How to hire a CRACKED remote team
Arthur Zargaryan breaks down his system for hiring remote teams on a budget, ranking countries by tier (Philippines S-tier, Poland/South Africa/Armenia A-tier) and salary. He screens candidates through automated tests for IQ and English, 15-minute interviews to check punctuality and Wi-Fi, then a paid work sample, with strict policies like mandatory cameras on during work.
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I put together this little guide which explains like where do you find people, how do you source them, how do you filter through them without looking at thousands of CVs yourself, and then how do you make the offers and hire them? And then like what are like the red flags that you look for like when you want to fire them basically? And actually interestingly enough, hiring a remote team in my opinion is much harder than hiring an in-person team. And to be honest, I don't even believe in remote work, but given that I run two companies which are remote first, we've kind of refined the art and the craft of hiring these teams. And what it would take me before 6 months to hire, now I can do it really quickly in about a month. So let's jump right into it. So who is this video for? It's basically for CEOs or anyone who's like leading the hiring. You've got some budget to hire people. So really anything under $1,000 a month, it's not worth it. And then also you have about $500 to spend on actually the hiring costs because there's some infrastructure you need to put into place. But it's quite quick and quite easy. Also, one disclaimer I want to say is that I actually don't believe in remote companies, and I run a remote company, and I'm lucky enough the team is really good there, and they're managing to do their work. But with a remote company, a lot of the energy is actually lost being remote, and I'm very, very bullish of being in person. And COVID kind of has messed that up for everyone, and everyone's trying to build remote companies now. Interestingly enough, in one of our companies, we're actually relocating everyone to be in person because you can feel that energy, and people really push things harder on another level. The trade-off you make when you hire a remote team versus in-person team is when you're in person, everyone's really firing on all cylinders. There's a lot better like exchange of ideas and everyone is much more productive. But the problem is hiring those remote staff in tier 1 cities is super expensive and you're not gonna get the crème de la crème. So what you can do then is hire remotely and there you can actually get the crème de la crème, but you gotta understand that everyone's productivity or on average the productivity might be at 90 or 80%. As if you were in person, but you'll make up for this by hiring the right people. So keep that in mind. Now, what are the geographies that I hire from and that I don't like? So, in D tier, France, Spain, Italy, basically almost any European city, their quality of life is too good. They've got really, really strict employment laws. So actually firing people is gonna be impossible if they're shit. And just their like attitude is not the right, I mean, the French are basically communists. Now, C tier, I would say Pakistan, India, US. The US are used to working hard and there's certain parts of it where you can actually get a much better priced talent. I mean, you're not gonna go hire from SF or New York. India is actually really great for hiring, and I've heard the same thing about Pakistan, but I put them in C tiers because it's not for the faint of heart. It is really, really hard to find the right people because there's just so many bullshitters, and you really need to make your way through all of that bullshit. If you are Indian or you are from Pakistan, you should probably hire from the local geography because the talent pool is so huge, and there's a lot of really good technicians. Actually in the media agency, everyone's in person in India, in Bangalore, and we've got really good talent at a really good price and they're happy, we're happy. The UK is actually surprisingly a good place to hire from because people are used to the hard work, they speak really great English, and the salaries are really, really low in the UK. They're actually comparable to what we're paying our staff in India and in some of the other geos. Some A-list locations to hire from are, for example, Poland, especially for anything engineering, South Africa is really good. You got a good time zone with Europe and they speak really good English. I put Armenia in there because I'm Armenian and actually hiring from your personal geo where you are based from or where your nationality is from is a really, really big win because you can get underpriced talent and you understand the local culture. Now the number 1 S tier for hiring in my opinion is the Philippines because on average the Filipinos are very reliable. They have really good level of English, really good education. It's actually a really good starting point for those who are not experienced hiring remotely. It's, you're less likely to get absolutely fucked and scammed. When in India and Pakistan, you're very, very high chance of getting fucked and scammed unless you know the geography. So let's talk about everything in terms of the Philippines. Here are like the budgets. $500 a month, really not worth it unless you're giving people like robotic, like web scraping work to do. $800 a month is when the like the talent starts working. So you can get like support staff. For $1,200 a month, you can actually get a really, really good talent and I have insane talent at that price. And then you just get absolutely crack talent at like $2,000. So here are kind of the price ranges for the different like roles that I usually hire for. Sales, $1,800, that would be the base plus they get commission. The reason that sales is a bit higher than all of the other roles is because it's very client-facing and you need to make sure they speak really, really good English and that actually commands a premium. For $2,000 a month, I've got an insane talent out of the Philippines. Now one thing which I struggle to hire with in the Philippines and we've actually failed every time we've tried is good engineering talent. For that, I would go to like Eastern Europe, Armenia, US even, UK is really good. You can get really, really good grads in the UK at a very good salary from like top-end universities like Cambridge, Oxford, honestly a big steal if you have the ability to train them up internally because grads just don't have the knowledge. Also, another mistake I used to do is I used to always hire people for their experience and that never actually turned out well because our budgets were never that high to be able to get A-star players. So if you're trying to hire people for experience and you've got a low budget, you're just gonna get the kind of shitty people who've not been able to grow in their role. Instead, we've changed our hiring methodology to be high IQ times really high work ethic times good vibes. High IQ means they're gonna learn things fast. Good work ethics means they're gonna progress really quickly. And then vibes means you're gonna enjoy working with them. So this profile of person will reach the person with experience really quickly and continue growing past them within months. So this is the flow we usually do. Post a job, I'll share what platforms we post it on. Then we do an initial application. We don't do a full application initially because the best talent don't wanna like apply into huge forms. And this is a really good way to get things started off. So it's a pre-filtering mechanism for us. And actually then we use some automations to look for things like language levels, IQ levels from that initial application and invite them automatically to a higher level, to like a more in-depth application process. Also that initial feedback in email makes them think that we've actually reviewed their CV. It's a bit gray hat, I would say, but it makes them much more engaged. If you're constantly asking people to do more and more work for you without them feeling like they're progressing through the process of applying, they're just going to forget about your application process because the best talent has a lot of job offers. After we send them that email saying we're really impressed with their CV, we're actually gonna do really, really detailed psychometric and IQ test evaluation. We have some software for that and I'll show you that in a minute. After that, basically at this point we filter out 90% of the people. We'll do quick 15-minute interviews to find if there's like the people are weirdos, if we vibe with them or not. From that, we'll also give them a paid test task. The reason we do it paid is again, best talent's not gonna do shit for free, especially engineering talent. And this task should reflect the kind of work they do. I'll show you a few of those in a moment as well. You can choose if you wanna give them this like cultural test, cultural interview, it's another interview stage. And then finally we give them out an offer. So here's the numbers that actually I used to hire my chief of staff/admin assistant. So we did a job post across a few places. There was 5,469 people who like looked at the job, of which 718 actually applied to that initial like simple Google form, of which 576 passed the pre-filtering. And were sent to the psychometric evaluation stage. There we had actually 414 people do that process, of which only 7 actually passed our requirements. And the biggest time save is being able to go from that 400 to that 7 and only invite 7 of them to interview. And actually reviewing all of those applications only took me 30 minutes because we've got such good processes in place. So from those 7 people who were initially interviewed, one I liked, I sent them the paid test, and then they passed the cultural test and I hired them actually. So if you're just starting off, you might want to have a few more people in the paid test, but I've started to get a quick flair for this and you will too after you hire 10, 20 people. Where do we actually job post? So the asymmetric places, basically these are the places where you're going to get the best talent at the best price, but the problem is these are hard to scale. So your personal network, asking people if they know anyone looking for a job, posting on your Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, on your personal network and hiring from there. If you have a personal brand, Huge, huge win. We've done like almost all the hiring for the agency business that I own through the personal brand of our CEO. Reddit is a really good place, especially for creatives and Instagram as well. Basically the harder it is to find a person through a channel, the more likely you're going to get a gem, right? So on Reddit you can scour through like do basically a job post and then have people apply through there. So good places on Reddit to post is like repatriation communities. So we've done that with Armenia for example, but there's like a lot of different repatriation communities. Or for example, under like r/video and then you post a job post there for videographers, have them DM you and then you send them the application form or through like Instagram, right? So you go, you find a video editor, you see who they're following, then you reach out to the people they're following, offer them the job post, they apply through it. A lot of the stuff here that I'm explaining works mainly well if you're trying to hire someone in support, sales, operations. There's certain peculiarities that you cannot really apply to people if you're trying to hire them like creatives or engineers, but it still kind of applies. So more symmetric places which are easier to scale and you can hire from are onlinejobs.ph, LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed. These are some of the platforms we use. You can see I actually have a job turning right now on LinkedIn. And then the initial contact form, we keep it very simple and the form looks something like this. You can see all the responses we got. We keep it very simple. First of all, it's where did they find us, their first name, their contact info. Their email, their English level, then also some information around their IQ. So we make them do an IQ test, upload a screenshot. So the reason we make them upload a screenshot, we're never gonna look at it. It's just so they don't bullshit this part. And then also the reason we ask them to upload their CV is because then we can mention it later on in the automations. It's a bit gray hat, but we get so many applications, we need to implement these tactics. One more thing to note here, and I'll come back to this, is note that this has a little dot. This also has a little dot. And these ones have little dots. These little dots are later gonna be used in our automations to actually filter out the people we want to move to the next stage of application. So once people apply, we're gonna be running a Zapier automation, I'll show you in a second, which basically takes all the new applicants, checks if they hit our IQ and English level requirements, waits 30 minutes, and then sends them an email with the link to the TestGorilla, which is the platform we use for the most advanced testing. And again, the reason we're sending them this email is to engage with them, show them that they have a chance so they actually go through that next process, which is very arduous and takes time to do. So this is what the filtering looks like. So a new website support form is submitted, then we're going to be filtering for certain conditions. So you can see here for this question, we're filtering for anything which contains a dot. Here's the dot, here's the dot, here's the dot. So anyone basically with above 130 IQ gets picked. The reason the IQ is set so high is because this test is quite easy. We also do the same thing with English proficiency levels. Now this is important where English is important as a role, right? Some roles don't really require that much English., but either way, I'm always looking for people with full professional or native English. This is what they self-report, and then when you do like an interview with them, you'll actually see if they hit that English level or not. Then we're gonna delay for 45 minutes to make it look like an actual human answered them, and then we're gonna send them an email. And I usually set up to send emails from careers@parceltracker.com or careers@atomicgrowth.com, my companies. The reason we have this other email is because I don't want my personal inbox being spammed or being flagged for spam. And then this is the kind of email we send them. We say that we're very impressed with their application and would like them to continue with their application process. Again, gray hat, but when you get 5,000 applications, you need a quick way to filter through it or you're gonna spend months doing this. And the best talent gets hired really quickly. So you need to move really, really quickly. And here you notice we send them a link to a test on TestGorilla. So this is TestGorilla. I will show you what it looks like in a moment. And in TestGorilla, you've got these assessment tools, like this very advanced testing. It takes them about an hour to complete this full test suite., but this really helps us do the next layer of filtering. So after they basically get the email, a big portion of them will go to TestGorilla. In TestGorilla, we use it to basically test people and then track their results. The must-have test I recommend you get in all of your tests in TestGorilla is the pattern matching test. That is a very, very good proxy for IQ. Basically allows people, it basically shows you how smart are people, how are they able to create patterns. And 99% of the work everywhere is pattern matching basically. We also do an English test. It's like a C1 or C2 high-level English test. I'll show you in a minute. And then we also do an Ocean5 personality test just to see if people are neurotic, if they're open to new experiences, will they match our culture? And then based on the role you're hiring for, you can actually set other tests. We'll also set additional questions like what type of company are you looking to join? We'll ask them to upload their CV and we'll also ask them to submit a video. We ask them to upload a CV just so we actually can look at the CV. We also ask them to change their name to green. The reason we make them make their name green is because can they read basic instructions and do they follow the basic instructions, right? So that's a really good way of pre-filtering people out. There's a really good study. So I heard about this in Freakonomics, the podcast and the book, but basically there was a band which would tour a lot and the band would have this huge book that they would give to every venue, like humongous like this, on how to set up the stage. And the thing is, if you set up a stage wrong, The whole thing's gonna collapse on you and you're gonna die. And the problem is the band does not have time to check every single like SOP in that brand, in that stage setup book. So instead what they did is they had this like really fucking request, which was in the green room where the band waits, put a bowl of M&Ms and take out all of the brown M&Ms. The reason they would do that is because this is a stupid request which people don't wanna follow usually, but If they know how to follow instructions well, then they will actually remove all of the brown M&Ms. And that's a good proxy to show that actually other instructions that they might not want to follow, it might seem redundant, they will actually do because this is the worst of the instructions. It's tedious, it doesn't seem to bring any benefits, and seems to be capricious. So it was like a canary in a coal mine. And the same thing we do here with the name being highlighted in green. And also we ask people what type of company do they want to join. The reason for that is because We want people who want to join an intense startup, are ready to work weekends. We don't want people to assume they're joining a corporate environment. And all these different things will help us actually pre-filter like people out. So basically we're filtering out anyone with an IQ— English level below 68th percentile. That means they can get 2 mistakes on the question. Anyone with a pattern matching skill under the 90th percentile. So we want only the top 10 percentile of IQ. Anyone who's not willing to join an intense startup. And then anyone also, then this will filter out already 90% of the people, maybe even 95. Then we'll actually go into each profile and look, has their average employment been more than 2 years? Because we don't want people company hopping. We'll look at their Big Five Ocean test. We'll look at if they've been cheating. I'll show you how that the software shows that. And we'll also look at their Loom video, their recorded video of about them to see if they're a good vibe and a good fit for the company. And then with the candidates, you can see the results here. Like I would not look at anything really below this point because we don't have even the time to look at it. We really want the best for this role because we're paying a lot of money as well. And then you can click into the profile. You can see like, okay, this person seems actually good. They didn't exit full screen mode, they didn't switch tabs, perfect. Their IP was correct. And then you can look at their results, good results. You look at the report. So here, emotional stability, very low. That is not what we want. In the Big Five Ocean test, we actually want people who have high emotional stability. And then this is like, you know, extroversion depends on, you know, their role and your type of company. Agreeableness, meh. Conscientiousness, we do want that high. Openness to new experience, if it's a person who's gonna be changing roles all the time, you want that to be high. So I can show you the person who actually end up hiring. So this person who actually end up hired them. So look at their like really, really good, Big 5 Ocean test. And actually when you start working with, they can bullshit this of course, but when you start working with a person or like you watch their videos and you interview them, you get a good sense for this. This is super important. And I've seen thousands of these at this point and I can tell you different trends on people on different nationalities and then different genders will have general trends in this. But I'm not gonna say, 'cause I'm gonna get absolutely hung and lynched for saying it. But yeah, and here again, you know, this person switched tabs once. So even if they cheated, they didn't cheat too much, right? Let me try to find someone who actually did cheat quite a bit. Like this person switched tabs 55 times. Definitely a cheater. We didn't even invite them to interview. And then we'll basically keep statuses here, you know, evaluated people who we like, then we invite them to interview if we really like them, so on and so forth. So once you review everything, what you want to do is you want to set aside a part of the day and create a Calendly link, like basically a calendar booking link with 15-minute time slots, and you want to invite everyone just to book for that same day. They need to find the flexibility, you don't, and you basically just invite them. And what you're looking for in these like 15-minute chats is, are they on time? Do they have good Wi-Fi? Is their English level good? And are they presentable? Like how did they dress? How do they look on this call? All of those points, if they really failed any of them, It's case for disqualification. You also want to look for things like vibes. Do you vibe with this person? And then a final point you want to do is you want to make sure you try to scare them away from the job. It's better to make the job look impossible and still have them want to do it and then actually the job's easier than make the job seem easy and actually it's really hard and the demands are too hard. What I always tell people is you're going to be working insanely long days and you're going to be working weekends. We don't always work weekends in all the companies. But it's better they come in with that expectation. So after this initial interview point, you will filter out again most of the people. You might like 1 or 2, maybe 5, and then you want to basically invite them to do a test task. So I'll show you what some test tasks look like, and actually you want to pay them for it. Estimate how much time it's going to take. It shouldn't take them more than 4 or 5 hours, and then you pay them basically how much they would get paid if they were working for you at that rate. You don't want to give them too much time to do it because you want to see how quickly these people can execute, but you do want to give them good instructions. Anyone who submits test task late, disqualified. So here's the one we do for the SDRs. These are the people in sales. We give them context on the company. We then basically with them, we made them do cold calling and actually with the SDRs before they had the initial chat with me, because that would've kind of ruined the cold call experience, I actually made them do this task before that even. Basically we told them, oh yeah, here's like an example of a lead. Here is our sales calls process. Here's like lots of information, like we're paying you $100, go do the test task and then cold call me, pretend that, you know, you're trying to sell to me and then the real interview will start after the test task is done. For the administrative assistant, actually at that time I was looking for a good lead gen software and I asked this person to basically go, I paid them like $200. I said, hey, please go look at these lead gen softwares, like evaluate for all these points, create me like a report, talk to the different vendors, yada, yada, yada, yada. Took them about a week to do it. They got everything done. It was purposely an insanely hard task because that's the kind of work that person was going to do working with me. And actually this person made an insanely good report. They even found more leads than I had asked them. They did follow-up calls, got pricing, everything. They even gave me a suggestion of which software to go with. So they really impressed me. So this kind of work will really set people apart. So after you're done with the paid test task, you'll know more or less who you want to hire. You can give them feedback, ask them to iterate on it. That's also another really good way, especially with the content writing roles. We'll always give people feedback, ask them to iterate because IRL, in real life, like when we're chatting to them, we're gonna ask them feedback. So how do they take on feedback? How do they adjust and improve? After then done with that, you give them a cultural test, like a cultural interview. This will usually when you loop in other stakeholders, like the people they'll be working with or your other co-founders, and you must run reference checks as well. So here's a bonus. When I ref run reference checks, I always ask why did this person leave the company? Would you hire them again right now? Were they your best employee? Were they smarter than you? Were they smarter than the rest of the team? Also, I would ask them if they were to have like something bad about them, what would be one thing you have to say is bad about working with them? And based on these answers, you'll know if this person is good to hire. The thing is, the best talent, the A+ talent, the people you're reference checking them with will sing their praises. Like you really feel after you've hired one or two A-star players, what the reference checks for the A-star players look like. For the moment, like when you're starting off with this, just like make sure you don't get any red flags, right? And then here are some red flags that when the person actually starts working with you, you gotta look for like people with a shitty attitude, fired. People with slow responsiveness, fired. People should be responding to you quickly in their like, in their work hours. If you have to explain the same thing to people 3 times, they're fired. I really don't believe in performance enhancement plans. Like a person is stupid, they're gonna stay stupid. It's very rare that they don't have enough context on a business or they don't have enough knowledge. You cannot improve people's IQ and really you've gotta be hiring for high IQ. And if someone got through the process and are giving you low IQ signs, then you need to just fire them, to be honest. And also look for team feedback, like how is the team responding to working with them? That's another really big thing. One more thing is with our remote companies, I force everyone to put their videos on. It's super important. Good luck doing that with the engineering team. They usually don't do it, but everyone else, videos have to be on. And yeah, my tips is keep the cameras on and don't have a remote company. So yeah, that was my quick video. I hope that's useful. I'll have my IG below. If you have any questions, shoot me a message on Instagram. Comment if you have any questions around this. I'll make another video around this, which is a bit more detailed if you want. And yeah, it's my pleasure, guys. Happy hunting, and I hope you find some A+ talent. Boom.
