Evan Carmichael hires remote workers by burying two hidden prompts in a long job description: one asks applicants to find his Twitter follower count, the other asks why they like entrepreneurs. About 80% ignore them entirely. The remaining candidates do a paid trial task with a 10-hour time limit and four assignments to prove they can deliver.
Chapters
How to hire remote workers successfully. In my business, I've had a mix of hiring people remotely and people who also work, you know, out of my office. And I recently had to go through the process again of hiring somebody new remotely as we're growing, and I wanted to share my experience with you because a lot of people get this wrong. A lot of entrepreneurs make mistakes here and end up losing tons of time in the process. So here's the first thing I do. It's, it's really important. I'll write out everything that I want the person to understand, okay? I want them to know what my company stands for, what we're all about, right? Helping entrepreneurs, believing in entrepreneurs. I will write what their job entails, all the different tasks that they have to do, and it'll be one big, fat, messy, ugly paragraph. Say, Evan, you're so mean. Why would you do that? Why don't you make it easy for them to get the information? I don't want it to be easy. You know, part of the job requirement is being able to work through hard stuff, right? I try to make it as easy as possible once I've hired them. I don't want their lives to be hard, but I need them to be detail-oriented and see who's a worker and who's not, right? It's an attitude. Somebody will see that huge paragraph and say, "I don't want to read that." Great! I don't want you as part of my company. I want somebody who's going to take the time to read it. If you start seeing stuff about believing entrepreneurs and that doesn't inspire you to keep going, if you're not hungry enough to work for me, then I don't want you as part of my team. It's perfect. They've self-eliminated themselves. The next thing I'll do is right in the middle of that ugly, nasty, long, terrible paragraph, I'll ask two questions. One will be, how many Twitter followers do I have? And I'll say, please share this as your first sentence in your response back to me. And then I'll ask them, What do you like about entrepreneurs? Because if you don't like entrepreneurs, you're not going to have a great time working for me. So the first one tests, did they actually read that long paragraph? And the second one will test, why do they want this job? Because you're not just looking for a bum in a chair, you're looking for someone who's going to give you their heart and soul because they love what you're all about. So I posted the job, I got hundreds of requests. 80% of them, 80% of them didn't even mention the Twitter thing that I posted. That means they just saw the ad, saw it was a marketing position, and they sent in their cover letter and their resume. 80%! I would have burned my time reading all of their profiles or resumes or cover letters, wasting my time when they spent 5 seconds looking at the job ad. That's what's gonna happen. If somebody does not say in their first sentence, like I clearly asked, how many Twitter followers do I have, then I don't read their profile. It saves me a ton of time. See, this is what you need to do. This is why hiring can be so painful and frustrating, because you're bringing on the wrong people and spending time with the wrong people. Okay, so 80% gone. I just cut my work down by a lot. Next, the next 10% wrote something like I don't know how many Twitter followers you have because you didn't give me your account. How hard is it to find Evan Carmichael on Twitter? It was a small, simple, stupid, easy test. So all you showed me now is that you read the whole paragraph, but you have zero resourcefulness to go out and find how many Twitter followers I have. You type Evan Carmichael Twitter, you'll find me. It's not that hard. So those 10% are gone too. I don't want them in my business. If I have to explain every single thing step by step and you have zero resourcefulness, then you're not going to be a good fit at my company. And they shouldn't be a good fit at your company either. You should care about this stuff. This is important. The last 10% are the ones who actually said how many Twitter followers I had. That's like baseline, right? I've already eliminated 90% of people who are just wasting my time, who didn't even care about this. Those last 10%, then I look at what their response was. Not just the Twitter followers, but how did they answer the second question? Why do they like entrepreneurs? Do they have it in their blood? Was it part of their family? What is it? And you can tell. Some people speak with passion. They speak from the heart. And I don't care for this job if they're perfect English or not. I'm not asking them to be a writer. But I want to feel something from their response. They're not just saying, I love entrepreneurs and I hope to be one someday, right? That's not what I want. So you get down to like the last 2 or 3% of people, and then I'll hire them on a small job, a trial job. This is something that they would do for me, and I give them a limit. So I'll say, you have 10 hours to do this job, and I'll give them like 4 tasks to do. And some people will take the full 10 hours to do it, and some people will will not get it done within the 10 hours. And some people won't do anything and they'll just claim the 10 hours. And so you're losing a little bit of money on these people. But what you want to see is how long does it take somebody to do the task. I give them something that is hard and I see, can they get this done within that 10-hour limit? Are they being honest with me? If they finish early, are they billing me for 10 hours? Are they going to bill me for the 8.5 that they worked? That's who I want. I want the hustler, the one who said, "I got all this stuff done and I did it under time. What's up?" That's who I want to hire. So you can do a lot of the work of screening people up front. You build the crazy long paragraph, you ask them a question that is relatively easy to find if they just read what you wrote, you give them something that relates to what you're all about, something passionate, and see what their response is. And the people who write back, you give them some kind of trial job to test their skills, to test if they're the right fit for you or not. Small amount of money up front, but it's worth it for getting the right person. Anyway, that's my process. It's worked, it's worked repeatedly. I hope you'll use it to make better hiring decisions. I don't want you to be the entrepreneur who tries to hire somebody, it doesn't work out, and you say, this is not for me, I can't hire people, I'm just going to do it myself, because that's not how you have a real impact in the world. You got to bring people on, and it's tough and it's hard, and you make mistakes, and the first person you hire is probably not going to last with you, right? It just happens. But I want you to minimize your mistakes, and I want you to believe that hiring people can work, and you can, you can bring on people to really help you build something powerful. So that's how I do it. Believe. You guys like this video? Please give it a thumbs up below. I'd love to hear what you have to think. You have a question about my process, you want to learn more, leave it below. You have another question about your business in general, leave it below in the comments. I'm going to give you a response. Thank you guys so much, and I'll see you soon.
