Guru.com

Guru.com has the most members of the four sites, having amassed over 170,000 registered workers. With powerful tools for matching people with the right projects and empowering members with value-added information and business management services, Guru.com offers an ideal venue for independent professionals to find work and for employers to find people to fulfill projects.

To become a “guru:’ you create a profile of your skills, education, references, and your ideal job free of charge. You can publish or hide different sections of your profile, which is accessible via its own URL. If you’re just getting started as an independent, Guru.com includes tips for keeping your profile up-to-date and making long- distance relationships work—a key for remote workers.

You can either wait for employers to contact you or “Find a Gig” by searching by category or keywords (a large percentage of the gigs we saw were in the IT and creative fields). A Power Search option lets you search by such items as pay rates, availability, and location. Saved Searches let you capture criteria and receive updated search resuits once a week. Once you find a project, you apply for it and start an e-mail dialog with the project owner, called the hirer.

Hirers can search for gurus or post project descriptions and wait for gums to contact them. Hirers pay a fee (between $53 and $125 per posting) iftheyhire a guru. Starting in July, hirers will be able to rate gurus based on their project performance; gurus with better ratings will appear higher in search results,
To jump-start the process, Guru.com suggests gurus to hirers if the skills match a protect when the guru first posts a profile. This intelligent matching saves employers and gurus time.

To promote high-quality bids and projects, Guru .com uses a blind-bidding model where all bids for projects are private. This eliminates most of the “lowest-bidder” competition and forces gurus to put serious thought into each bid. With average project values around $15,000 and over 2,000 gurus matched with projects at the time of this story, Guru.com’s high-quality model seems to be working.