May

Freelance Design Job Sites - Toe to Toe

By jimdiggitydog

Find Work on Guru and Elance I have had subscriptions to many (if not all) of the freelance job-finding websites. They all have good points, and I think the amount of work you actually glean from them has a lot to do with how much time and effort you put into the searches, the portfolios and the profiles.

Recently, I sat down and really considered the pros and cons of two of the heavy hitters - Guru.com and Elance.com. I’m only going to comment on the paid portion of the sites, since I think if you’re going to explore, you should go for a more premium package and be serious. You gotta spend money to make money, right?

First up, Elance:

$9.95 per month, includes 20 “connects” which are essentially bids. You can purchase more for around .50¢ each. Some jobs actually cost more “connects,” and you can have your bid appear higher in lists by spending more connects.
Reasonably slick interface.
Skill tests - lets employers see that you’re actually skilled in what you say you’re skilled in. You get 10 free with a paid membership, and you can buy more.
Not a huge number of projects for non-web designers. Only 426 as of this posting
Stiff competition - 14k plus design candidates for such a limited number of jobs.
Decent bid levels - most logo jobs are going for “less than $500,” which is generally higher than Guru’s bid levels. Just using this as an example. All the jobs are reasonably close.
Kind of sucky portfolio. Clunky and kind of awkward to upload large numbers of files.
Most professionals seem to charge a decent rate - not too many $5 an hours designers. That helps prop up the rates - which is good for everyone.
Fairly robust mediation.
Good escrow and payment systems.
6.75-8.75% for transaction processing.
Decent communications systems for client/freelancer relations.

Next - Guru:

$25 per month, payable quarterly for 100 bids per month. You can buy more (called “bid pax”) for .50¢ each, and they roll over, so you never lose them.
Good interface
Good project notification and search
Large number of projects, including a fair amount of straight illustration (which I dig.) 600+ in Design/Multimedia right now, plus a ton of others in other fields.
Fairly bad bid levels. I’ve found that you face a lot of those $25 bids for a brochure. But - people also are realizing that you get what you pay for.
Stiff competition - 15k plus providers in design alone. Many of them are inactive or really, really bad, though. Plus, with many more jobs posted than on Elance, you get to bid on a lot more, so the percentages really are in your favor with Guru.
Fairly robust mediation.
Good escrow and payment systems.
6.75-8.75% for transaction processing.
Very nice communications systems.
Decent portfolio system.
Easy-to-use escrow and payment systems. Direct deposit and PayPal are very fast. Never used the check system, but looks pretty easy.

So - who would I recommend? I like Guru. I think the pros outweigh the cons. I’ve gotten a lot of great business through Guru, and I have a lot of long-term clients that I met through Guru.

A lot of this recommendation is based on my familiarity with Guru, and the fact that I’ve used them a lot longer than I have Elance. I think that Elance could be just as good - I’ve just not gotten quite the response, and I haven’t gotten the level of user experience that I have with Guru.

Really, though - for the price of one small job, you can subscribe to both and see for yourself.

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