This is a short podcast episode (Ep. 329) by John Jonas about hiring online Filipino specialists (OFS). He reads and reacts to an email from a listener named Spencer who hired his first OFS after running a multi-round, emailed interview process and emphasizes the value of "imperfect action" — hiring even without a perfect plan. Jonas adds his own hiring practices (email-based multi-round questions, paid test tasks, targeted job postings) and encourages listeners to take action and hire.
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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 329, Spencer's Imperfect Action hiring process. So I get people who have said to me, john, I've listened to every podcast episode and now I'm ready to hire someone. And every time I hear that, I cringe because I wish you would have hired someone after, like, episode eight. I'm on 329 now. Yeah, you just spent a lot of time that you should have been working on hiring someone. Now, I. I get that there's a lot of people that are hesitant or you don't know what to do, which is why I created 1vaoa.com. Try it out. If it doesn't work for you, I'll give you money back. Now, this isn't about that. This is about Spencer and an email that Spencer sent me, which hopefully is a motivation for you. If you're listening to all of my episodes and haven't hired someone yet, here's what Spencer says. I just hired my first OFS, exclamation point. I posted a job and got 71 applicants. One, which 71 applications is too many to manage for me. Spencer continues, I made up the interview process as I went along. There were four rounds of four to five questions. Out of the 71 initial applicants, 29 finished the process. It was a tough decision to make. I had 13 that met the requirements that I was looking for. Onboarding starts in a few days. I need to get that all lined up and finalized, and I need to put together the training. And then he adds in in parentheses, which is my favorite line of the whole thing. Imperfect action executed violently today is better than a perfect plan. Next week says, what a sense of relief. Assuming things continue to go well, this guy will save me 50% of my time. And you know what? I think he'll do a better job than me. Thank you for onlinejobs. Ph. Best, Spencer. So it turns out that Spencer came up with on his own, I think, a similar process to how I interview people. He did a lot more than I would have done, but he did it similarly and ended up with a great result. I don't ever get on the phone with people. I don't do video interviews. I send exactly what he did at 4 to 5. I do. I do multiple rounds of questions via email. I almost send all the exact same questions to everybody who is involved. I will not deal with 71 applicants. I always make sure that I get fewer applicants. From the beginning, based off of my job post. It makes it easier to weed out the bad people and keep the good people right from the start. But. But then I'm going to do it the same way he did, by asking lots and lots of questions. And then I'm going to do a test task and I'm going to see how we work together, and I'm going to pay people for that test task. My favorite part of this, again, was Spencer saying, imperfect action executed violently today is better than a perfect plan next week. And I cannot agree more. I remember when I first hired my first person, I wasn't ready. I didn't have any training for him. I knew I had some stuff that I wanted him to do, but I didn't have training and I didn't know how long it would take to hire. And I didn't. I just didn't know. And I was scared. I didn't know if I could keep him busy full time or if I could afford it. And I decided I have to take this chance because what I'm doing isn't working. And I took the leap. And yeah, I made some mistakes with him. And my guess is you'll probably make some mistakes with the first person you hire. But I also got a lot of things right and I got a lot of time back. And that guy still works for me today. That was 2005 when I hired him, and it's been a lot of years. And this is all why I created up 1vaaway.com so that you don't have to make the same mistakes that I did. So you can do it almost perfectly the first time, even with imperfect action made a little bit more perfect based off of years and years of someone else's experience. Mine. So if you've listened to all of my podcast episodes and you're waiting to hire someone until the end, well, there's never going to be an end of this. So go take some imperfect action today. Post a job, start interviewing. The interview process is not hard when you do it through email. Don't get some time back in your life. Hire someone in the Philippines.
