| I'm both freelancer and I had a chance to interview a few candidates found on oDesk. Here are my thoughts: 1. Reviews by clients are not worth much. I've had a situation where my client asked me to fix the project after previous developer, who's code was horrible, but at that time my client didn't realize it, so they gave him 5 stars. 2. Pay attention to the language candidates use - very often their summary/portfolio is written in correct English, but during conversation they make lots of very basic mistakes. I'm not a native English speaker, I also make mistakes, but quite often these people just can't communicate in English, and this , sooner or later, will become a problem for you. 3. It's better to invite developers than to just post an offer - I've seen offers starting with "ONLY DEVELOPERS BASED IN US" to which hundreds of people from Asia applied. People don't even read descriptions, they just apply everywhere. 4. Developers' summaries are overrated - I've interviewed people with "more than 5 years of experience in web development" etc. whose code was more like junior developer's. 5. Having said that - ask people for samples of their work. The best is some OS project, because then you know it's their code, but actually few people write OS. Anyway, reading the code, even just 2-3 simple files, helped me to reject a few developers who made good impression during the talk. TL;DR: chat to see if they can use English, read their code, be sceptical about what they and their clients wrote about them. |