Evan Carmichael shares his three-step system for hiring remote workers on oDesk. Embed a hidden skill-test question in the job description to filter out 80% of applicants who don't read carefully, then run a small paid trial project to assess quality and initiative before committing to ongoing work.
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Welcome to another Technology Tuesday. Today I'm answering a question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Crap Stuff, who wrote in to say, Evan Carmichael, thanks sir for this amazing video. Could you possibly make a video for those who want to hire on oDesk? Something like how to hire an employee on oDesk. Well, Crap Stuff, this is a great question and I love oDesk, okay? I have, I have a man crush on oDesk. I found such great people to work with me on exciting projects, to do an amazing job, and it's all remote, right? Nobody's actually sitting here in your office doing stuff. They're all doing it on their own time when they want, but delivering. I've recommended oDesk to a lot of different entrepreneurs, and people have had a hard time finding the right people, and they wonder how, how I'm so lucky compared to them. I have a different hiring process, okay? I have a really different hiring process, and not just on oDesk. This is That's what I do bringing somebody on locally too. I think the regular hiring systems are broken and somebody can look really good on paper, right? You beef up your resume. Some people can do really well in an interview and they breeze through all the interviews, but they don't end up being a great worker, right? You end up having to fire them after 3 months and I hate going through that process. What's more important to me is I want somebody who loves what we're all about and is a worker. And if you don't have the answer, you'll go out and find the answer. That's what I think we need in entrepreneurial businesses, and I've developed a system for how to find that on oDesk. So I'm going to share it with you, and hopefully you can apply it and be one of the lucky ones who get results with oDesk. So number 1 is have a skill testing question. Whenever I post an ad on oDesk and post in a job posting, I always have usually one big, long, ugly description, right? I don't make it easy for somebody to read through my job posting. A lot of the reason why is I'm not always a super a detail-oriented person, but I need my teammates to be, right? I need people to complement that weakness in me and be really detail-oriented. So I need them to read this big job posting, big ugly paragraph, right? And in the middle, I have a skill testing question. And it's usually something really easy, like how many Twitter followers do I have? How many YouTube subscribers do I have? Somewhere just buried. It's totally random and it's in the middle of this big chunky paragraph, this question. And then people, have to answer that. And I say answer this question in the first line of your application, because what's going to happen with oDesk or anywhere else, people see a job and they apply, right? They send their standard resume, they change the name on the COVID letter most of the time and send it to you. What takes them 2 minutes of work takes you real time to screen, right? You have to screen all these resumes, you have to screen all these cover letters, and they're chewing up Your time, and I hate having my time chewed up. So what I do is I look for that first sentence. If you haven't told me how many Twitter followers I have, you haven't told me how many YouTube subscribers, or whatever my skill testing question is, you haven't put that in your first sentence, I'm not reading your application. I don't care how good you are, I don't care about your background, your credentials, I don't care about your references, I don't care about any of that because you're wasting my time because you did not read my paragraph. And the people who write in to say, "What's your Twitter account so I can answer the question properly?" It blows my mind. If you can't go and type Evan Carmichael Twitter and find me, then I don't want to hire you either. So right away I cut out around 80% of the people who apply to the job. 80%! Imagine if I had spent— you know, if you get 100 applications and 80 of them are junk and you have to spend 5 minutes on each one of those, going through. How much time do you lose on that? It blows my mind. So you gotta answer my question. Number 1, have your skill test in question. Number 2 is hire for a small job. So if you answered my question, typically what I'll then do is— again, I don't care about your previous work on oDesk. I don't care if you're brand new. I don't care if you have 2,000 hours on it. Doesn't matter to me. If you answer my question, then I'm gonna hire you for a a small sample project. And what I usually do is set a project, I set a limit of 5 hours, and I pay you for it. Say, hey, I'm gonna hire you to do this project. And it's a small thing that relates somehow to what they're gonna be doing, right? So when I hired Christina, who does my video editing, I hired her and I hired a bunch of people. And I hired them for 5 hours and said, hey, here's one video, do what you can with it, make it awesome. I give them 5 hours, and what it does is allow you to test to see are people doing a good job or not. So first of all, it lets me see, are they milking me for the full 5 hours or not? I actually try to find something where I think it's going to be less than 5 hours. Maybe it'll take them 3 hours to do. And so are they going to milk me for the full 5 hours and say, oh yeah, I work 5 hours on this, so they can get the money grab? Because I don't want that person working for me, and I just saved a whole bunch of time figuring that out, and I can eliminate them right away. Or did they do it ahead of time, right? If I say I need it done by Saturday and here's 5 hours to do it, do they go all the way to Saturday and take 5 hours? Or do they get it done by Thursday and do it in 2 hours, right? That's the hustle that you want. And then you can look at the quality of the work. Is it good, right? Do they blow you away? The reason why I hired Christina is because she did more than what I asked her to do. Most of the people who submitted it They just did what I asked them to do. They took, they took my intro, they put it on there, they put the end, whatever I asked them to do, they did it. But they didn't go beyond. Where Christina said, "Hey, here's some other things you can do with it," and created a new video, and I loved it. I said, "Her. I gotta hire her." So always start by hiring on a small job and expanding from there. Number 3 is keep the top performers. So you'll find that from that trial job, a couple people will stand out. It may only be one person, but it may be two or three people. I hire those people, if it's 1 or 3, on a more full-time basis, right? I hire them on an ongoing basis, and I see who excels, because I believe that you get a feel for working with somebody pretty quickly, and you can see, are they really working hard? Are they really pouring their energy into this? Are they giving all of themselves to this, or are they just kind of floating by, taking a paycheck, right? I don't want to be the guy on oDesk who has to look at your screens and has to track your keystrokes, right? oDesk gives you that feature. You could, you could see everybody's screenshot. I don't want to micromanage people on oDesk or somebody who is in my office. I don't want to have to manage those people. I want them to be motivated. I want them to work hard. I want them to be passionate about what they're doing. And so I find those people who want to do it and don't waste my time on everybody else. So remember, number 1, have a skill testing question. Number 2, hire for a small job. Number 3, keep the top performers. And believe. Thank you for the great question. If you want to see more videos like this, you can subscribe to my channel, and I will see you soon.
