How This Will Enhance Your Business Efficiency

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another video. Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite tools that I use all the time to run my business. It's called oDesk and it allows me to outsource a lot of the work that I don't want to do to people around the world who do want to do it and lets me focus on higher priority tasks to grow my business. So I'm going to show you here, this is my page of my favorite tools that I use to run my business and we'll scroll down and we'll find oDesk. There it is. So click on that, we'll load it up and I'll tell you a little bit about it and also how I use it to grow my business. So these are basically a list of all sorts of people around the world who are looking for contract work and want to be outsourced workers. So they're never going to come into your office, you don't ever have to worry about having staff sitting next to you. They're used to working overseas remotely from their computer and oDesk facilitates you being able to work with them. So you can post a job and go through all the details of what your job is about and who you need, and what you'll find is that people start bidding on it, and you can show all sorts of different categories and pick the one that best fits what you're looking for. So if you need a web designer, you need some sales and marketing support, you need someone to do some bookkeeping for you, it's all there. Let's pick data entry. So I need somebody to help me with data entry for my business. For example. All that stuff you don't want to do, you can hire somebody overseas to do it for you. What you'll see is a list of contractors that come up. So there's 162,000 contractors who want to do data entry for you. This is fantastic. What you'll see is a list of who they are, so you see their names. This is Kathy, you'll see her picture, you'll see how many stars she's received. So just like eBay, people receive feedback from previous jobs, so she has 4.8 stars on average, received 7 feedback. You'll see what her wage is, how many hours she's worked on oDesk, where she's from, tests that she's passed. So the tests are really important. What this basically allows them to do is they can take tests in different areas, so they can say take an English literacy test, they could take a, you know, how to communicate via email test. This is for data entry, they could take a Microsoft Office test if that's important for you, and also test for other things that you may need to hire somebody for. So if you're hiring a programmer, you might want to make sure they've passed the PHP and MySQL programming test, and you might not have any idea if they're any good or not. So that's a great way to find out if somebody really has the skills or not. And she has a portfolio here, bio, and I like this part here. I like seeing the picture. I usually hire people who have a picture, so this person I wouldn't hire. Or if you see somebody who has a non-professional picture, I wouldn't hire them. But we have way too many contractors, so what you can do is start to narrow it down by different fields that might interest you. So for example, here on the right side, this lets you break it down a little bit more. So you can say, "I only want people who have received 4.5 to 5-star feedback from previous jobs." So that narrows it down. Then you can say, you know, "How much do I want to pay?" Well, maybe for data entry, my max is, say, $10 an hour. So that again will start narrowing it down a lot. You can look at tests and so this will basically allow them to take tests that will rank them against all the other people on oDesk. So from those 160-odd thousand people on oDesk who wanted to do the entry, they can all take different tests and oDesk will basically rank them for you. It saves you a ton of time. So you can say I want somebody who scored say in the top 10 10% on US English Basic and English Spelling Test. That's important for my data entry job. And maybe English is really important, and maybe it's not. Just depends on the skill that you need them to have. So you can say, maybe I need Windows XP, email etiquette, whatever it is. You can keep going down. Location, I don't care where they're located. You might prefer to have somebody Native to North America, if it's a communications type of role where they're going to be speaking with clients or emailing with clients. For data entry stuff, I usually don't really care where they are because as long as we can communicate, that seems to be okay. And then we can go and basically see what we've narrowed it down to. So now it's, you know, 2,000 people still who can potentially apply for these jobs. You can see that, you know, $4 an hour, $3 an hour, $8 an hour. And you know, if you want, you can narrow it down even more from there. But it's a great option to find people who are interested in working, doing the kind of tasks that you're not interested in doing, or maybe the, the less important tasks, so you can focus on the CEO tasks to help you grow your business. They want to work, they're used to working remotely, and oDesk helps you manage the entire process. So you can post a job, people will start to apply, you'll start seeing you know, the pictures and profiles of all the people who have applied. You can then ask them interview questions, you can ask them to take tests, you can even offer a simple trial job if you like to start testing people out, and then hopefully you find somebody who you like working with. Now that's how you kind of go about getting somebody. Working with them is also really easy, and oDesk does a good job of helping people out on that side as an employer. So I thought I would show you on my end what I see as an employer that really helps. So I'll look at somebody here, I've hired this person 13 days ago, and what it'll do is it'll show you their profile and it'll tell you how much they've worked for me. So here, this week they've worked 2 hours for me, last week was almost 3 hours, I'm paying $3.33 an hour, and what oDesk will do is Whenever somebody starts working for you, they have to log into the system to say, "I'm working for Evan now," and it starts tracking their time. And oDesk will take a 10% commission from the oDesk worker on top of the salary. So that, you know, $3.33 an hour, 10% of it goes to oDesk and the rest goes to the contractor. So it allows you to keep track of how much time exactly there is being spent on your particular tasks. You can see here that I've limited the time to 5 hours per week, so you can set a limit saying I don't want them working more than a certain number of hours and the budget, you know, kind of explodes on you. And what you can also do, and I never really do this, but you can check out their work diary. And if you want to micromanage, or especially at the beginning if you want to see how they're doing and what they're working on for you, what this does is it takes screenshots of their computers as they start working for you. And they know this. This isn't, you know, Big Brother kind of watching in without them knowing. They know that as soon as they log in to start working for me, it'll start keeping track of their time and also start recording what they're working on. So this person is doing some data entry for me. So, you know, some of the stuff involves Twitter, so they'll be on— I can see what screenshots they're doing here. They're on Twitter. And you can see that their various screenshots show what they're doing. It shows you the time, and underneath here it shows you how active they were. So if it's, you know, full green, it means like that they've been working a lot, they've taken a lot of keyboard strokes, and they've moved the mouse around a lot. So they're active, they're not just kind of sitting on that page and not doing anything. And you can see that most of the time my worker here has been pretty active, so that's great for me, no surprises. So here it kind of shows you if they're kind of mucking around on Facebook or doing other things or if they're actually working for your project. So I think it's a great way to find people who are working for you potentially. They've got the skills, it allows you to outsource almost all the tasks with your business, allows you to screen them really easily, find people who have good feedback, who've passed the tests that are needed to do that task. You can hire them on trial projects if you want to see who works best and then hire somebody for your main project. And then once you do hire them, it allows you to track their time. It's great for you, great for them. You don't have to worry about payroll. Everything goes through oDesk, and if you like, you can see exactly how many hours they've worked. You can put a cap on it and you can see what they're working on and how many, you know, keyboard strokes they're taking to make sure that they're actually doing the stuff that you've hired them to do. So overall, I think it's been a really great service. I've hired people on here to do video editing for me, to do data entry for me, to be personal assistants for me, and every time I think I really need help to grow my business, I go back on oDesk and post a new job and find new people to help me take that up to the next level. For the most part, they're very professional. They're They're trying to grow their own little independent business as well. They're trying to get good ratings. They want to get more business. And so it ends up working out really well and a great way to find great workers at pretty good prices and let you focus on the most important CEO tasks to help you get that business to the next level. So I hope you guys enjoyed how I use oDesk. I encourage you to check it out. If you did like the video or if you have any questions, please leave a comment below. I'd also appreciate any thumbs up you wanna leave on the video, and stay tuned for the next episode.