Jam, a former call-center trainer, recommends opening video interviews with casual questions about TV shows or neighborhoods to see how candidates sound unscripted. The host argues personality fit matters more than skills, but also promotes his email screening process using six quick criteria as a faster alternative to 15-30 minute video calls.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 265 Skype or Zoom. Interview suggestions from one of my OFS so I have 5 kids ages 9 to 20 and they are super social kids. Like I have other kids at my house every single day. Someone is at my house every day. Whether it's with my 9 year old or or my 17 year old who's still at home always. And sometimes making small talk with like a 9 year old is not that easy. I do make a lot of small talk with them though, although one of my nine year old friends is super easy. That kid loves to talk. James. Man, that kid such a delight to talk to and it's so easy to make small talk with him. So small talk is not one of my strengths. I'm just not very good at it. I'm not very good at asking questions. I try and it just doesn't come naturally to me. So one of the things about interviewing people on video is small talk is kind of important. And while I personally don't do video interviews because I don't, I don't like it and I don't find it necessary, a lot of people do. And so here are some some suggestions from One of my OFs, Jam, who used to train call center agents. So in addition to like the the typical questions like what are your five year plan? Or what are your strengths and weaknesses? James recommends that you start and end the interview with some small talk because it'll put the other person at ease to give more honest answers. In other questions, Jem says to ask about like the shows that they watch or the neighborhood, what their neighborhood is like or where they grew up, or what TV shows they grew up watching or do they like to read or what kind of books they like to read. So just things that are common in life today. What do you think about the current government? Here's what Jem writes. He says small talk during an interview does the it puts the person you're interviewing at ease, inviting candor and encouraging them to give more honest answers in other questions. These questions, these are questions they don't really prepare for. How they talk when answering these questions are closer to what your customers would likely hear when they're answering calls. Even if you have training materials and standard scripts ready, it's important that your customer service OFS would know how to react with when things go off script. So JAM trained call center agents and so that's why he's focused on customer service. And like he suggests, I've usually found that it wasn't a tell me about your skills or how did you solve this problem question that really made the difference when interviewing. I've always found that it's more of a personality thing that matters rather than a skill thing. There's lots of people with skills. How well does this person fit in my business as I talk with them, as I email with them, as I interview them? How well does that fit in my personality and our company culture? Because if someone doesn't fit, it doesn't matter how good they are at their job. It's going to be a really hard working relationship. So at 1vaoa.com, one of my steps is all about interviewing and how I interview in email and all the questions that I ask and tons of questions that I don't ask but you could ask. I give you all of that as part of one vaoa. And my goal with that is, number one, I want to interview how I'm going to work with people because I'm not going to work with people on the phone. Number two, I want to keep it as simple and short as possible, which is sending an email takes me, you know, between five and 30 seconds rather than an interview, which takes between 15 and 30 minutes. And then in this step, I lay out all the things you're looking for. I have six different things that you're looking for when you're interviewing via email. And it's so easy to find out if this person's going to be a good fit or not. If you've looked at these things like attention to detail and how quickly do they respond and red flags, There are six things that I'm looking at and they're super easy to identify when you're getting emails from them rather than on a video call, which may or may not be easy to identify these things. So that's available at 1vaoa.com. Included in it is how I interview via asking questions. 1vaoa.com.
