Michael Levinson on oDesk, hiring made smarter

Hiring has always been a major pain, not just for small companies but also for major corporations. With the office being more decentralized than ever in the post-Internet era, managers have to deal with the possibilities of hiring remote teams to be more cost-effective. Having remote teams, however, brings with it other difficulties especially when it comes to coordinating tasks, clocking work hours and paying salaries.

We spoke to Michael Levinson, oDesk‘s Vice-president of Products, prior to Echelon 2011 to hear his views on how employees can leverage on the connectivity of the web to track remote jobs and improve efficiency.

What are some trends that you’re seeing in the way people distribute work globally and in Asia?

We’re seeing the idea of the distributed team start to lose its novelty and become more “normal”, if you will. Many companies start out with small side projects, ancillary work, and then as they’re looking to fill core roles, they realize that if they look beyond their local area there is a world of talent out there at their disposal. Especially if you’re starting a company in an area that doesn’t have a deep startup scene, distributing work can actually be a necessity – not just a way to save money but a way to fill roles you wouldn’t be able to hire for any other way.

How can consumer Internet entrepreneurs use oDesk?

Almost every day, I find someone using oDesk in a new way that I never thought of before. I just pulled the last couple weeks of jobs posted by Singapore-based companies on oDesk. One posted for a full-time “Experienced Magento Developer” for an e-commerce site, while another posted a project to “Write 10 Articles about Compulsive Hoarding Syndrome”. Just about any type of computer-based work you can think of, it’s getting done on oDesk.

How has oDesk’s product evolved over the years?

oDesk started as a way for companies to hire small teams of software developers remotely by the hour. Over the years we have broadened the offering to support more types of work, as well as much bigger teams and organizations. We’ve also invested a lot in billing and payment, as getting money to workers who live in other countries is one of the top pain points of distributed work. Lately we have been investing in simplifying the user experience, and some new innovations to help companies and workers make better matches in the marketplace. We are never done, there is always more to improve!

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