Make Hiring Work for You | 14 Minutes to Transform Your Team

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe that hungry entrepreneurs deserve help, and today I want to talk about how I hire using a website called oDesk. I know hiring is one of the hardest things that entrepreneurs face, but if you want to grow your business, at some point you have to build it beyond yourself. You cannot do everything yourself, and you have to be able to trust people to be able to take over some of the tasks for you. One of my favorite tools that I use is oDesk, and it's— I think it stands for Outsource Desk, I'm not entirely sure, but basically it's a resource that connects people who have jobs to offer with people who are looking for jobs, and it's all managed online. So I'm gonna flip to my screen so you can see what it's all about, and you can follow along with me on a recent hire that I'm going through right now. So this is my screen here, and what's happening here is I need to find somebody to help me with my videos. I've been doing a lot of videos, I love working on videos, I find it's an awesome way to connect with the people who are watching, my fans who have questions, and various entrepreneurs, instead of just answering everything by email. My regular video guy has gone AWOL. I haven't heard from him. I don't know what's going on with him. And so I needed to find somebody else quickly who could help me edit all my videos. I am usually filming the videos myself, but then I shouldn't be the one doing all the editing because it's a big waste of time for me and I'm not that good at it. So I posted this job and I want to break down how I did it and hopefully you can learn from it as well. So the first thing I do is I post a job title. So I call it Reliable Video Editor. I called it this way because my last guy wasn't so reliable, so I wanted a reliable person this time around. And I'll show you how I did on my post. We'll click on the View Post, and this is the actual job description that I posted on oDesk. You can take a look. You can see here I call it Reliable Video Editor. Estimated time, more than 6 months. So whenever you have a job that is ongoing, you want to make sure you mention that because a lot of the oDesk workers, they're contractors. And they're looking to get work and they are struggling to get a lot of the different jobs that are coming in. And they don't want to do all the work of applying for jobs and then have it only be for a month or a couple weeks. Their ideal situation is when they can work with a few regular clients on an ongoing basis. Now this isn't a full-time job that I'm offering here, but it is regular work ongoing, and so that makes it more attractive. So if you can do something on an ongoing basis, you definitely want to put it in there because you'll attract better candidates. So this is a job description. I always like to post one big ugly paragraph. Now this is actually small compared to what I usually post, but I post a big paragraph because usually for me it's important to hire people who are detail-oriented. I am not always the most detail-oriented person. I try to be, and, uh, I usually have to send myself emails to remind myself of things. So I like to surround myself with people who are detail-oriented in case I miss something. If you're not very detail-oriented and you're working for me, then it's going to be really hard for us to get together on projects and make them a success. So I don't make it easy for people, right? One big ugly paragraph makes sure that the people who are detail-oriented and who actually read and who follow instructions are going to be able to pick out the important parts of the post. So back to the post, I say exactly what I'm looking for. I explain what happened in the past. I say that I use services like Dropbox to be able to communicate with my employees, so I need them to be on that. And this is a trick that I always use. In here I write, "Prove to me that you've read this and tell me how many subscribers my YouTube channel has." And I've listed the link to my YouTube channel here. So this is important. In every oDesk application that I put out, and this is applicable in oDesk or anything else that you're doing for job applications, I always put something in there to make them prove to me that they've actually read my post. Because too many people will apply, they'll send their cover letter, they'll send their their resume in, and that takes up my time. If you want me to read your application, that takes time away from my day. And I want to make sure they've actually spent time reading my job post, because a lot of people will just apply for any job that has their keywords. So they'll see video editor and they'll just apply without reading it at all. And then whoever writes back to them, then they'll spend a little bit of time on it. I don't want those people. I want the people who actually read my post, are excited about the opportunity, and want to work with me. So what I did was I always put in this kind of paragraph, this kind of question in the middle of my paragraph to see if they've actually read it. So here, tell me how many subscribers my YouTube channel has. When they're applying and I'm checking through each application, if they haven't told me that, then I'm not gonna even shortlist them. I'm not gonna even write back to them. You haven't taken the time to read my job posting, so I'm not gonna even take the time to read your listing and write back to you. So that's important. I get a little upset about it because it takes a lot of time, right? As an employer, as an entrepreneur, you're bringing on these people to help save you time. You know, we're busting at the seams, we're trying to do everything ourselves, and we need help, and we don't need people wasting our time. So this is a quick way around it. Just to show you as an example, I had 86 people here. If you look at the, the site, I have 86 people who applied to this job, and I only messaged 36 back. That means 50 of the people who messaged me didn't even read the job posting. That would have been a huge waste of my time to go through all those applications. Now, 36 is still a lot, and it's great to have tons of talented people who are interested in this job, but at least I'm spending my time on the people who cared enough to read about what I was posting. So back to the posting, the other thing that's really important— so we've talked about putting the duration, saying that it's long-term, saying that it's ongoing. Ideally, if you can put in some question in the middle of this big ugly paragraph so that you make sure people are reading it and applying correctly. And then the other thing that's really important is you want to have good feedback about yourself as well. So this works kind of like eBay where there's buyers and sellers and there's feedback for everybody. After each job finishes, you're asked to leave a review of the person you hired, and they are also asked to leave a review of you and how you were as an employer. And that's something that people look at. So as a new employer, it could be hard to get started. People still apply, but it's better to have as full a profile as you can. So on mine, you can see I've been a member since April 2010. You can verify your payment, so that's another big thing. So people who are coming, who are applying for your jobs, if they see that you haven't verified payment, that means just entering your Visa card that goes to oDesk, not to the employee. If you do that, then it shows that you actually are registered with, with oDesk and your Visa card so that the employee doesn't have to worry about getting stiffed and not getting paid. You can see that I've spent over $20,000 using oDesk. I've billed 5,500 hours and I have 5 out of 5 positive feedback out of 39 reviews. So that's a lot of great feedback. It makes me an attractive employer and people want to do business with me. So that's why I have so many people who are applying to this job. So, you know, you might be just starting out, and that's fine. As soon as you can, you can at least verify your payment, and then from there, keep going on, try to build good relationships with your employees, try to get them at least positive feedback, and treat them like you would a normal human being, right? Just because they're not working from your office doesn't mean they're not a person, they don't have feelings, they don't have ambitions, they don't have drive, they don't want to grow. So you gotta treat them as a person. And if you do that, then communication will be easier and you'll both be able to get positive feedback, uh, once and if the job finishes. So this will all help you in designing a perfect job description and get qualified people coming to your application. One other thing I want to show you here, my process is repeatable, is easy to do. Anybody can follow it and will help make sure you get the best qualified people for your job. What I will always do, I'll post 2 jobs. The first is public. So this one here, reliable video editor. This one is public. This is the one that almost 90 people applied to, and I only wrote back to 36 of them. The 36 people who wrote in were ones again who had a— who filled in the application and made sure that they said how many YouTube subscribers that I had. They answered my question. From there, I'll invite them to do a trial job with me. This is a paid job and it's a small job. So what I'm looking for is someone who can do my videos, edit them, and help me put them on YouTube every week. And I make between 7 and 14 videos now a week, so it's a lot of work. It's not a full-time job, but it is ongoing. What I do with my trial job is I give them a small job for them to work on, and this is usually time limited, so it's up to 5 hours in this case, and I give them one video to work on. I send them the video, I give them detailed instructions, and I see who can follow the instructions, who gives me what I want, who's gone above and beyond, who's asking me questions and communicating with me very well, and who delivers a product that I can actually go and post. I also see how many hours they worked on it. So I give them a maximum of 5 hours to do it, or 10 hours, or whatever you want, whatever you think is reasonable. I try to give them a little bit more time than what I think it should take them to do it. And then you see who's milking you because they're tracked. Their time is tracked as they go through it. So you'll see who is actually taking you for the full 5 hours and who is trying to do it and is being honest and is being a fast hard worker and gets it done in fewer hours. That's the kind of person you want to hire, right? You don't want the person who's always maxing out the amount that you give them and will constantly take you for as much money as you'll give them. You want someone who's going to work hard, be efficient, and if there's extra time left over, then there's extra time left over, and that's good. What's interesting here on this screen is I invited 36 people to come, but only 21 people actually did come. So out of my 86 candidates, only 36 actually responded with my question that I asked. And then from there, I asked them all to come to a trial job, 5 hours paid work. And only 21 of them came. Hey, if you're looking for a job, if you're trying to land deals like this, this is ongoing work with a quality employer, you gotta show up. You gotta at least say yes. You gotta do the trial. You gotta see how it goes. I'm paying you full rates on a trial basis for 5 hours to help you build your profile and also see if you're gonna be a good fit for me. It's unbelievable to me that out of 36 people who I asked, only 21 showed up. And right away again, I'm losing 15 people who I wouldn't want to have as employees. Right? They couldn't even take the next step. They couldn't even come on board for a trial job. So I'm not going to waste my time with them. So now I've gone from 86 people all the way down to 21, and I've done almost nothing. Right? They have weeded themselves out. From the 21, I'll see who actually finishes the job. You'll find that people say yes to it and then they don't actually ever finish it. You'll find that some people you have communication problems with, some people don't Some people don't understand the project. Some people may not have the tools or technology to get you through it. And you get to do all this on a trial basis. So I'm only spending a max of 5 hours with each of these people, and we'll see what they can deliver. What I usually get is a couple people stand out from the crowd. A couple people rise way above, and I'll usually often hire 2 to 3 people from every job that comes out. Reason being, You'll still have some people who drop off, and I'll split whatever tasks I have between those 2 or 3 people and then see who I can work best with long-term and give them the ongoing opportunity. Now, with this job, there has been one person who's been amazing and who stood out, so I'm probably going to give her all of the work and have a few people as backups if I ever need to go back, if it didn't— doesn't work out with this person for whatever reason. But I usually do like to hire 2 to 3. I'm kind of breaking the rule because one person has gone way above and beyond what everybody else is doing. So this is my usual process, and the goal here is to get quality people who want to work with me and quickly weed through all of the crap, all of the people who aren't paying attention, who don't read your profile, who don't put in even a little bit of hard work to prove themselves. Those people you don't want. If they're not going to jump in and do a little bit of work for you, then you got to move on and find other people. And so this process helps make sure that you get the right people in. So again, quickly to recap, one, I'm creating the job description that is a big ugly paragraph and I'm asking them to answer a question in the middle. I don't read the profiles of the people who do not respond. I try to make sure that it's ongoing and I'll say here more than 6 months, so it's ideally ongoing work that makes it more attractive to people who are coming in. And I try to make my profile look as good as possible, verify your payment methods, try to get good feedback as it comes in from your employees, and again, just treat them like human beings. From there, people who message me in and who filled out the right question get hired on a trial job. And from there I see how I work with them. And then I hire 2 to 3 people typically to become my new employees. And I'll see how it goes from there, ending up probably with 1 or 2 people longer term. So that's my process. Hopefully it helps. It's a little bit, uh, complex, I guess, but it is something that once you get into it is pretty easy and helps save you a ton of time weeding through different candidates. You can apply it to oDesk like I do, or we can apply it to any job application if you're going out and trying to hire employees for your business. I hope you guys enjoyed. This is my first video going through my oDesk process, so I welcome your thoughts. If you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more for you. And if you have any questions about this process, how I applied to oDesk, or how you might be able to apply it to your business, or any other questions about your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those. I really I love seeing them come in, even if you're just saying thanks to the video. It always makes my day when I'm eating my breakfast and kind of checking in on what's going on on YouTube. So thank you, please leave a comment, and I'll see you on the next video.