As many of you know our company has been growing and expanding so we thought it was time to find some fresh new talent. In the past I have searched online for hours looking at resumes of potential designers we would hire but in this search I usually wasted a lot of time only to find a lot of designers that could talk the talk but not walk the walk.
I was really starting to feel like that people in general didn’t want to work and as my mom has said several times “They are so lazy they would not work in a pie factory tasting pies”.
Now, I love the area of Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee that we live in but when it comes to design skills that is one thing that is not a strong point of people here, there are some but most of the good ones here are doing more print work instead of web so its tough to spend time training someone that has been in that industry especially when you don’t have the time to do it.
I was doing my research and found a website called oDesk, it’s a site that you can connect with freelance designers and hire them to work on projects. My thinking is instead of hiring someone full time from the beginning I will let them start as a contract freelance designer then if and when they are settled in we can talk about more permanent things.
To my surprise oDesk is a really good website offering great services; we found several good candidates there and have even put some of them to work. The only downside to oDesk is that we were pounded by a lot of designers from India, Pakistan, etc that did not read the position requirements and had no previous work to show, some had a little bit of a portfolio (if you want to call it that) but I would call them Dreamweaver jockeys.
FYI: Yoda says “Knowing Dreamweaver does not a designer make you”
What ever happened to good ole hand coding?
I won’t get off on that rant at this time but hand coding but I think it is something any designer worth his or her salt should know.
We will probably be using oDesk more in the future as the need arises and props need to go out to the oDesk team, keep up the good work!
