Looking for a flexible Joomla programmer shouldn’t be such a headache. We have two excellent guys who’ve helped us in the past who’ve done some incredible customizations for our sites.

At up to $70 an hour it’s unproductive asking them to do simple Joomla tasks so we want a few coders who are happy to do the simper work at a fraction of that hourly rate.

We used the usual channels to source some staff yesterday and were disappointed to find that we’ve rejected over 20 applicants so far.

Some might accuse us of being too aggressive in our interviewing but, considering each position we advertise gets over 50 applicants then its worth us trying to eliminate most of them efficiently.

An interview practice we’ve set up is to provide applicants with 9 simple tasks in Joomla that we know how long they should take. We ask applicants to provide a brief description as to how they’d achieve the task and how long they expect it would take.  We ask them to indicate the number of hours the job should take - knowing full well that most jobs take between 5 and 15 minutes.

We don’t tell the applicant that we know perfectly well each task should take because we’ve done them ourselves. Instead we let them assume that we don’t know anything about Joomla at all.

We have wasted hours today suffering from the same cliched messenger conversation which always begins like this:

Interviewee: Hello
Us: Hi
Interviewee: How are you?
Us: Good, who is this?
Interviewee: We are applying for your job
Us: What Job?
Interviewee: The Joomla Job
Us: OK, so have you received our email?
Interviewee: Yes
Us: So please reply to it. Do you have any questions?
Interviewee: No
Us: Ok, please do that then
Interviewee: OK
Us: Bye
Interviewee: Bye

Of the 20 we’ve rejected, 10 of them have needed to be told to follow the instructions in the email we sent to them. They all replied back to us either without providing descriptions or without providing time estimates.

Sadly the kind of time estimates other providers gave us were insulting at best, a complete scam at worst. Work we’ve done ourself in 10 minutes was quoted as a task that would take 2-3 days (8 hours of work for 3 days each!!).

Thankfully we are experienced enough to know how long simple jobs take but I pity the new entrepreneur who pays these people to create a website for them and is billed for 100+ plus hours when their ’supposedly’ cheap programmers knock out the work in a few hours.

For those of you experienced with Joomla here’s some of the estimates we’ve been given.

Task #1 Upload an existing Joomla template and delete any references within it that say "Created by Jooma Template Provider"

Longest Estimate: 4 hours

Task #3 Backup the entire Joomla website and database

Longest Estimate: 5 hours

Task #9 Add a ‘contact us’ form to an article

Longest Estimate: 8-10 hours
 

You might have your own approach for finding good quality workers. If you do please do post below.

For any of you who are not experienced in recruiting freelancers please do realize that the cheap providers often inflate the hours required to do a job by sometimes many THOUSANDS of percent.

Try to have a good idea of what the work really entails before commissioning it otherwise you risk being severely exploited.  And, if you’re not being exploited you’re probably employing an idiot!