Elance introduces new system to manage outsourced work

Elance, an online outsourcing marketplace, has unveiled a new  “remote work system” to help businesses track and pay their outsourced staffers. The Elance site is already a popular destination for companies offering outsourced jobs and people seeking such jobs, but its offerings to help employers manage those workers they’re hiring them were a bit more limited. There are already a few management and payment features, but the remote work system is Elance’s attempt to provide a full set of tools.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Elance is also releasing some numbers to back its claims of being a leader in the field, which also includes sites like oDesk and Rentacoder — since launching in 2006, the company has facilitated more than $100 million worth of outsourced work, and there are now more than 100,000 service providers offering their talents on Elance. In comparison, oDesk (which was founded in 2004) has a network of around almost 89,000 providers who have completed $38 million worth of jobs, according to oDesk’s oConomy statistics page.

Elance already has a robust system in place for finding jobs or workers, depending on what you’re looking for. Employers, for example, can conduct video interviews before hiring someone, and there’s also a way for job seekers to become certified for different skills — so if someone on Elance claims to be a great PHP programmer, businesses can see if they took Elance’s test to prove their skill.

The idea behind the remote work system is to provide the similar services for businesses once they’ve actually found someone to do the outsourced work. These projects an can now be managed from a new page called the “workroom,” a centralized location for all of a company’s interviewing, hiring a collaboration. Also, each provider is now required to turn in a weekly status report on their work. Businesses can convert those reports into invoices with just one click, and then issue payments based on those invoices. Not only do the reports keep employers up-to-date, they also let Elance know how different jobs are progressing, and whether there are particular problems with an employer or service provider.

None of these features may sound all that impressive when compared to the detailed monitoring (screenshots, keystroke tracking, etc.) provided by companies like oDesk. But they do add a new dimension to Elance’s apparently successful offering, and for many companies they may be good enough, or even a preferable alternative to micromanagement. Chief executive Fabio Rosati argues that the more high-level tracking provided by Elance’s status reports better reflects how people work. After all, if you’re a programmer or a designer, for example, you may spend a lot of work time thinking or jotting down notes.

“Sometimes [people] do work without staring at a computer and tapping on a keyboard,” Rosati says.

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