Paul Stanton, who manages 90 overseas Filipino staff at seoworks.com, screens job applicants using simultaneous Skype chat interviews. He opens multiple chat windows, asks the same questions to each candidate at once, and compares their responses side-by-side in about an hour, timing sessions for 6am Mountain Time when candidates are alert.
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Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 22, how to narrow the Field when you are getting tons of applications to a job post. So I get lots of questions about how to narrow the field of candidates who responded to a job post on onlinejobs.ph and I've heard from several of you that the number of responses can feel overwhelming. So we recently did an interview with Paul Stanton who runs the super successful Internet marketing company seoworks.com and that is se s e o w e r k z.com and he had some really really great advice about this. So Paul employs over 90 OFS, which is pretty remarkable. 90, not 19. So while some of his Filipino workers are managed by a partner SEO company which is based in the Philippines, Paul does a lot of the specialized OFS hiring himself. He's got a really good hiring training managing system set up that runs like a well oiled machine. So his initial interview tactic is really kind of brilliant. So after he posts a job, he invites the most qualified candidates to do a typed chat interview with him on Skype. So not a video interview. And most of you know that I really dislike video interviews. It just takes so much time and that's kind of a waste of your time. So the typed interview gives him a good sense of their English skills and doesn't risk scaring potential talent away with face to face interviews that are super intimidating for ofs. So here's the kicker. Paul conducts all of his chat interviews at the same time so he can weigh and consider the responses against one another and of course save himself a bunch of time. So before the interview he prepares his questions. They're pre typed, ready to cut and paste into the chat boxes. Then he opens all of the chat windows at the same time and asks the candidates identical sequential questions. So his preparation allows him to focus his time on each candidate's responses. And Paul says he dedicates about an hour to the interview process and notes that the best response time is around 6am Mountain Time, which would be 5am Pacific or 8am Eastern Time or about 7pm in the Philippines. So you can learn more about Paul's favorite questions to ask in these interviews with in the case study that we did and I'll put the case study link in the description below. So, and then I would like to know what kind of questions do you ask to narrow the field when you get really good responses to a job post. Like, if you get a whole bunch of applicants. My email is johnlinejobsph. Let me know. I want to know what questions you're asking people.
