Hiring people - a job on its own

Yesterday I more or less finished the design for the project I am working on. As it turned out, it will require quite a bit of CSS knowledge to accomplish all the small little design touches that I hope to utilize in the design. I myself haven’t really done much coding since the days when table-based design was the hottest thing around, and my experience with CSS is somewhat limited. Because of this I decided to save myself from the pain, agony and timewaste of doing it myself, and looked to hire someone to code the theme instead.

I posted this little “job-advert” on vBulleting.org and WebHostingTalk. I would have posted it on the SitePoint MarketPlace as well, but since they charge money even for simple listings as this one, I decided not to, seeing how I was confident of finding someone qualified to do the job on one of the places mentioned above. So far the response has been decent. Some of the applicants actually look like they are interested in taking me up on the job offer, while others again don’t really look that interested, and seem to be contacting me more for the sake of it. One example of this:

hi i can code ur theme in no time here is my info (Instant Messaging handles follow)

Seriously, how can anyone expect to be hired by presenting themselves like this? I am amazed that it’s even possible. I guess that is what you get in an open market where everyone and their mother can offer their “services”. I also decided to get in closer touch with one of the applicants, just to see what he was about. He asked me to pay half the fee upfront, and I told him that once I saw a working demo of the skin I could pay him half the money, and then the rest upon delievery. He said he was fine with this, and I haven’t heard back from him since, despite putting in my best efforts to get a response from him through Messenger.

When I logged on a little a while ago, I had gotten an application that matched my expectations however, and I am hoping that I’ve found the right person for the job. In his application he presented himself in a proper manner, and included links to some of his previous work, which definately looked up to the standard that lead me to believe that he can actually code my design properly. Right now I am currently awaiting his response, but hopefully this will be a done deal soon, and the design will be up and ready to go in not too long!

Update: I had a nice conversation with the person I mentioned above, explained to him all the specifications of the design, and he agreed to take me up on it. The ETA of the design is sometime over the weekend, Monday most likely. Hopefully this means that the design part of the project is finished, and I can move on to the next stage of the development phase.