| Guide for Administrators Employing contractors |
A. Introduction[edit]
Owing to the tremendous volume of work and the fact that for many years there were no volunteer proofreaders I have regularly hired contractors to do tasks like proofreading, adding new books, fixing and adding header templates, and similar. What follows is what I have learned from this process.
B. Preparation[edit]
If you are going to hire someone it is important that you have a clear idea about the expected output, and how long it should take to achieve. For example, if you are going to hire someone to proofread an issue of Bahá’í News, you should first proofread it yourself, keeping track primarily of how long it took. The first issue the contractor works on should be the issue you proofread yourself. Once they are done you should compare their work product to your own, and the time it took them versus you. This will verify the quality of work, catch any unexpected issues, and allow you to address any concerns before the individual works more autonomously. Failure to do this cost me many hours in correcting the work of a contractor who I trusted because they had completed several other tasks for me successfully, and I had laid out clear step-by-step instructions. What I did not anticipate was the text editor they were using was not UTF-8 compatible and had converted all special characters into garbage, for example “ became “. I had to re-do hundreds of pages to fix this error.
C. Finding and hiring contractors[edit]
Since I was hiring as an individual, maximizing the work I received for the money I spent has always been my primary concern. The very first time I wanted to hire someone I reached out to the National Spiritual Assembly of Pakistan, owing to the low cost of labor there, and was put in touch with someone who worked with me for for about a year and a half from 2011-13. Later on it became impractical to repeat this because I wanted to hire multiple people, for various tasks, for various lengths of time and it was easier to find candidates through contracting sites like upwork.com which are set up to facilitate this kind of relationship. When I set out to have Bahá’í News proofread, which has more than 700 issues, I hired 7 people and then kept close track of their work product and time. Most contractors completed one issue in 7-9 hours, a few took 12 hours or more and were fired. One individual however consistently completed an issue in 4-5 hours with far superior quality to all the others, so everyone but this individual was fired. The work continues to this day with one person proofreading the series. Had I not hired multiple people I may never have gotten a clear idea about how long the work should take. For reference with about 720 issues, 5 hours per issue is 3,600 hours. Obviously, doubling the time it would take to complete the project because I didn't find a quality contractor would have been very expensive.
