How I hired 9 people in 7 cities in 21 days using free and low-cost tools

Here’s what I faced: I had about 3 weeks to hire 6 to 9 people to work as City Editors for the CultureMob blog. They were going to be located in 7 different metro areas and we could only pay them a small monthly stipend. Like many start-ups, we had no money and even less time to waste.

Given enough time, I’m certain I could have found people one by one, but there was simply no time to do so. Instead of Dinner Impossible, this was Hiring Impossible.

Robert Irvine of Dinner Impossible

I turned to low-cost and free tools online to find people, interview them, and get them signed to a contract. I started on April 23 and got the last contract signed on May 13. Here’s how I did it:

1. Craigslist. Duh! We had done some adverstising for writers last year and I knew that Craigslist was a good place to find people. But given that I was nearly asking people to work for free this time, I wasn’t sure how good it would be. Craigslist is so simple to use and extremely cheap at $25 per job. And with all the space to write that I wanted, I could make a good pitch about why these were good gigs. Plus, the right kind of people just hang out there. How well did it pull? I got nearly 250 resumes across 5 cities. (I found our Seattle person online and emailed her directly.)

2. Google Mail. All 250 resumes dropped into my Google mail inbox, auto-filtered to the appropriate city’s label based on the unique ID in the Craigslist anonymous email system. I discovered a small flaw in my system here: those who replied with the same subject in the same city would sometimes get rolled up together by Gmail’s threading. Not a huge deal, but I did lose track of a couple of people this way.

3. Microsoft Excel. Excel is still the workhorse of corporate America. All these years and it’s still the go-to application for keeping lists. Kept track of every applicant along every step of the way. I sent personal notes to everyone who applied at least once, and used sorting and auto-filter features to keep track of each city and who the top applicants were.

4. Genbook.com. I did Seattle and Washington, D.C. first to work out any issues before doing the other cities. Good thing. That’s when I found out that phone interviews were going to be tough. Yes, I wanted to talk to people directly, but scheduling them all via email would have been a nightmare when doing 6 cities in 4 different time zones at once. I found Genbook.com via Google in 5 minutes and within 15 had my phone interview reservation slots set up waiting for people to fill them on their own. This tool has a freemium model, and the free version worked great for me. Over three days I would check my schedule and call the applicant at the time they had selected. Only 2 out of 25 got the time difference wrong, and I didn’t hire them.

5. Comcast Digital Phone. Long distance charges a thing of the past. Glad my wife talked me out of giving up our land line, cause it came in handy here.

6. Echosign.com. The freemium model for Echosign is not as good with Genbook, but this application is so good, and so bullet proof that it was worth the extra $15 to easily get e-signatures on the contracts. It’s clear that this application could handle everything from a small business to a massive one.

Total out-of-pocket expenses? $165 to find some incredible, talented people to fill these roles for us. The added benefits were finding another site to partner up with us on content, a few people who will work as unpaid contributors, and 2o or 30 others who I could call on again if needed. I made sure that I communicated clearly with everyone about where they stood, and respected the opportunity they had given me to consider them.

All of those that were hired are already blogging, writing about great local events, venues and artists in their metro areas.