Microjobs, or “micro jobs” have been part of the online business landscape for more than a decade.
What started with shady businesses hiring low cost workers to click on ads or send spam emails have today been taken over by legitimate businesses that use workers to automate or outsource processes that are repeatable and can be easily hired for.
Amazon mTurk, TaskRabbit and ClickWorker are some of the popular websites to find microjobs.
As a business owner, you may be interested to know how you can benefit from the microjobs landscape. Here is a quick guide to help you through this.
How Are Micro Jobs Different
Platforms like Freelancer and Upwork have plenty of data entry and data processing projects that can be considered microjobs. But are they?
One important differentiator between regular freelancing projects and microjobs is project ownership. In a typical freelance project, the service provider is in charge of the complete task.
For instance, a data entry project on Upwork might need the freelancer to input a thousand rows of data from another source in exchange for a predetermined fee. This project can take anywhere between a day to a few weeks. Some projects are also ongoing.
Microjobs, on the other hand, do not provide project ownership to the service provider. Instead, they are paid for every task they perform.
Another key differentiator is that a regular freelance project is handled by one provider. If you need to build an Android app, you would assign the job to a freelance Android developer who handles the development completely.
A microjob, on the other hand, may assign this same project to hundreds of different microjob service providers. These workers are then paid based on the number of tasks they complete.
Of course, not all data entry projects can be assigned to micro job seekers.
Also, not all micro jobs need to be online based. TaskRabbit, one of the popular platforms in this space, for example, pays its workers for running small errands like buying groceries or helping with moving furniture.
These are one-off tasks unlike Postmates or Uber where gig workers perform the same task over and over again for different projects.
Micro Job Examples
Here are some real life examples of micro jobs.
- Hire workers to add ALT texts to images on your website
- Add subtitles to video
- Go through a spreadsheet and improve content formatting\
- Approve comments on your blog as spam or not
- Capture information about business or professionals
This is but a small list. Here are a few ways different departments in your organization can use micro job portals to save costs and build efficiency in their projects.
Human Resources: Organizations that use a software to onboard new employees to have checklists that each new recruit must go through. You can hire a micro worker to check if a particular employee has fulfilled specific criteria (like going through the onboarding kit, or filling up certain forms) and make suitable notes or send reminders accordingly.
Marketing: Micro jobs are incredibly useful to marketing teams. Consider this specific scenario with Instagram marketing. You can hire a micro tasker to go through each of your posts and make a note of whether your submissions contain a relevant Instagram caption, ALT tag, and also other things like the number of hashtags, comments, replies, etc. This can be useful in understanding the impact of each of these components towards the success of your campaign.
Moderating UGC: User Generated Content is an incredibly attractive marketing channel for businesses to both build content as well as engage with their target group. However, some kinds of UGC will need extensive moderation. Blog comments are a good example of this. You can hire a micro tasker to approve comments after assessing if they are spam or not.
Best Places To Hire For Micro Jobs
Amazon mTurk: On mTurk, every task assigned to a worker is called a HIT (Human Intelligence Task). There is no consensus on how much it costs, But the average worker earns between $6 to $10 per hour on mTurk. Adding the 20% commission that businesses pay Amazon, expect to shell out around $12 per hour for tasks on mTurk.
Fiverr: Fiverr has long moved away from microtasks and is more or less a proper freelancing website today. However, it is not uncommon to use Fiverr to hire for micro jobs. If you have moderately intensive tasks that you pay dollars for (and not pennies like with mTurk), you can go with Fiverr. The minimum you pay for on Fiverr is $5 per project.
ClickWorker: There are a number of different categories of tasks available on ClickWorker like correcting texts, processing data, proofreading, test apps, etc. As a business, it is not recommended to hire random Joes on the internet to proofread the text for you. However, for other tasks, you can use ClickWorker for pennies a task.
TaskRabbit: TaskRabbit is a popular micro job service that is primarily geared towards the offline market (think moving furniture or delivering groceries). However, there are also several online tasks that one can hire taskers for.
In addition to this, there are several other platforms like RapidWorkers, Gigbucks, Microworkers and Damongo you can hire from. I would however recommend using one of the bigger platforms to begin with, and only use the others when you are unsatisfied. Larger platforms like mTurk offer scale which is a pretty important criteria when it comes to microtasks.
Have you hired people for micro jobs? Share your experiences and advice in the comments.
