Perhaps the most critical task when it comes to staffing your blog business is finding the right people. The quality of a team can make or break a business, so it's important to hire well.
The most obvious way to find people is to advertise! For employees you can usually advertise on local job sites online. Ask around to find out what sites are the most popular in your area.
For freelancers you have a wealth of options. A good job board that is free for advertisers is at FreelanceSwitch. You can also advertise for bloggers at the Problogger job board. Otherwise there are sites like Elance and oDesk where you can find freelancers of all varieties.
When writing job ads, always write in a clear, straight-forward manner. Explain what you require, what the site is for, what criteria would be helpful, and how they can apply. Job ads can be very formal and stuffy at times, and a clear job ad will help attract the right type of people.
If you are receiving a lot of applicants you can put in a "bozo filter" which is a simple test to check applicants have read the job ad. A good bozo filter is to ask that applicants use a specific subject line in their email application. You can then automatically disregard any application that doesn't pass the bozo filter.
It's always great to hire on personal recommendation as it helps eliminate some of the pain of hiring. Asking your current staff if they know anyone who'd be good for a role often yields good results as most people will only recommend someone who isn't going to soil their own reputation! Moreover people often know other people in the same field of work, so your current staff is likely to know other writers, editors, and bloggers.
Depending on what type of blog you run, it may be appropriate to simply ask on the blog itself for applications. Hiring fans and regular readers of a blog is a good way to ensure that the tone and style of a site are carried through.
It's not a bad idea to have an open contribution form for writers who'd like to write for the site. This can just be a link somewhere on the blog that is effectively a "We're Hiring" sign. The form can either be an email application to write for the site, or you can actually take contributions and then pay for those that get published.
If you take the latter approach, you need to publish a good steady stream of submissions or otherwise it's not very fair to ask people to do work with little chance of actually getting paid. Open contribution systems can work quite well as a staging ground for finding regular writers. When someone submits an article and it's good, you can simply write back and ask them to write more for the site.
For more permanent jobs, always check references. The only real exception to this is if you are hiring a writer, you can simply get them to write a few articles and pay regardless of whether you use them. The downside is fairly limited and you'll quickly know if there is a problem. But for other positions such as an editorial role, you'll want to know they are up to the job before you commit too much time and energy into hiring and training.
It's always good to get new staff started in small ways to get a feel for how they work. For freelancers this means a small project, for employees it means a trial period. If you are hiring a new permanent editor, you might get them to do a few weeks of work, or start them as a writer first before announcing them on the site to make sure it's going smoothly. There's nothing worse than announcing a new team member only to let them go shortly after!
It's really worth investing the time to hire well. It takes extra effort to search for the right candidate, to analyze everyone, to respond to all the applicants who don't get hired, and to give them the appropriate trials and test runs. But given how important your team is, it's a worthwhile investment.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Sharon Reed at 02152011
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