Please share legitimate link building strategies and tips. Does it make to hire someone to do that? What would be criteria for hiring???
In your case it would be better to hire. It would be good to give us a little info on what type of site you want linked.
You can search for web sites that are in your niche and then contact them and offer to contribute to their content. Many blog publishers are more than happy if you offer to write a well researched guest article. Within the article you can link to your site. But for this strategy you need to find really targeted web sites.
hpgoodboy recommend the most traditional way of link building strategy, but personally, i had experience that this method give you success rate at less than 10%. If budget permit, i would rather suggest you to buy a link building service.
Writing articles with great content that you can submit to directories and/or allow others to reprint on their websites is a legitimate link building strategy.
Writing articles seems to the most effective strategy at the moment as long as you can spin and distribute the articles to a number of sites. This is slow enough to appear natural to Google and can easily be outsourced.