Working with freelancers and telecommuting employers is a pain
Some of you may find this situation familiar: You need something done, you post a job description - either a one time freelancer that will do the designated task or a full time employee that is going to work with you telecommuting - you get a bunch of applicants, you work for a couple of weeks trying to find the right person, explaining the project in details, answering the same questions over and over, and eventually settling on someone.

The first couple of days everything works well, but a week or two down the road you begin to notice first communication breakdown - emails are ignored, tasks are pending, and the developer? not answering his skype for 10 days straight. Is he dead? did he abandon the project? No idea, just you with a half of the work done, and some money that you will never see again.

After five-six weeks you start the process all over again.

I've been there countless times, on both sides, and it always looks the same, you pay the money, a few weeks go by, features are not coming in as fast as you initially expected, and the dev starts loosing interest as time goes by - no face to look at in the morning means you can simply ignore the person. Not a fun way of doing business.

What is needed is some kind of a freelance report card - where employees and employers can post their own experience working with the other party, think of it as linkedin with employees/employers keeping tabs on one another. Item delivered on time? that's +5 points, two weeks late? that's -10 points. Your client haven't paid in 6 weeks? that's -50 points.

At first it will need to build up reputation and network - but once the network is sufficiently large, both sides will go to this report card to check on future employees/employers to see how well they worked in the past. No score on a particular freelancer? it might not be that good of a deal to make.

Good freelancers/employees will work harder to maintain their report card, and will request from employers to post a report.

You might say "But that's what Elance is for", wrong - elance is a platform designed to maximize profits for themselves - they care not for the employees nor the employers, and if you've ever worked with a freelancer from Elance you know that the scoring system there is not really genuine, and people (freelancers) often change names when they get bad rep and continue onward.

To fix this, the freelancer report card should care only about creating profiles of work-providers and work-consumers, with full on details about the person as much as required - Facebook, LinkedId, past clients, past employees, and sincere commenting/scoring that would require users to provide genuine information about themselves, and work to maintain their report card in good condition.

Reporting on employees/employers would require connecting at least one social network profile, and I think that the "quality" and "trustworthiness" of a particular profile would be calculated based on the number of "positive" connections that link to the profile - if you plugin a fake facebook account with 2-3 friends, and zero users in the report card system, you won't get a high score, but the more social networks you plugin, the more active it is, the more followers it has, and the more users are linked both in the system and in your social network the higher score you'll get.

"Unregistered" users will still be reported on - so if you work with a freelancer that isn't registered to the system, you still can report on them, providing social network handles and some review details. The only thing that "registered" users can do is to report on others and attach different social graphs to the report card.

I'd like to hear your opinion on this, and answer questions if you have them.