Welcome to Hero TV today. We're talking about how to hire your first
employee. John Jonas, he's the one that taught me especially, you know,
outsourcing to the Philippines. So stay tuned that's we're going to talk
about.
Okay. So you're ready to hire your first person. Let me tell you what other people
tell you, how to do this. And then I'll tell you, how I tell you how to do it.
Most people will tell you, hey before you answer something and you're ready to
start hiring someone, what I want you to do first is to make a list. Make a list
of all the things you do in your business. And I think this is garbage.
Make a list of all the things you could outsource and blah blah blah.
That's crap because it's a giant waste of time and it doesn't really solve the
problem that you need. What you should do to get started hiring your first person
is think of one thing that you're doing that you could teach someone else to do.
Not something else but not all the things you need to get done in your
business that's worthless. Think of one thing that you do every day, that you
think you could teach someone how to do. And then, go recruit for that one thing.
Teach someone to do that one thing. It's going to take you more time to teach it
than it would to do it yourself but after you've hired this one person and
you've taught them how to do it, you have something off, of your plate. All of a
sudden, you gain time back. And that changes things. Here's how you do this.
Step one, go to onlinejobs.ph and you're gonna start recruiting there and
like I said in another video, I explained onlinejobs.ph. I also said I own onlinejobs.ph
but it is the best place to find remote workers in the Philippines
and there's all kinds of reasons why I hire in the Philippines. So, head to onlinejobs.ph
you're going to find a crazy talent pool there that is super
affordable. So when you go to hire your first person you're going to do one of
two things. You're going to post a job or you're going to contact lots of workers.
And this is the thing that I often see people make a mistake. They post a job
and they get responses back and they find the one or they start looking at
workers profiles and they find the one. And so I'll get an email from someone
that says, "hey John I'm shortlisting candidates right now and I found this
guy I really want to hire him" and that's the wrong way to go about this because
what are the cultural traits that Filipinos have is they're super loyal.
And there's loyal almost to it being a fault of their. So that like if they
already have a job and you contact them saying, "hey I'm offering you a job"
They're likely to not even respond to you because they're, they're loyal to
their employer if they respond to you that might put them in jeopardy with the
current job. So rather than shortlisting candidates and finding the one, contact
lots of people and and describe your job and say, "hey are you interested?". So for
example, in a job posted, I would make, I would give, I would say, "hey I want a
video editor and I love someone with experience and this and this and this,
these things if you have them are bonus not necessary.
Hours are very relaxed and flexible I just want you to get the work done that
I give you" Or if I was sending, if I was contacting workers I would say something
very similar to that. The one thing that you have to be careful of when you're
recruiting is don't give them too much. Say, I need this and this. I Some people
that'll say like, here's like someone I got one time, "John I need someone who can
build a website and make it look really nice and design the logo for it and
write 50 articles for it and write this custom plug-in using PHP so they're
doing programming work and that's test number one. Number two, I want them
to write 20 articles a day, and number three, I want them to be participating in
forums. Number four, I need to create a sales page and a squeeze page opt-in
that looks really nice and they can capture emails I want them to write the
autoresponder series. I was like, "what the heck?! this person doesn't exist"
So rather than saying, "hey I want you to do this and this and this and this."
when your contacting people, give them a couple specifics
like two or three and then some generics. That way, you don't scare them off.
Filipinos get scared off easily. You've contacted or you've posted your job or
you've contacted like 30 people. So in order to contact 30 people, you don't
spend too much time shortlisting candidates. You're just going to contact
a whole bunch and see who replies. If you contact 30, Maybe you get 10 who reply. If
you post a job you're going to get 50 responses. Of those 50, you're going to
immediately weed out 35 of them because they were people who just sent you a
foreign letter they didn't really apply. So now with, with the rest of the
candidates you have, here's the process that I go through when I'm hiring.
I start asking them questions. I will ask them two or three or four questions in
every communication, every email I send, well I'll just start sending them emails
back and forth and asking them questions. And I'll wait for their response. And so
when I do this, I'll do this ten times. I'll email them back about ten or
fifteen times before I hire someone. And, and what you'll find is as you ask
questions, you'll see how responsive they are. So if it takes them two or three
days to respond, well while you're interviewing them, it's probably gonna
take in two to three days to respond after you've hired them. And that's
frustrating especially when you're working with a virtual worker. If you ask
them four questions in an interview and they only answer three of them, then they
ignore the fourth one, what are the chances that when you give them three
tasks to do they're only going to do two of them when you hire them? Pretty good.
So like, I get to gauge their responsiveness, I get to gauge their how
detail-oriented they are and these are important things to me when I'm hiring. I
also get to see their personality as they respond over and over and over
again because you know, you can have some a friend help you write your your
profile on onlinejobs.ph. It's really hard to have a friend help you over and
over and over and over again, over a ten day period when you're writing e-mails
back and forth every single day. So you get to gauge their English. There's all
Kinds of stuff you get to gauge when you start responding to people over and over
again and asking questions. And I'll have some questions like, where do you live?
did you grow up watching Sesame Street or Batibot? Batibot is the filipino
version of Sesame Street. And so people who grew up watching Sesame Street tend
to have better English. I'll ask them how much money do you want to make? How much
experience have you had? can you send me examples of this?
Do you live with
your family? or do you live alone? Are you married? you have kids? I'll ask them
specific questions about the job over and over again and then I'll ask them
things like, in the beginning I'll often ask like,
Can you attach a picture of a
pink Cadillac to your response.
And the only reason I do that is just to see are
you paying attention? you know? So I'll do silly things like that one
interview. And really just to gauge,
how are you,
how do you interact with me? So once you've gone through all this, you're
gonna have a gut feeling of who you should hire. Go with your gut. A couple
times, I've said I really just think I should hire this person but this person
looks better on paper. I'm gonna hire this person. And it usually it ends up
better if I go with my gut so stick with, you'll get impressions as you as you
start recruiting people and you email them over and over again. Just something
will trigger in your mind like, "oh that's the guy. That's the one I want."
So then offer them a job. I see too many times where people say, "hey I want
to do a trial with you. I want you to do this work and then I'll see if I like
you or not" And then that often scare people away. It'll, it'll scare them there,
Filipinos are very scared about doing work and not getting paid. And so unless
you, if you don't offer them a job and you just say, "hey I want to try this"
you may have just lost a good candidate who you've done this recruiting for. Another
thing I avoid when I'm recruiting that first person is, I don't want to talk to
them on the phone because they don't want to talk to me on the phone.
Filipinos are shy. They don't like to talk. And so if you try and set up a
Skype interview with them, they may set up the interview and then not show up.
That's super common. and there's a couple reasons behind that. One, they're scared.
They're, you know, you're a foreign boss and Filipinos look up to foreigners
and that's scary for them. Two, they're worried that, that you might not
understand them and they're embarrassed about it. Usually their english is pretty
good and they know they'll understand you because they watch American TV and
American movies, but
they're worried that you won't understand them and they're
embarrassed about that. So anything you can do to avoid talking to them or
interviewing them on skype is, is a really good idea. I do all my
interviewing through email. Unless it's for a voice position where someone's
going to be talking on the phone. Then I, then yes I definitely need to talk to
you on the phone or on skype. Otherwise, I don't. So then, once you've hired them, you
you've offer them a job, the first thing is to teach them. Teach them what
you want them to do. Give them training. Even if they say they know how to do it,
go through a training process with them. Like, you hired someone for SEO and they
say they know how to do SEO. Say, what would you do? Well, give me a plan here
for how would do this and then and then help
them modify it. Even if you don't understand it, it's probably a good idea
to understand some because it'll make your life easier with them, just Filipino
culture, this, this is important in the Filipino culture. Work with them, teach
them, train them, show them that you're there to help them do their job. That is
a big deal especially the first time you hire someone. That they know you're
willing to help. If you just set them free and and don't let them know that
you're willing to help them, do their job, you're very likely to have problems with
this person where they get embarrassment, and they want to disappear. So if you have a
disappearing Filipino worker it's probably because you didn't put in
enough time with them or enough instructions with them or enough
feedback. They didn't trust you enough. So especially in the beginning as you get
started, this teaching and training is really really important. So then after
they've worked for you, in the beginning, I'm going to suggest that you
pay them once a week for the first couple months. Filipinos are very
scared of not getting paid so if you pay them once a week they'll they'll feel
better about it. After couple months, you can change to paying paying once a month.
Also, and this is super important for me, is require a daily email from them.
require daily communication with them. And in that in that communication, you
want to ask three things. Number one, what did you work on today.
Number two, what problems did you run into and number three, what can I help
with? Those are the three things that I require my Filipino workers to respond
to me with every single day. I want to know what you worked on because if you
didn't work on something today you have a hard time answering that question. That
daily email just makes this work so much better it makes it so much more
effective for you, it makes it more effective for them, it makes managing
them more effective. So require that from the very very beginning. A daily
email of what they worked on every day.
Thanks so much for watching hero TV
today and thanks so much John. Really appreciate teaching me this stuff
and teaching everybody here on Hero TV. Great. I want to share how I found one of
my best team members. I gave him a really hard assignment up front and it's one
that that would make most applicants uncomfortable but I was looking for some
very specific things worked, okay? I required him and
several applicants to apply by video. So he talked jump talked about it's
uncomfortable to be on the phone they're really shy, and I did get on the phone
but I did have him you know pull out his phone and record a video of themselves
answering some questions and then they have to figure out how to upload it to
YouTube and how to send me the link and a lot of the applicants couldn't do that
or wouldn't do that and that was a great, great filter I have. I think in that
instance, five, maybe six or seven different applicants send me a video. Some better
than others. There were a few that were fantastic. The one that just stood way up
above the others and that he's working for me for several years.
I highly recommend it when you're looking for somebody that you just need to really,
don't know, what's the word? Video interview. I love it. I think it's a great idea.
Remember live on purpose, make a difference, be the hero.