my clients do. I generally do the contracts if they don’t have them, and I get pretty much everything I can in writing with dates and signatures from the clients or all the people who are going to be involved in that particular project. My contract has a scope… On the first page, a scope of the projects, it very generally lists the deliverables, the agree to budget schedule, and then I ask the consultant or vendor to also give me a deliverable timeline. So rather than just, we will have it done at such and such a time, there are steps involved. So, the first draft for maybe it’s copy, first draft will be done on a certain date, I expect it to be done and I’d see it on my desk, unless told otherwise that there was a change because there was a… Something else happened, that changed that direction.

23:43 JH: Keep a record of all your interactions as well as your agreement, but save emails, text, voice messages, just so they’re there, and so you can see, sometimes someone will feel like they gave some instruction and it never came through or it wasn’t really clear or there was a misinterpretation, communication is really a key factor here as it was with so many things, so that’s why I do regular update meetings, I keep emails and I’m diligent about reading them and going through them so I understand, I believe from my end what’s being done. It’s also a way to go back if something happens in the project that I hope it doesn’t to you, but something happens, it kind of made it a little messy, and then you have some proof that it was in fact, something was said or something wasn’t said. I think keeping really open communications, you’ve chosen the best person you know of, and you’re going to keep open communications with them or that team that you’ve hired, you’re going to go along and have them be very open with what’s happening, you want transparency, information, you don’t need to know every detail of everything, cause things go wrong on projects in the background that you really don’t need to know because they don’t affect the outcome, it’s something that the consultant or the vendor or the gig worker can handle, and so you don’t want to know every detail, but you keep in mind that you want open communication and want to know what’s going on, and also want to see the progress.

25:25 JH: Things can change quickly in this environment too, so having those regular communication, whether it’s through Slack, whether you do a Zoom meeting, whether you… Whatever way you and the consultant, and that’s another thing you need to define, I define upfront, what is the best way to get a hold of the consultant, what is the best means of communication and how does it work within also either my clients or my particular way of doing things. I hope that all helps you, if you have more questions or you want to give me some more feedback on this area, maybe some of your experience, you can go to my onpointthinking.com website and send me through the contact form, whatever you want. I read all of those, I get all the contact forms and I do go through them, and I do answer them if there’s a question or if there’s a need, or if you have a podcast idea, I’m always looking for podcast ideas and I’ll appreciate them.

26:26 JH: You are listening to On Point Conversations, and my name is Jacalyn Holsted.

00:00 Jacalyn Holsted,: Hello, you’re listening to On Point Conversations. My name is Jacalyn Holsted, I am a marketing and content strategist and consultant. I work with small to large companies, medium-sized companies also that are looking for ways to enhance their online and digital environment as well as branding and also developing content that targets their consumers, potential consumers, and also putting systems in place that helps them to do this more effectively. I also work on marketing programs and projects in order to help my clients grow and develop. Today, I want to talk about one of the areas that I get involved in, and that I also do is hiring, selecting and hiring consultants or freelancers. I just did a blog post on my website, which is onpointthinking.com.  The blog post is titled 11 best practices for selecting and hiring a consultant or freelancer. I’ll be covering most of those points in this particular podcast, but you can also go there, and you see them in writing as far as what those points are.

01:19 JH: While, your projected needs may be only for a short time, taking the time to really select appropriate vendors or resources, personnel resources, really in the process, in my experience, saves time, money, frustration, stress and disappointments. I hire outside consultants and freelancers for my own company, and then I also hire them for my clients. I can be the project manager in the middle of it, but sometimes it makes more sense to provide them that resource directly. And I have found that in my experience, I’ve learned and I really continue to learn the best practices for selecting and hiring those outside consultants, and you get the rush that if you have a successful project outcome, and there’s no surprises, no bad surprises, people are happy about what they achieved and what they found, and they work together really well, so it’s not one person dominating, it’s not one vendor, whatever dominating, but the team works together very well.

02:32 JH: In the past, I have been asked to talk to clients, a potential client who’s asked me to come in because they’re very unhappy with their earlier consultant and the project outcome. And so when I come in, it’s a result sometimes of maybe they rushed to hire someone, there was no time, we’re in a society now and a business that moves very quickly, or the team, that person turned out to be the really wrong fit, and that could be because of the rush job done to hire that person, or just because there wasn’t a clear understanding of what the company actually needed. The outside vendor promised too much, maybe they couldn’t even achieve it or never achieve it.  There were surprise added costs, all of a sudden at the end of the project or there were added costs that come in that weren’t anticipated.

03:29 JH: And when that happens to a potential client and they call me in, it’s starting from scratch, basically. Sometimes it’s helpful and you can redo the project, you can take in the project or whatever was started and change course. Most of the time it takes a restarting all over again, and depending on what the client needs, it could be that it’s hiring those additional resource or resources again, but at a different people, different personnel. But this action almost always leads… It does lead actually to increased costs and also time. So, you want to start at the beginning with a better foundation for selecting your outside consultants or vendors or gig workers or freelancers. And when I talk about this gig economy, it has to do with people that are brought in on a short-term basis. They might be brought in for just one project, they might be brought in seasonal. There might be a reason that the company need someone right now with this expertise and they don’t have it in-house. It could be related to someone being off, on leave or something. So, there are all kinds of reasons that companies do bring in an outside resource, but don’t plan on hiring that person full-time.

04:48 JH: The first thing to do is start by really analyzing, articulating, and I suggest writing down what you need with regards to your projects, the skills you need, the pain levels, are you looking for a website developer, a website designer, an art director? Keep in mind too, that if you’re not familiar with titles, that’s no problem, actually, because you want to start in this approach with what skills are you looking for. So, you might be looking to have a new logo done. Well, what skill do you need in that logo? A designer or an illustrator? You want to look at what that means, and you also want to really define what your pain points are. There’s a reason you’re looking for an outside consultant, what is that? It could even be a situation where you say, “Well, we’re getting visitors to our site, but they’re not buying online,” or there’s… People are dropping off, there could be very basic things you start with and you could put your… Start putting your list together of things that your company could use to enhance what you’re doing.

05:54 JH: So, I always really feel that a successful project starts with the beginning and the basics of what it really is that you’re looking for and what you need. If you have a team, if you’re not a sole proprietor, if you have a team, then I suggest engaging your team and talking openly and candidly about the issues and what outside resources might be good for your company. Now, unless you’re planning to hire an agency, which is not really the way… Necessarily, the way the things are done right now, you might be hiring more than one freelancer or gig worker, so you want to look at all the places that you could possibly… The things that you need. Then what you want to do after you’ve engaged your team, you will probably have a list that’s way bigger than what you had anticipated, then that’s the time to prioritize the list by what’s most valuable and the most profitable to your company. Al what your budget limitations are. We don’t have unlimited budgets, nobody does, even very large companies don’t have unlimited budgets.

06:57 JH: And you want to look at your timeline, what do you need to accomplish? And now hopefully, there’s been enough planning ahead, which is what I do with strategies that you’re not rushed, but things change, and we particularly know that marketing changes quickly, and so there’s… Sometimes there is a rush when you don’t even mean to have a rush to get to market or to change something or to do something digital. So, keep in mind that your best consultants, if they’re too busy, then they’re not your best consultants, if they can’t do it in your timeline, or if they are too expensive. So, we want to look at where that point is, where it fits with what you need. And there’s also the timeline with what you need, and there’s also the aspect of money.

07:46 JH: So now that you’ve defined the project or at least defined the tasks, you can look at the scope and budget limits. Again, as I said, nobody has unlimited budgets and a rough schedule. Maybe there’s a drop-dead date, maybe it’s… You have to have it done by a certain date. So, you have to backtrack from that and see what you can do, it might even be you break up those tasks. So it’s very… Getting more specific here, so that when you do bring someone in, you can be more specific about what you’re looking for, and they can be more specific in what they’re providing, and then you can see where they meet in the middle. So, knowing what you need is very critical and knowing how much budget you have is important and knowing your schedule requirements. Now, on that same vein, you may have to compromise on the deliverable day. You may find somebody that is really the person you want and you’re going to have to wait for them if they’re busy or work within their timeline, or maybe tasks or some of the tasks that they might do that someone else could do so that they can do it for you. So, it depends, and this all depends on who you need and what you’re looking for.

08:57 JH: And again, keep in mind, when you’re talking to consultants, I’m a little bit ahead here, but when you’re interviewing or talking to them, you need to listen to what they have to say, because as being in a company might not realize that the timeline for a logo, it takes time, there’s a creative incubation time, it’s not just putting it on paper and giving it to you, so listen to what they have to say and take what they have to say and as long as you’re talking to… I usually take to interview five to 10 people for a particular task or a particular… It depends on the project and how involved it is too, and what you need to do, but that allows you also to get the perspective of the different sources of what you might and might not be able to do.  because I’ve done this for quite a while. I generally have a pretty good contact list of people to hire within the marketing or creative area, meeting people like website developers and designers and illustrators and photographers, but when I don’t… When a contact list doesn’t have that vendor, or that person in there, then I use, I go to my trusted personnel, personal references and referrals, so I seek out people I trust and appreciate and know that they know what they’re doing and ask them for referrals or references.

10:18 JH: I use my own observations. I am also one to go do a lot of online searching, and then it also gives me an idea if this person will fit into this company, will they not fit, the work that they’ve done, is it along something that would work on the same time or on the same look, maybe similar looks. You can see a lot from an online search, organizational groups are another one, there might be a group that you can find that you can go and spend some time out to see who’s in that group.

10:50 JH: You really want to narrow down your candidate list because you could end up getting into this tunnel of many candidates and you don’t want to do that, as I said, I limit mine to five to 10, and in our current COVID-19, it’s going to be a Zoom meeting or an online meeting, whether you use GoToMeeting or Zoom. I generally do Zoom, but anyway, whatever you choose as your primary interview mechanism, it’s going to be online probably, most likely. With that being the case, you want to make sure you have your technical resources, maybe you have a technical resource available, or if you’re one, then you know basically how to combat things that, bad reception, maybe the internet freezes all the things that you can run against across. If you’re interviewing with a team, I like to start first with them before you interview anybody is to make sure your team knows the rules and etiquette of online interviewing, it’s a little bit different than conducting meetings.

11:49 JH: You want to have an agenda, gather all the questions upfront that you might get from your team members, so you can put it together so that you can put them into categories, and you can also eliminate redundant questions. Use things like hand-raising or chat, when you’re doing the Zoom meetings with your team members so that you’re not talking over each other and making any consultant uncomfortable too, and you want to have a moderator, you might be that moderator who then calls on people and then that’s the interviewer, a person being interviewed. Talk and it allows them enough time to answer the questions.

12:28 JH: Now, in a one-to-one, or even in a setting where you’re not necessarily doing Zoom, I used to feel like you could ask a lot of questions, I still think you can on the Zoom meetings, but let’s give them time to answer, really be cognizant of not talking over each other, and if you can just call on people as you… As you’re going through the questions so that they can answer, ask their question and then you move on to the next one. You want people to have not only the background and experience possibly of what you’re looking for, but the soft skills, and that includes communication skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to work with you and your team. I check references and I ask for feedback from other clients who’ve used their services.

13:22 JH: If you have any concerns about the vendor-specific capabilities, just be candid, voice your concerns to them now, they possibly can answer them, or maybe they’ll say, “Oh, I’m not the best resource. Or, I have someone that I can refer you to.” And, of course, remember the person being interviewed is putting their best foot forward. So, observe and listen. Well, not just recently, but through my experience, people that are new, like photographers that are new to the photography gig, not new, in the fact that they haven’t done photos before they have the equipment, they’ve done photos, I’ve seen they’ve done photos, but they’re kind of still a little new to the industry and I have had really good luck with that. Mostly what I do is I still check with other references, I look at their online presence, their personnel, website, their portfolio, what they do online, I talk to people, and then I generally like to encourage my clients and also I like to do a small project to begin with.

14:35 JH: Not a huge project, where we’re investing a lot of time and money, and it’s really a major project, but trying people, trying out the situation with a smaller project, if you can. Make sure you know who your day-to-day contact is going to be, if you’re doing a project that’s longer in duration and a couple of days or something that takes longer, because in an unforeseen emergency you do, you might get someone else for your day-to-day contact, but you want to ask them specifically because you really do only want one contact to go through so that there’s communication, less communication issues, there’s less work for you to do, if there is a team and they have other people with them, they can do status reports and put everybody on there, but it’s still one person that you’re able to communicate your issues with or the things, the timelines and things that you need to do with that person.

15:32 JH: Because getting a new person up to speed if that person that is your regular day-to-day contact is not available and they just move you to somebody else, their assistant or something you could lose that communication in the process. If you’re really doing something pretty involved, such as a new product introduction, that’s very crucial. They’re all crucial, but really look at the experience and try not to be this vendor’s guinea pig, if you see that they’ve never done some project as big as yours, Again, if you can start with a small project, try that, if you can’t, then probably go on to the next person. And you’re also reviewing vendors work, so you know if they’re going to be in that experience or they’re going to have the experience that you’re looking for. On the same vein, confirm who’ll be doing the work. Sometimes I’m hired as a marketing consultant, and I’m very upfront with what vendors or what people I’m using that I might bring in for that project. Confirm for yourself who’s going to be doing the work. Some of the clients that I work with don’t really care, and I guess if the project is successful, that’s fine, I tend to care just because I want to know where this project is going, and when I work with very confidential information. I really want to know where it’s going and who’s, how’s it being parceled out and the kinds of things like that, that could be a confidentiality issue.

17:05 JH: Another issue is, when a consultant is hired and they hire a team, I don’t do this, but when they hire a team, they might expect that each of those vendors is going to send you an invoice separately, which can get time consuming for you. Number one, confusing, number two can add costs, so you want to negotiate this upfront.

17:37 JH: As I just said a little while ago, test, test, test, if you can.  For example, you want to hire a copywriter, but you want to have them for one blog post or one piece of work rather than hiring them on a yearly contract, and you try and see how it works, or I just recently tried a new transcriber, so rather than saying, I want you to transcribe all my podcasts for the next three months, I’ve said, “Let’s try one” and it’s a trial, and that way you could tell whether you feel that it’s working, it’s going to work or if they’re reservations can you talk about those reservations, or you can also see if it’s not going to work, because it’s in your best interest to really make sure that this runs as smoothly as you can. You’ll have enough things with a project that can go wrong, or things in the environment, or things with your marketing environment or things.

18:30 JH: It’s best if you can try and keep your project, things that are, systems and things in your project and keep them on a very basic level so that you’re not dealing with those kinds of issues that you don’t have to. Now, by this point, you’ve agreed to a budget, and again, a budget can change, and I have had clients make big changes and expect the budget to stay the same. In the beginning you need to say exactly what this budget covers, if there are additional changes, then those will be additional change orders or change costs, and you need to let the client know ahead of time, that’s what I would tell the vendors that this cost is coming, and do they. Then they can make a decision of, do they want to do it or do they not want to do it? So, it is more in their hands to control the purse strings.

19:19 JH: I also always look for check points, some of the clients I have worked with just want to hand over the project and be done with it and let it go and come back when it’s done. I have found that to be. It may not at all be what you’re looking for, so I would say that periodically, I do status meetings once a week, but again, it very much depends on your projects, you can do that more often, if you’re doing something really on a fast track, you may want to have a meeting every day at the beginning of the day. So you want to really be sure that you’re not surprised, and again, make it very clear with the vendor or the consultant that if there is a project change and it results in a cost change, that they are allowed to make that decision before you spend the money. I stay involved in the projects just in order to keep things on more of a course, and then when there are course corrections, they can be made very quickly and more in a timeframe that works within that project. The other part here is a final product ownership, and that to me, to agree, I think of illustrators, I think of photographers, and there are other people too, where you would want to know who owns what.

20:51 JH: Do you own that piece of music for everything that you want to use it for? You don’t even know yet where you’re going to use it, did you buy it out? Right. The photography. Did you buy out, right? I generally buy photography and music out, right. It can be more expensive, but it’s easier than having to go back and forth when you want to change and then re-negotiating how much it’s going to cost for that particular piece. With photography, I really only do that if it’s a photo shoot that it’s going to be used long-term, there are photo shoots, a new product introduction, you might only use one of those photos for a long period of time, it might be just that photo with a fashion shoot, you probably, next year you’re not going to be using that same fashion, you’re going to be doing something else, so how much timeline do you need for those particular ownership rights?

21:44 JH: Also define upfront what you expect is ongoing support, now that has more to do with website development. In this COVID-19, we’re seeing a huge drop, a huge increase in online buying, and so when you are… If you’re doing your site, which I did during this COVID-19, I worked with a designer and developer to redo my site, and I negotiated ongoing support for at least the next six months so that when I can. When I work with the site, maybe I need some additional education, maybe something that’s in there doesn’t work properly, and I need to have them redo it or maybe something, when I look at the analytics isn’t producing the way I want it to produce, so I want to still keep working with them, and then also there’s technical issues, maybe an update messed something up or something like that.

22:36 JH: So, it’s keeping a way to have a… Just a cushion there of technical support or some support for a period of time. I use a formal contract; I recommend my clients do. I generally do the contracts if they don’t have them, and I get pretty much everything I can in writing with dates and signatures from the clients or all the people who are going to be involved in that particular project. My contract has a scope… On the first page, a scope of the projects, it very generally lists the deliverables, the agree to budget schedule, and then I ask the consultant or vendor to also give me a deliverable timeline. So rather than just, we will have it done at such and such a time, there are steps involved. The first draft for maybe it’s copy, first draft will be done on a certain date, I expect it to be done and I’d see it on my desk, unless told otherwise that there was a change because there was a… Something else happened, that changed that direction.

23:43 JH: Keep a record of all your interactions as well as your agreement, but save emails, text, voice messages, just so they’re there, and so you can see, sometimes someone will feel like they gave some instruction and it never came through or it wasn’t really clear or there was a misinterpretation, communication is really a key factor here as it was with so many things, so that’s why I do regular update meetings, I keep emails and I’m diligent about reading them and going through them so I understand, I believe from my end what’s being done. It’s also a way to go back if something happens in the project that I hope it doesn’t to you, but something happens, it kind of made it a little messy, and then you have some proof that it was in fact, something was said or something wasn’t said. I think keeping really open communications, you’ve chosen the best person you know of, and you’re going to keep open communications with them or that team that you’ve hired, you’re going to go along and have them be very open with what’s happening, you want transparency, information, you don’t need to know every detail of everything, because things go wrong on projects in the background that you really don’t need to know because they don’t affect the outcome, it’s something that the consultant or the vendor or the gig worker can handle, and so you don’t want to know every detail, but you keep in mind that you want open communication and want to know what’s going on, and also want to see the progress.

25:25 JH: Things can change quickly in this environment too, so having those regular communication, whether it’s through Slack, whether you do a Zoom meeting, whether you… Whatever way you and the consultant, and that’s another thing you need to define, I define upfront, what is the best way to get a hold of the consultant, what is the best means of communication and how does it work within also either my clients or my particular way of doing things. I hope that all helps you, if you have more questions or you want to give me some more feedback on this area, maybe some of your experience, you can go to my onpointthinking.com website and send me through the contact form, whatever you want. I read all of those, I get all the contact forms and I do go through them, and I do answer them if there’s a question or if there’s a need, or if you have a podcast idea, I’m always looking for podcast ideas and I’ll appreciate them.

26:26 JH: You are listening to On Point Conversations, and my name is Jacalyn Holsted.