We’re currently considering bringing contractors to help us with a backlog of work and, in theory, unblock our engineering team to work on more valuable initiatives.
We began by thinking aloud about what it would look like for external contractors to work with us. For context, we rarely work with external contractors since we have a philosophy of hiring worldwide.
we decided on a specific set of criteria that we would like for our contractors to engage in
- Only well-defined work is assigned
- Engagement will have an end date
- Contractors will need to be self-sufficient after onboarding
With the criteria above would begin looking for possible vendors to work with us. This is where the procurement process begins.
We started by gathering information from people within the company who had worked with vendors in the past and were willing to recommend working with them again.
A few companies showed up, and we started speaking to two of them at a high level.
Both companies had very similar profiles.
They were both nearshore companies with similar price points, technology experience, and a list of prior engagements providing social validation.
Since they both had similar profiles, we moved on to a more strategic way of comparing them by introducing a weighted vendor comparison matrix.
The matrix has weighted values for each of the attributes we care for, allowing us to measure each vendor critically, considering that we value specific characteristics, such as prior experience and onboarding time, differently than others such as price and payment options.
This simple exercise provided some much-needed clarity and allowed us to select the right vendor for our contractors in the future with a higher level of confidence.
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