Ep: 286: What Makes An OFS Resign Early

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 286, what makes an OFS resign early. So this is a super frustrating situation, and it has happened to me. Here's what happened. So I hired this person, I did all my recruiting, and I went through the whole process that I cover at 1 VAOA, and I gave them their first task, and she responded to me once or twice, and then she didn't respond to me again for a week. And after a couple days, I was like, what's going on? So I followed up with her. No response. Days later, I followed up again. This time I get a response, but not from her. At least they said it wasn't her. They said it was her sister. And they said, sorry, sir, she can't work for you. She has an emergency. And I was like, oh, that's fine. I don't mind an emergency. I can wait for her to come back. I know I did a good job recruiting her, and I'm pretty confident she's going to be good. And her family member, her sister or. I don't know if it was her or her sister, but they responded to me and said, no, sir, she's not coming back to work. She doesn't want to come back to work. And, you know, that's shocking. It was shocking to me saying, no, she's not coming back to work at all. Especially after I just put in all this time and effort recruiting someone, and I was like, dang, I'm pretty confident I found a good person here. And they disappear right at the beginning. And so later on, when I went back to recruit again, I realized, oh, look, I wasn't very clear about the job description of what I wanted her to do. My instructions for the first task, I don't think she actually understood them because they weren't. They weren't very good. And. And I think I kind of assumed she had all the skills she talked about in her resume. And I had done some recruiting, but I hadn't gone all the way yet because I didn't know yet. This was early on when I was hiring people. And so this is where I started to tweak the way that I hired people, because I didn't want to have this experience of recruiting someone and having them disappear immediately. I started interviewing people via email rather than whatever else I was doing, where it lets me ask them lots and lots and lots of questions to verify they are who they say they are. Verify their skills, get a really good idea of their personality to see if there are any red flags for me to see how they respond and how much attention to detail they pay. When I ask a lot of questions, I usually find out all the quirks. It also lets them ask me questions back to make them feel more comfortable with what's going on so that they understand the job and the work before they get into it. And before I say, okay, you're hired, they already understand exactly what I'm expecting, which then prevents them from overstating their skills. Or they have a chance to back away or stop responding to me or drop themselves out of my recruiting process. This is also when I started giving a simple test task to people. Before this, I hadn't given test tasks because I just didn't know very much, right? And so I started giving this simple test, and the point wasn't to accomplish something. The point of this test task was just to see, can we work together? Because I don't want you to get into this and say, oh, I don't want to work for this person, and then have them disappear after I've already done the recruiting and I've already hired. So I'm going to give a test task to one or two or ten people and see, can we work together to accomplish something? It doesn't have to be something meaningful to me and my business. Just can we accomplish something together? Because if we can, then the chances of us being able to work together after I hire you are much, much higher. And then once we see success together, they're much more likely to stick through hard situations and they begin to trust me. Then after I hired someone, I started asking different questions. So I've gone through this process with you, and even during the test task, I would do the same thing. But once I've hired you, now I've given you instructions, I started asking, does this make sense or is this something that you think you can do? Or can you explain to me what I'm asking here? Sometimes my instructions aren't nearly as clear as I think they are, which note that I'm taking the responsibility on myself, for if they don't understand the instructions, I gave them an out, saying, look, it's my fault. And then any thoughts on how we can do this better? Which I don't expect you to have thoughts because you haven't done it yet. But do you have any ideas of what we might do differently or how I might explain this better or what we might do to improve this process? All of these things are things that I started doing to try and prevent the early resignation and help bring them on board with me and to trust me better. If you want to know more about exactly how I do this now, which now my process is so fine tuned that I haven't had someone resign early. I mean it's probably been 10 years. I teach this whole thing at 1vaoa.com where I will walk you through finding a great ofs the first time.