The Indian freelance marketplace has been found wanting in several aspects like the presence of quality freelancers, the respect qualified and experienced freelancers deserve, compensation parity, the need for a platform that is specifically targeted towards the Indian freelancing industry and last but not the least, the presence of clients who recognize the hard work put in by freelancers.

Most of the Indian freelancers have to depend on non-Indian freelancing websites like Elance.com, Freelancer.com and oDesk.com to earn money though freelancing. It’s not that these freelancing websites are useless but one cannot associate oneself with non-native platforms fully.

Few days back, I was browsing through LinkedIn when I came across this ‘Indian’ website in someone’s comment. In the few seconds interval from deciding to check out the website to arriving on the website had my mind conjuring up various perceptions, a result of pre-conceived notions like “not again, not another so called Indian freelancing half-baked website to rip us off with paltry money”.

“Work N Hire” was a sight to behold. A quick browse through the website and an even more quick decision to review it prompted me to contact the owners and request for an interview. My perception of “Work N Hire” improved with an equally quick response from the owners! I was impressed and it was time to put the impression to test.

 Evidently, this will be a “Work N Hire” review and verbatim publishing of what the owners had to say.

“Work N Hire” Review

“Work N Hire” Genesis

“Work N Hire” is a venture of Excellence Technologies, a web property development company. The idea behind this initiative is the visible demand from start-up companies and small businesses that are always on the lookout for freelancers and contractors to outsource minor and major tasks.

Its founders are Kumar Mukul, an IIT Kharagpur graduate and Manish Prakash, an IIT Guwahati graduate.

The ace up its sleeve is that “Work N Hire” has been totally customized for the Indian freelancing market.

“Work N Hire” Positives

(1) Location Customization

One of the best things I liked about “Work N Hire” is the ease with which you can find out location-specific freelancers from India. This is beneficial especially when the purpose for which you want to hire freelancers is dependent on the location of the freelancer.

For instance, if you want to open a real estate portal in New Delhi, you would want freelance writers, let’s say, from the New Delhi area because it adds to market knowledge.

Here is a screenshot of their location customization.

(2) Escrow System

Let me not extol the virtues of working with an escrow payment system. Though it may also encounter glitches sometime, escrow is no doubt the best method to get payments online.

Those who don’t know what is escrow, it is a payment system whereby the client (buyer) places the complete payable amount of any project in ‘escrow’ and once you, the freelancer, completes the project and is approved by the client, the escrow is released and can be withdrawn from the freelancer’s account. Very easy and hassle free system.

(3) Clean Dashboard

There are perhaps a handful of freelancing websites globally that has a clean dashboard like this one. “Work N Hire” freelancer dashboard is very clutter-less and very easy to browse. Here is a screenshot of my user dashboard.

(4) Compensation

To the rest of the world, India is a country to outsource. Be it any product development or any service related issue, outsourcers’ think of India as an ideal place for outsourcing work. It leads to a lot of problems though, like compensation disparity.

What “Work N Hire” has done is eliminated this disparity to a greater extent by making INR as the functional currency for freelancers and clients. This way you don’t have to constantly calculate and convert project fees from INR to USD and vice versa. Freelancers place bid in INR and they get paid in the same currency.

As you will see, you can search projects by budget and since the clients also mention the amounts in INR, it becomes easy to decide on project fees.

“Work N Hire” Negatives

The freelancing platform is very new so any negatives will not be visible now. It has been seen that the negative factors of any venture comes out when it actually begins to work. So I will have to reserve this section until I get some projects on “Work N Hire” and experience how their system works personally.

Nevertheless, I will like to highlight something. This is not exactly a negative aspect of “Work N Hire” but yes, it will have a bearing on the workings of this platform as well.

(1) No Compensation Threshold

It would have been good if “Work N Hire” could have a compensation threshold for both clients and freelancers like ContentSpree. This would have helped to set a kind of standard for the members and enhanced the competition parity mentioned previously.

This is especially necessary for a completely “Indian” freelancing platform because a large number of its members are already habituated with USD currency format. While a US client will offer a basic $5 / 500 words, that is, 250 INR / 500 words, Indian clients mostly offer a basic 75 INR / 500 words – huge difference due to currency value.

Hence, a compensation threshold would have been wonderful for certain kind of segments like freelance writing.

Nevertheless, as you will read in the interview below, the founders do intend to take care of this.

“Work N Hire” Interview with Founders

I conducted a very brief email interview, asking them about their aims with ‘’Work N Hire’’ and its contribution in the Indian freelance industry.

Here is the full interview:

1) You would agree that the Indian freelancing market needs more upliftment, especially when it comes to quality work and quality payment. How will “Work N Hire” contribute in this in terms of maintaining quality and compensation parity?

Yes, we agree with the point that the Indian freelancing market needs a lot of upliftment. Freelancing market is in a very nascent stage in India, we think that there is a lot of potential but it needs to be properly structured and presented to both freelancers and employers.

Regarding your question on how “Work N Hire” can help in maintaining quality, we try to screen all the project posted on our site and freelancer profiles created. We have features for feedback and rating for both freelancers and employers so that quality of a person can be judged.

We are planning to introduce more features for profile verification, profile rating, tests in the future to further demonstrate quality of a person on Work N Hire.  As far as compensation parity is concerned ‘Work N Hire’ is an open system for the employer to choose freelancer based on their quality and cost.

2)After signing up, the one thing which made an immediate impact is its designing and its similarity to Elance.com designing. Was this deliberate? Doesn’t it run the risk of becoming an Elance “clone”?

What we have tried to do is take the best UI/UX practices from the top freelancing sites in the world and tried to combine it with our own design ideas. Similarities with elance.com are not deliberate, but yes, some of the design elements might be similar.

But if you take an overall picture for the sort of website we have built it will differ widely from the current sites already in the market. The site has been customized to the needs of the Indian market and we will keep evolving it to meet the needs of this target audience.

3) Truth be told, most of the Indian clients really don’t like paying appropriately. The basic offered is 10 INR for 100 words, a very paltry amount. Won’t it be better if “Work N Hire” demarcates a minimum compensation threshold?

“Work N Hire” cannot demarcate a minimum compensation threshold based on the work category, but we will be looking to only entertain projects above a certain amount only. As mentioned earlier, “Work N Hire” is an open marketplace where an employer can choose a freelancer based on quality and cost.

What we do is highlight the freelancers that are good, based on feedback, earnings and other parameters and thereby making sure that the clients, who are looking for good quality, will have to entertain higher proposal amount from such freelancers.

4) There are many other freelance websites catering to Indian freelancers, how would becoming a “Work N Hire” member help a freelancer?

Well there are numerous websites catering to Indian Freelancers but none of them are directly operating in the Indian Freelance Market.

As a member of “Work N Hire” there is many advantages like easy and fast money withdrawals, lower fee compared to other freelancing sites, direct dealing in Indian rupee, avoiding currency exchange rate fee’s, fair dispute resolution as per Indian laws and many more.

5) What is your aim with “Work N Hire”? How do you think this initiative will help the Indian freelance writing industry specifically?

Our aim with “Work N Hire” is to create an online marketplace for the Indian Client and Freelancers to get their work done without hassle and risk.

Regarding helping the freelance writing industry specifically, for starters, freelancers will start finding opportunities with much more ease. Even the clients will have access to few thousands of freelancers under one roof which will make their life easier to find the right freelancer.

Our Escrow system will help the money transactions be secure and risk free. With our feedback system and earnings in place, good writers will start getting noticed and will start finding work even at rate which is higher than an average rate, because you will have your profile to show to your clients.

Endnote

Honestly, “Work N Hire” does look promising. Anyone visiting the website after this review will feel the same. How well does it live to its expectations remains to be seen! Meanwhile I will keep on updating this review for my readers.

Alternatively, please get in touch with me through the comments section below if you have already worked with “Work N Hire” and would like to talk about your experiences.