Hiring remote employees and getting work done

I think hiring remote employees have no difference from gathering them into office except for having employees from global area. But still if they are full-time workers they should have insuarence and etc and you may need to deal with that kind of stuff for multinational range. And if you are doing a business, i don't think it's not that exprensive to rent an office in city in everywhere.

But I think having remote employees will cost you more than office expenses because it's more hard to control them from a distance, and you may not reach them in urgent situations. And in this case you risk your company's reputation which is more valuable than office expenses to me :)

I've made business with some freelancers for 5 months. I was taking tasks from customers and dealing with developers. Eventhough the people i worked with are responsible, great coders, trustable, polite and professional, it's really stressful and hard to manage a developer team remotely. I did everything to bring them together regardless that distance and developed a web based system which my developers opened issues and others was suppose to search/solve for that. Sometimes i was spendnig half of my day to control them remotely for distance and time zone difference issues

A great way you need to do when looking for freelancers to hire is to ask first from network of friends, colleagues and family. This will help you reduce the risk of hiring a freelancer who is not capable to do the job.

You can look for freelancers from different freelancing sites such as oDesk.com and Guru.com. However, when hiring a freelancer you need to test them first even you get them from legit freelancing sites. This way you could see the full potential of a person to do work.

If you’re looking for a place where you could hire fulltime freelancers, I recommend Staff.com. One good thing about this site is it allows you to have a 10 hours trial or conduct an interview to freelancers so that you could see who fits on your needs. I’ve been hiring freelancers on it for a month now and so far so good.

I would recommend hiring from industry specific sources. What I mean by this is don't use generic job boards or you will get very low signal to noise ratio.

If you are hiring a designer, maybe try the job board at www.dribbble.com. If is a bit self selecting that way that really only designers that are passionate about their craft will see the ad.

If you are after a developer for Python, find a Python developers user group or forum to advertise in. Again this will target people passionate about what they do.

The "industry specific" job boards rather than "location specific" will let you reach the global audience.

As for getting the work done, find some good collaborative tools to use like Trello, Campfire, etc.