Hiring Global Talent

Business Brain, episode 549 for Casual Wednesday, May 15th International Family Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Business Brain. We're the show where we take a few ideas, we crunch them together, we dissect them together so that we can use them together to tune our business brains together each and every week. Our sponsor for this episode is LinkedIn Jobs, where you can go to LinkedIn.com businessbrain and post your first job for free. I've used it. I love it. We will talk about it a little bit more later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And still out here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. Great to have it. Super duper Family Day a couple days after Mother's Day. That's pretty good.

Yep, that's right. International Family Day. Yeah, sure.

That's. That's fantastic.

I like it.

I do, too. That's great to have LinkedIn sponsoring us again. They're back a couple times.

Yeah, they've been a little while, but yep, it's good to have them back.

We had some great comments up there in the last Friday's episode. We talked about how to get sponsors for your podcast if you're in the podcast business. That was great. I had a bunch of people reach out, ask some questions. So make sure you listen to that episode.

I will put a link in the show notes for that.

Yeah, yeah, that's perfect. I want to talk before we get into our main topic, which we're going to talk about global talent, I want to talk about this, what I'm calling snowball decision making. And let me give you a description. I'm curious on your take on it. So I have a coaching client that I'm working with. Great guy. Run into some issues with a few different government agencies that he's kind of behind on some payments and different things and trying to figure out the best way to move forward, to get caught up and to call and reach out and get these things situated. And my take on it is to start with the smallest one first because it gets you some experience, gets you flexing your muscles of calling and trying to talk your way through it and getting your story right, even though you know, you know your story, but you.

Might be your delivery of your story, right? Yeah, your delivery.

I love it. What's going on? Why I miss these payments? I want to do the right thing. I need to make them up and I'm ready to work out like a payment plan, you know, every, every if. If you act in good faith. In my experience, every government, government agency, federal or state, if you owe them money, they will work out a system to get your money. They want your money. And if you don't have it all at once, they will work with you to pay them over time. Yes, you will pay in interest. You might pay some penalties, but these people would rather have your money than have, you know, some more problems for you, which turns into more problems. Problems for them.

Yeah.

So I, anyway, I suggested, I just made that because his question to me is like, who do I call first? And I said, well, pick the smallest number that you're the least intimidated by and call. And I guess that's kind of the think talking through this now. You know that. I guess where I got this snowball thing is that Dave Ramsey, he does the same thing with debt.

Okay.

The debt snowball. Start with your smallest debt and pay it off. I'm just curious if you thought that using it on the other side, from a business perspective, if you think that's, you know, a good system.

Well, I, yes, I do. Except when it comes to government agencies.

Okay.

The every bit of advice I've ever gotten is they will use what you say against you. You're you, what you have said is correct. Right. You, you are absolutely right that, that if you approach them the right way anyway and tell them, I know I owe you money, I, I, I can't pay it all at once or I want to pay, you know, whatever it is. Like everything you said is right. I would work with my accountant to do that, though.

Yeah. I made that suggestion to this.

I would pay, I would pay an accountant to do it because the IRS treats you differently when you have an accountant, and they will. If you don't have your delivery, like you said, your story is your story. But if you don't have your delivery. Perfect. And you don't have experience delivering those stories to the irs. Everything I have heard says to get an accountant, you know, a certified, like a cpa.

Like that advice. Yeah, yeah.

To do that.

Maybe you can listen in on the call or something.

Oh, you should like that. Yeah.

I like the idea of having a representative to call for you.

Yes.

Because your, your point is dead on. If you say the wrong thing.

Yep.

And you don't want to, you don't want to say the wrong thing. They're going to look into you. If you say, all I can afford is to pay $2,500 a month, they're going to find out if that's all you can afford.

To pay. That's right.

So you want to be careful how you represented it. And I do like the idea, I still like the idea of starting with the smallest amount.

I think that's. I think that's a good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To get the process going. But I, I do recommend having your accountant, maybe an attorney or somebody, you know, reach out on your behalf if you've had, if you've dealt with this before, share your tips, feedback at BusinessBrain show. So we can share with everybody here these things. I, I will give you one little more bit of advice. If you do make the call and you get kind of a nasty person on the line, just hang up and call back.

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I am so. Yeah, I love to talk about this. So this, this term, global talent is really popular online. Leased up on expiring, you know, assistants and everything in other countries.

Yeah.

Not only do you, you know, I think initially it was all about saving money, but I think now that's gone. That's certainly part of it, but it's gone beyond that too, as far as getting qualified applicants to help you out.

Yeah.

And so I'm hiring a person to help me, like a content manager, if you will. Not to create content for me, but to help manage all of. I don't have a problem making the content, I have a problem distributing content.

That makes sense, right?

Yeah, yeah. The follow through. So I, I need help. Someone that's organized, someone that's familiar with, you know, social. I'd like to have all the content I create on X. I'd like to have it on LinkedIn as well, but I'm just not super motivated to go put it up there. Every time I, I start and then.

I stop and I start, I totally get that.

Yep. And you know, X gives me instant gratification, so it motivates me to give feedback and I make great connections there where LinkedIn's a little more, takes a little bit more time to get feedback, but certainly valuable.

It's a longer response curve. Yeah, exactly.

Longer response time.

Yeah.

And at the same time, I've got a significant amount of people that have subscribed to my newsletter. And the only problem is I have no newsletter, so I need to, you know, grow that. So anyway, I'm trying to hire this person, did a little bit of research. I've hired, they used, you used to call it offshore talent or virtual assistant, which I think, I don't like that term.

I presume these people I'm hiring, regardless of where they're located, are real people. They're not virtual people. They're just remote.

You got it.

That's it.

Yeah, exactly. So I've done that before, but now there's a number of agencies out there that will. And I guess they've been there for a long time, but I think there's been a, a bloom of new ones that'll kind of hold your hand, walk you through it, represent how it's going to work. And so I picked this one company called Pavago, and we'll put a link in the show notes, and it was pretty cool. So I, I, I, I walk you through how, how it worked. They kind of gave me A rundown. It's pavago, pavago.co.

Yep.

Is the, the thing. And they do an interview with you. What do you want, what do you need? What's your business? What do you hope to achieve? How do you define success? And then they go out and find, you know, people and they interview them. And then what I really liked is I got to watch the interview after, you know, they set it up, had the, their, their rep going through the interview, talking to these folks. And then after that I could pick, pick them out, go through, hey, this is who I want to talk to, this is who I don't. So I picked a couple, did my own interviews. And that's this where it got a little tricky because I had two prospects. One was very experienced, had done this kind of thing before, like to work autonomously, which is great. All those things that are important.

Yep.

But the second one, second prospect, didn't quite have all the experience exactly related to what I'm doing, but seemed a lot more organized. And I think that, that my gut instinct was that's what I probably need more help with. And so, but, so I posted up on X, I said, hey, here's the breakdown, just like I described. Who should I hire? And 99% of the people came up and said, hiring prospect number one. Well, because she's got the experience.

I, I want to add one of the thing because I, I, I commented on this post.

Yeah, yeah.

And one of the things that in your post you said about prospect number two was that they self identified as a workaholic.

Yes.

And to me that was the big red flag, especially with a, you know, remote assistant, whatever. Largely because I found that many of these people wind up picking up many jobs.

Oh yeah, yeah. It's a good point.

And that can be, that would be.

What you would, of course, you would want many jobs. Right. Wouldn't that be, shouldn't I just assume that that's what they're doing?

Oh, it depends. Are you, are you hiring them by the hour? Like, are you hiring them full time?

I'm going to pay them a salary and I'm going to have KPIs. Then they meet certain benchmarks, they can get a bonus. I get it. And maybe I should have added some nuance that came up when I said how I'm really focused on outputs. Right. We talk about that all the time. If they're able to get all the stuff we want done in less time, that's okay. So I think I was mentioning it in some kind of about working autonomously. It's like, look, I want to give you direction. I want you to go, go, go. And I want to get these things done on a certain timeline. And that's when they said, oh, well, yeah, I like working that. I'm kind of. I'm a bit of a workaholic. I'm going to work and get everything done. And I could see how that's a red flag. So I listened to all the comments up there, and the consensus was overwhelmingly.

Hire somebody with the skills.

Yeah, yeah. But so I, I, and I talk about my gut instinct all the time, so. And I, I went against the consensus. I hired. I hired number two. Got it. And we'll have to see how it works because of course, I think. Yeah. And I'll keep it. You know, I'll keep everyone posted here because I made that choice because I just think I need somebody that's more administratively strong than creatively strong. And I'm hoping, yeah, that person gets me on. Keeps me on task more.

My only hesitation is that there are tricks, skills, whatever you want to call them to the social media game. And if somebody doesn't have that, that might be a pretty big hill for them to climb.

Could be, yeah. And one of the great things I love, like working with this agency, Pavago, is I'm paying a subscription. Yep. And anytime I want to swap this person out, if it doesn't work out, I can do it. Now the question I have is how do I keep number two? Ideally, I'd hire them both.

Right.

I'd hired this organized or this organized person to be. I love this term that's thrown around a lot. My chief of staff. That's. That's the.

Sure.

You know, I, I love seeing that out there. So then the creative person down below. But I, I can't do that right now. It's too much for me.

It's too much one person.

Too much. So I'm going to reach out to this, to this prospect number two. Hey, look, you know that I'm going to go with this route hours.

Are they gonna. Like, where are they located?

Pakistan. Okay. They work my hours.

I was gonna say. Well, they work your hours.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

For the stuff that we need to. I'm flexible. Like, if you're just organizing and building things, it's okay with me. You don't have to be doing it, you know, when I'm there.

But yeah, I, I'm curious how this works out, because I've done a lot of this and I have found for contract type work. The offshore stuff has been great. Right?

Yeah.

The. When hiring full time. There's a reason I use LinkedIn to hire Sadie because we had people like her with a different business that I have that we had used a service like you're discussing here and it was a freaking nightmare managing these people, I.

Think it can be.

And we'd had a couple of them and it was like, all right. So when it came time to, to hire Sadie was like, well, I'm going with LinkedIn jobs. Yeah. Like I want to hire somebody here in the United States. Sure. Understands how to communicate because they're going to be doing communication on your behalf. And so like living, living in the culture. I, I have found it's a really. I mean, I'm curious to see how this goes.

Me too.

I'm just sharing.

I'm bringing it up because I'm, I love building in public.

Yeah.

And we'll see how it, how it turns out, whether I made the right choice or not. But if you, you know, I, I've had it work out really well, but in the past and I've had it be disastrous from a standpoint of it. It is tougher to get the. Someone who's not in the here in our culture. Get them to understand the business processes.

Right.

And the, and the whys behind it. They're. They're often phenomenal at whatever the skill is.

Yes.

The tactic. Getting that done.

Yep.

But from a, from a strategy point. No, no. So I'm hoping. And I haven't done. I haven't hired anybody like this in about 10 years. So I'm hoping that it's different. And these, you know, this person is very highly educated and super intelligent. So we'll just have to see whether. Because like I said, I have no problem creating the content. That's what I do all day. I'm writing, I'm doing.

But every platform needs a different voice platform. Like it's the nuance. Yeah, exactly.

Nuance.

Yeah.

And I'm optimistic that, that it's going to work. We're going to have to see.

I mean, you're probably right. Like it's probably experiment.

It's an experiment and it's of course. So, you know, it's a 90 day probationary period as we work things out. And then I put, you know, certain, certain KPIs in there. Try to build. The number one thing is if in the next 90 days I'm able to get this newsletter launched, template it out, take my existing content and repurpose it for the newsletter and continue to build that out.

Yep.

That'll help me with success. You know, I'm building, I'm building a funnel to bring people to me that value my experience for my, my coaching business. So I mean that's what we're ultimately trying to do. But I want to do it in, in a warm way. I don't want to go out in cold. You know, the thought of trying to build clients that way is good. So if you've had experience using people like this feedback at BusinessBrain show, share us so we can share it with everybody here and help each other build.

Yep. Like he said, feedbackusbrain show and yeah, let us know. We like to, we like to hear from you. We've got some feedback coming in on the Friday episode so we'll, we'll, we'll discuss that. We'll use it to tune our business brains. Until then, keep living that charmed life and we'll see you on Friday.