[Case Study] Guru.com: Bringing Talent to Your Door
Introduction
You need a jingle written; administrative help; a CAD expert. Or maybe you need a business plan or a new product packaging design. There is a good chance that you have needed some skill at some point that you just don’t have.
Finding talent is frustrating and time-consuming, rarely leaving you satisfied. To find reliable service providers, you ask around, play phone tag, and deal with convoluted referral networks. Every day you search is another that your needs go unfulfilled. Small businesses go through a lot to get the service they need. You know this. You also know – or at least feel – that it shouldn’t be so difficult.
Guru.com has revolutionized the process of finding specific skills quickly and for your budget. Guru.com is a marketplace for freelance talent. Service providers can advertise their offerings and bid on the projects that you post. Businesses can post their project needs and select from a variety of talented professionals. The website also offers a governance framework – including payment and 1099s for IRS tax compliance – so you can focus on the work you need completed instead of ancillary administrative matters.
Searching for Talent Your company is based in Virginia (or Iowa, or Utah, or wherever). As such, you tend to look for service providers in your back yard; a nationwide effort just isn’t practical. So, the New York company pays New York rates, and the Oregon company settles for a more limited talent pool. Nobody wins, and everybody settles for the best available solution. Traditionally, finding exactly what you need, wherever it may reside, was not a viable option. Fortunately, the world is changing.
The web does make the process of engaging talent easier, but most solutions are far from fool-proof. Monster.com is expensive and not designed for ad hoc project work and freelancers. Posting on Craigslist.org will get you countless resumes from unqualified practitioners. After such experiences, you wind up back in your local market, asking around for somebody who is close enough.
What you really need is broad access to nationwide talent without the headache of a resume deluge or absurd fees. You need a way to find exactly what you want quickly, so you can get down to business.
Guru.com to the Rescue What makes Guru.com particularly effective is the amount of activity it attracts. To constitute a viable venue for sourcing talent, there has to be a large and varied pool from which you can choose. Guru.com is the name brand for freelance talent on the web, with a variety of skilled practitioners and available projects posted. Because of the robust trade that exists on Guru.com, talent is attracted to this marketplace, increasing the likelihood that you will find the specific professional who meets your needs.
Among Guru.com’s many features, the following are particularly useful to small business owners who need to find talent, staff projects, and delivery payment:
- Inviting a practitioner to bid on your project
- Rating a practitioner’s performance
- Rendering and tracking payment
- Managing 1099s and tax compliance
To get started on Guru.com, all you do is register and post your project needs; you will receive a myriad of responses. Alternatively, to manage your workload, you can invite individual practitioners to apply, obviating the need to review countless proposals in search of the right professional. In deciding which professionals to invite or engage, you can review their proposals, resumes, feedback for previous projects, and overall Guru ranking.
The Guru ranking structure is multifaceted. The fundamental element is project feedback. At the end of each project, after payment has been settled, the practitioner and client have the opportunity to rate each other. Clients rate professionals on the timeliness and quality of their work, while professionals rate clients on clarity of instruction and guidance, cooperation, and payment. These ratings, from one to five stars, can be useful in making decisions around who to engage for specific projects. Individual project feedback, in conjunction with the number of projects completed and total fees earned, is used to generate an overall ranking for Guru.com practitioners, with the most successful ranked #1.
To facilitate engaging geographically dispersed practitioners, Guru.com has a built-in payment service, by which companies can render payment for services through the website. If you engage multiple practitioners throughout the year, this feature simplifies the accounting process; all your payments are made to Guru.com, and Guru.com in turn pays your practitioners. Within Guru.com, you receive invoices from practitioners for specific projects, and you can track payments according to discrete activities. You have a granular view of activity without having an overwhelming accounting burden.
Derived from the payment functionality in Guru.com is the 1099 service, required for IRS tax compliance. Since you pay Guru.com – and Guru.com pays the professionals you engage – you do not have to issue 1099s. Guru.com does it for you. This feature significantly reduces your clerical workload and allows you to spend your time on much more important business tasks.
Lessons for Small Businesses Guru.com provides an inexpensive, user-friendly, and comprehensive environment for sourcing and managing freelance talent. Instead of having to rely on an endless chain of referrals to find a practitioner who almost meets your needs, Guru.com offers an environment that decreases the time it takes to find a practitioner while increasing the likelihood that you will find the most appropriate resource. Essentially, Guru.com is faster and more accurate than traditional methods of finding freelance talent.
No small business owner can do everything himself, making the need for occasional outside help inevitable. By working with Guru.com to fulfill your talent needs, you can reduce the time and effort associated with engaging and managing freelance talent while concurrently receiving a higher quality of service. Guru.com not only helps you find the right professionals, it empowers you to manage the relationship effectively.
