A lot of X-Ray searches are stacked in favour of people looking for Permanent staff, rather than professional contractors.

Here, we’ll show you some techniques to redress the balance. There are more and more freelancer sites popping up and they attract people from across the globe who can work remotely, or on site.

On these sites you'll find a good mix of Contractors and Interims who can commit to long term projects, together with professionals looking for shorter term engagements.

Using the techniques we’re about to show you, you can quickly search across these sites to pick up candidates with all manner of skills.

The major freelancer sites where you'll find candidates are:

• People per Hour
• Elance
• Freelancer
• oDesk

Unsurprisingly, we’ve built a tool that you can find here that allows you to search all of these sites, in one fell swoop, without adding the formatting. Just type in your keywords and locations, and you’re away.

But for those who like to know the method behind the madness, read on to see how to search a couple of them independently.

People per Hour

Our personal favourite and home to a myriad of freelancers across all manner of sectors, in all corners of the globe. We’ve found Developers, Designers, Accountants and more to take on contract work, always to a high standard.

To search specifically PPH profiles you’d enter:

site:peopleperhour.com/freelancer

Then just enter the keywords you’d be looking for, together with a location. Simple! Worth pointing out that this will return all results where that location is mentioned on their page – it doesn’t guarantee they live there.

So you’ll get some hit and miss results, but in amongst them will be plenty of suitable freelancers whose quality you can vet in an instant by checking their feedback percentage. You could even find ‘The Best Web Developer on Planet Earth”!

As a rule, we don’t work with Freelancers who have a below 90% feedback rating, but that’s just our own personal decision. You'll soon get a feel for how reliable the reviews are.

oDesk

oDesk is another similar site to People Per Hour where you can find freelancers.

For this one, the format to target users is as below:

site:odesk.com/o/profiles/users

And just as with People Per Hour, all you need to do is enter your keywords and location, and then you’ll have a list of freelancers to contact.

You can either sign up to the sites to message these candidates directly, or once you’ve found them, try searching their names and images across other sites for contact details.

Happy hunting!