Where to Find Your Next Superstar Freelancer

You can get great freelance help at a great price - if you know the right place to look.

- Kalee Thompson

ABOUT A YEAR AFTER co-founding the mobile messaging service Tango in 2009, CTO Eric Setton needed more customer service help. So he turned to the then dominant freelancer platform, oDesk. “We were a tiny team, getting thousands of questions every day,” he says. Hiring freelancers helped his full-time employees dodge unappealingly repetitive work, thus improving both “service for our customers and company morale.”

No matter what sort of high-volume work or specialty one-off task you need done, there’s probably a freelancer platform that can help. Increasingly nimble technology is enabling the spread of the gig economy, allowing businesses to “access the exact right skills and people they need at the exact right time,” according to an October report by the nonprofit Freelancers Union.

ODesk, now merged with former rival Elance and renamed Upwork, is facing a growing field of competitors, but it’s still the go-to platform for Tango, which has 250 full-time employees. In addition to customer service, Tango now regularly uses freelancers for marketing design work such as presentations and email graphics—anything that could distract Setton’s full-time workers from their core goals. If you’re looking for freelance help but don’t know where to start, you might consider these online agencies. —KALEE THOMPSON

UPWORK

A Big Temp Buffet