Guru.com

There are plenty of apps and sites out there dedicating to helping employers connect with employees, but Guru.com has tailored their platform specifically to the needs of employers seeking out freelance talent. This kind of software has to do the delicate job of offering a worthwhile service to both prospective employers and freelance professionals. Guru.com largely succeeds in that regard, although there are some complaints that recent changes worked against the interest of hiring parties.

Guru.com is far from the only name in this market, but they offer one of the more accessible approaches for both talent and employers. It's free for anyone to join, and the cost comes entirely from a percentage of the freelancer's pay. It's a clean and straightforward approach that scales well no matter how many people you need to hire and no matter how big your business is.

Where Guru.com goes above and beyond most providers in this field is the amount of vetting that they put into their freelancers. Guru.com breaks down each freelancer's experience with them using clear and concrete metrics. All in all, the user pages are very designed. No matter what field you work in, the clean interface puts skill sets front and center using a convenient tag system for searching, and they offer both a review feed and a clean paneled interface for displaying a portfolio.

This site is specialized in the sense that it focuses exclusively on freelance workers, but the purview is broad in terms of services offered. There's a big community of programmers, designed, and web developers who call Guru.com home, but you'll also find writers and translators as well as freelance experts in sales, finance, or administrative work. It's functionally an alternative to a temp agency but one that takes a more skill-oriented approach to the people they work with.

The process of hiring a freelancer can be exhaustive, but that can be a good or a bad thing depending on your circumstances. After listing a job with any requirements and expectations you might have in place, contractors will then place their estimates for working. These bidding systems are pretty common in the industry, but Guru.com handles it well. Budgets can be assigned, and freelancers can evaluate the metrics of employers in the same way employers can look at them. The estimate system means you don't have to go hunting for freelancers and can instead let them come to you with specific pitches for their projects.

If you're specifically looking for freelancers and preferably freelancers with experience, Guru.com is certainly not a bad choice. It will likely continue to be worth dipping a toe into as long as it continues to have the large install base that it enjoys now.

Pros:

• Tons of categories for freelancer work
• Performance metrics for both freelancers and employers
• Free to use without a subscription

Cons:

• Customer service can be difficult to work with
• Dispute resolution system is ineffective