Jobs and Contracts Area

The HTML Writers Guild has (as of this writing) over seventy thousand members including Internet development professionals and enthusiasts with a wide variety of skills and experience. As a natural extension of those members' needs and the Guild's own mission, we are developing a means for Guild members to share contractual and employment opportunities with other members.

The first of these services, Request for Proposals, officially opened March 9, 1998.

Who Will Benefit From These Services?

US law makes a distinction between employees and independent contractors. This distinction may or may not exist within the laws in locations outside the United States, however, the conceptual difference is still important, because each of the four Job and Contract services serve an audience defined in terms of that distinction. For more details on the differences between free-lance or contractual work, on the one hand, and regular jobs or employment, on the other hand, please refer to the discussion included with the RFP Service's disclaimer.

If you are looking for a contractual or freelance opportunity, then you will want to post a Professional Service Offer with our PSO service. You will also want to take advantage of the Request For Proposals Service to see if any Guild members are requesting proposals for projects which require the skills you possess.

If you are looking for a regular job (part-time or full-time, long-term or temporary) then you would want to post a notice through our Jobs Wanted service, and also utilize our Jobs Available service to see if any postings match your needs.

If you have a project, or part of a project, which you would like to contract out to an outside source, you would want to submit a Request For Proposals through our RFP Service. You could also examine the listings of Professional Service Offers to see if any of the offers match the requirements of your project.

If you are looking to hire an employee (part-time or full-time, long-term or temporary) then you would want to post a Job Available notice through our JA service, and perhaps browse through the Jobs Wanted listings to see if any candidates meet your needs.

Note: These services are available to full members of the HTML Writers Guild. We will offer a portion of the service to trail Guild members as well as to the general public. If you are not a Guild member, or would like to upgrade your membership, you may become a full member by following these instructions. . For example, we allow all Guild members to post RFP's and have access to a database of expired RFPs. These RFPs will be stripped of all contact information so that users do not accidentally reply to the expired request. The available data gives users an idea of what is available to full Guild members.

Precisely How Will These Services Work?

As most of these services are currently in the planning and/or development stages, the features may be slightly different in their final implementations. In some cases, we will open a service for use while we continue to add functionality. This will allow users to take advantage of what we have as we complete the full development of the service.

Note that the HTML Writers Guild will not process applications/offers/requests/et cetera for any users. Once this information is accepted by our moderators, mailed to subscribers, and entered in our archives, we are no longer involved. Users will use the contact formation provided to contact directly the organization or individual who posted the notice/offer/request. The closest we may come to matching up notices with interested parties might be to provide a link to a targeted search of a relevant archive. For example, when a user posts a Job Available notice, we may be able to provide a link to our Jobs Wanted archive which would find individuals whose profiles match the requirements listed in the Job Available post.

Request for Proposals:

This service was the first of the four to be developed. Please review the documentation linked from the RFP Service pages for additional detail and sample interface pages.

The RFP Service has four primary features:

• Post Submission Form
  Users will use this form to enter in various data about their Request For Proposals. The form gathers contact information, time line information, language, skill, and geographic requirements for the project, as well as the main body of the RFP and a 100 word summary.
• Mailing List
  Users may subscribe to receive e-mail whenever a new RFP is posted. This e-mail will include all of the data gathered by the post form, with the exception of the main body of the RFP. A URL is provided so that interested readers may access the complete RFP. Eventually, we plan to allow users to customize their RFP subscription so that they will only receive announcements of RFPs which match their skill profile.
• Active Archive
  For as long as proposals will be accepted in response to an RFP, that RFP will be available in our archive of active RFPs. This archive is searchable on the basis of the location, time line, language, geographic, and skill requirements gathered by the post form. The poster of an RFP may chose to 'expire' their RFP out of this archive at an earlier date than given on the post form if they receive sufficient response prior to that date.
• Expired Archive
  Once an RFP has expired, it will be placed into an archive of expired RFPs. This archive is accessible to all Guild members, and searchable by many of the same criteria as the active RFP archive. All contact information (except for any that might appear in the main body or summary) will be stripped from the RFP so that users do not reply to the expired requests.
  This archive allows users to view examples of previous RFPs prior to preparing their own, and also gives users a tool with which to gauge which skills are most marketable in the Internet development industry.

Professional Service Offers:

This service will be based very heavily on the development work of the RFP service. The only significant difference will likely be the content of the records. The post form, archives, archive access, and mailing list will be very similar. Once the RFP Service has been completed, we will duplicate the service and make minor modifications to tailor it to the needs of the PSO service.

Jobs Available:

This service will be rather like the RFP service, except that it will be targeted toward regular employment and may require some slightly different data (wage, commissioned, or salaried; number of hours/wk; benefits; travel requirements; et cetera). We will begin development of this service after both RFP and PSO have been completed.

Jobs Wanted:

I dare say that you can probably guess what this service will involve after reading the above description.... This service will be developed concurrently with the Jobs Available service, after the PSO Service has been completed.

What Should We Do in the Meantime?

Until these services are in place, the Guild will have no 'official' venue for announcing available jobs (RFP is only for contract work, not regular employment. As these types of needs have come up in the past, we do have an accepted unofficial alternative. If you consult the FAQ for the hwg-business mailing list (specifically, the question about posting help wanted notices), you will read that you may request that the List Guides (lg-business@hwg.org) review your notice for posting to the list. They may give you permission to post the notice, or may have some suggestions for modification, or may explain why your post is not appropriate for that list.

This option will be available until the Jobs Available service has been opened. Please do yourself and the list guides a favor by reading the FAQ item before making a request of this nature. There are a few important guidelines listed for these sorts of posts.

In order to post to the hwg-business mailing list, you must be a subscriber to that list (and you must be a member of the HTML Writers Guild in order to subscribe to any of the Guild's mailing lists). To join the Guild, please follow these instructions. Once you are a Guild member, you may subscribe to the hwg-business mailing list, and contact the List Guides. They may consider forwarding your post for you, if you would rather not subscribe to the list. If you would like them to do so, please include a polite request along with your request that they review your help wanted notice.

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