Ep. 317: Finding And Keeping Highly Technical OFS

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 317, hiring highly technical OFS and using AI in your business. So I got an interesting email from Steve, one of our customers, and he had some really relevant points that apply to so many businesses. So one of the questions I get often are, oh, can I actually find someone talented? So here's what Steve says about this and then I'm going to go into a little bit more about his business. He says, I responded a couple years ago on how well things have worked out with our ofs. We now have a world class group of data and financial engineering analysts. We hire engineers who want to learn data analytics. They work out great as they have an innate curiosity and a well developed sense of logic that enables them to learn quickly. They're completely bewildered for about the first six months and when the light comes on, we just get out of their way. So really, really interesting. Steve is hiring engineers to do financial engineering analysis. So. So I often get people that think, oh, they can only do data entry. No, that's not right. You can hire really, really talented programmers. I have someone communicating with me right now, he's like, oh, can you actually hire a talented accountant? I'm like, yeah, you can hire a talented accountant. I mean, I know people that have hired accounting auditors or senior level accountants or investment banking analysts. Really, really talented, talented people. You can hire that in any skillset like marketing director or a senior level programmer, or a systems admin or a user interface. Super high level CAD engineers. Anything, any talent or skill that can be done on a computer online. You can find it@onlinejobs.ph Then the next thing that Steve talks about is using AI in their business, which this is interesting. It's getting more and more prevalent. So he says, back to the main topic. We source and employ AI all over our business. Here are just a few examples. ChatGPT training, research and coding. As for coding, ChatGPT is pretty good at converting one code base to another, like Python to C, which for most of you this is completely irrelevant because you'll never do this, but it's also pretty good at writing the structural stuff in code, but not very good at the hardcore math we do. Basically, ChatGPT can automate about 75% of the code we write. It's also helped coders go from zero to proficient very quickly without constantly having to ask questions of others. Interesting use of ChatGPT. Now, in my experience of seeing ChatGPT write code, you have to have a programmer behind it. It's just not going to do it for you without you having, without you knowing what you're doing. He goes into more of where they use AI, including like for their banking customers. They're a, they're a analytics as a service company. So they do a lot of analytics for banks. He says one of them is bank Profitability Optimization, using AI to determine if the bank is operating at peak performance considering a myriad of marketing, operational, regulatory constraints. The next two are strategic decision making and tactical decision making. So like if, if you don't know if you can hire talented of, look at the things that Steve is doing and is having his OFS do with him. There's some really, really high level stuff and you can hire some really, really high level people. And then here's the last thing that Steve talked about that I think is really relevant to a lot of people, how he treats his people. So he's hiring highly technical people and then he's treating them really well. He says, finally, just a comment on managing OFS resources. We've only lost one employee in five years and that was because he had a chance to go back to school in Canada. That said, we speak directly to the entire crew daily. Sometimes it only lasts five minutes, sometimes it lasts a couple of hours. And we might only talk about non business stuff. Basically we don't have a water cooler, break room or the opportunity to go to lunch. Employers need to understand that you should not make every engagement about work. Personal relationships are just as important as business. So making them feel valued in multiple facets is critical. Culture is everything. So good. Thank you so much, Steve for that insight. Now let me add a little bit to how he does this. So we communicate with our OFS daily. Also, there are very few days when we don't communicate. Usually we're out of town. And in that case, hopefully I have a project manager that's communicating with them. We do ours through the reports in basecamp and through email. He does his through a voice, he does his through a video call. However you do it, that communication is really important. You're establishing a relationship with them, you're establishing trust between you and them, between them and you. The daily communication is really, really important. And then you'll notice back in the beginning of this, Steve, he's hiring engineers to do something that maybe they haven't done before and he's training them. It's pretty, pretty common to see employers succeeding who are hiring smart people and then, and then training them to do the things that you want them to do. And that training, at least for Steve and for a lot of other people I know, has turned those individuals into a world class, talented team. So the takeaways from this, from me, for Steve, are, number one, you can hire really talented people, and if you treat them well, they can be really, really good for you. How you communic doesn't really matter. Tools you use don't really matter. How you do your training doesn't really matter. You just have to build relationships with people, treat them well, and they're gonna do really great work for you.