5 Things to Check Before Hiring Someone You Found Online
Looking for a professional online is straightforward, but finding someone who can actually do the job is another matter. A nice LinkedIn profile, hundreds of followers, an attractive website or a page covered with five-star reviews create a good first impression but say little about the expertise of the candidate.
This is especially important in cases where the service affects one’s health, finances, business, home, education or access to critical online accounts. After all, we wouldn’t pick a doctor, lawyer, electrician or financial adviser solely on the strength of their website, so why should it be any different with other professionals we discover online?
Before hiring, therefore, consider the following five points to sunder out relevant expertise from impressive but superficial information.
1. Check their experience against the job you actually need
First, ascertain what qualifications the job actually requires. The response will depend on what you are buying, so a generic credential may not be sufficient.
Let’s say, for example, that you want to hire an online fitness coach. A good starting point would be a personal-training credential that includes instruction in exercise science, assessment, programming, safety, and scope of practice.
To earn an NCCA-accredited personal trainer certification, candidates must satisfy age and education requirements and have current certification in adult CPR and AED, with a hands-on skills evaluation. The coursework also covers areas such as assessment, exercise programming, progression, behavior change, and professional standards of practice. This would be significantly more substantial than, for instance, a short social-media fitness instructor certification.
The latter doesn’t necessarily mean that the person is qualified to address your specific concern. You should always ask about experience and how the trainer proposes to meet your particular goals, rather than just general knowledge. A fitness trainer who typically works with healthy recreation-age clients may not have the expertise to design a postpartum, injury recovery, or senior fitness program.
The same goes for clinical professions. If you are looking for a speech-language pathologist (SLP), for instance, in the US, the relevant qualification would be a graduate degree in speech-language pathology, plus the clinical hours and degrees required for certification and state licensure. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), a master’s degree is required for independent practice as an SLP. An ASHA certification also requires graduate-level clinical coursework, examination, and supervised clinical experience.
In other words, it’s never enough to rely on a job title. Always research the professional preparation required for the position and verify that the candidate’s education, certifications, licenses, and supervised training match those standards.
The same logic applies to nonregulated fields. If you are looking for SEO copywriting services, for instance, you won’t find any specific professional licenses required for the position. However, you should still ask to see examples of their work, knowledge of search intent, experience with similar websites, and approaches to researching keywords, content structure, and SEO-friendly language.
2. Test their expertise with questions that relate to your situation
Having identified basic qualifications, move beyond the resume and ask open-ended questions.
Instead of asking vague questions such as whether someone has experience, present them with a scenario that approximates the problem they need to solve and see if they can identify an appropriate solution. Their response will indicate whether they really understand the subject matter at hand and can apply that knowledge to meet your needs.
For instance, if you are hiring someone to advise you about a home renovation, ask how they would choose between two materials for a particular room. If you are hiring a photographer for a business event, ask how they would photograph inside a room with challenging lighting. If you are hiring a tutor, explain where the student is struggling and ask how they would approach the problem.
A specialist does not necessarily need to provide you with a long answer. However, you should hear some justification rather than a generic promise that they can handle anything.
If you asked, which is better, an asphalt or a concrete basketball court for a particular property, a useful response should consider the surface, climate, drainage, maintenance, expected use, budget, and installation requirements rather than declaring one material better than the other in all cases.
This type of question also helps you identify professionals that know the limits of their expertise. Someone that tries to answer all questions is more suspect than someone that knows what falls within their professional scope and what does not.
3. Verify important claims independently
After asking your questions, it is important to follow up on the claims that directly relate to your decision. It is not necessary or even humanly possible to fact-check each and every word in a prospect’s biography, but any credentials they list deserve more scrutiny than a cursory examination of their LinkedIn profile.
If they have a professional license, find the licensing authority that issued it. If they have certifications, check the relevant organizations’ websites to confirm. Ask around if the person you are considering has membership in a professional organization, especially if said organization has a membership or certification verification tool.
This is especially important in cases where the service being performed carries risks to safety, legality, finances, or structural integrity.
On the other hand, independent verification of a service that has little to no oversight may take a different shape and form altogether. For example, if a business owner boasts about their past clients or employers, it is important to find examples of that work. If a programmer lists off their technical expertise, looking over their portfolio is a good way to assess their competency rather than taking their word for it. If a tutor offers to help you learn a foreign language, asking them to demonstrate their skills in that language is a much better test than looking at their certifications.
It is also important to verify dates, since time spent learning or practicing a skill does not necessarily reflect one’s level of expertise. A person who has had a certification for five years may have held it for ten, or even twenty.
The point is to perform your own research and have an independent source of information besides the person offering the service, so you can make the best choice for your personal circumstances.
4. Don’t be fooled by 5.0 star ratings. Read reviews!
After checking the professional’s work, you can look through others’ reviews about them. A good review will mention things such as the professional’s ability to adhere to deadlines, communicate issues and changes, address concerns, offer revisions where needed, explain anomalies, and deliver on-time.
For instance, there is no need for a person looking for a piano instructor to rely only on the number of positive feedbacks about the tutor. Instead, they should go through each review to learn what the tutor offers, how they handled students that require additional support, and their approach towards communicating lessons and schedules
On the other hand, someone looking for a cleaning company would be better off checking on the testimonials and ensuring that the professional has experience with specific problems or tasks like being punctual and consistent, communicating issues, and addressing concerns during the cleaning schedule after a missed appointment.
There may be a pattern in the reviews, so it is important to look at every comment, not just the ones pointing out the good and bad points of the professional. While one review is not enough to tell a lot about the given professional or company, it is always possible for more than one person to have a similar issue or a concern.
Some reviews might be found in more than one source. While the testimonials on a professional’s website are important, it may be helpful to find a few reviews from other sites. This way, the visitor will get an idea about the professional’s work from other people. Lastly, look at the response given by professionals to the reviews.
A professional that offers a detailed explanation about a problem or a concern that a client experienced is most likely to provide better services than those that will deny the issue or respond with little detail.
5. Confirm exactly what you’re paying for
Now that you’ve established the person is qualified and credible, the last step is actually agreeing upon the final deliverables, timelines, and compensation.
That’s where vague expectations can cost you. Before paying, you want to have a clear idea of what is being provided, deadlines, the cost and payment terms, if any changes (and their impact) are allowed, and if it’s possible to cancel or return the money at a particular point.
Take a wedding photographer, for example. Your assumption that he or she would provide you with edited digital photos could be wrong because the final cost may include only a set number of edited photos. There may also be extra payments for albums or other services like additional editing. If you haven’t specified your expectations, you and the professional will have different understandings of the final result.
This consideration also applies to web developers. The cost can greatly vary depending on what you need: a basic website may be several times cheaper than a full-scale solution with custom coding and plugins. If you want changes after launch, you’ll have to pay extra. And if the initial project doesn’t include photography, copywriting, or other services, you’ll have to clarify that before signing the contract. None of these examples are necessarily wrong, but they can create misunderstandings.
A large-scale project always requires a detailed contract. Even for small-scale work, it’s a good idea to have an agreement, whether electronic or written.
Another important point is who owns the rights to the final product (software, photos, videos, drawings, and so on) and if you can get the source files (Photoshop .psd, Illustrator .ai, and so on).
The more specific the better; that way, both parties have fewer reasons to be surprised later.
