Ep. 426: Increasing your chances of hiring a great VA

Welcome to the secret sauce of outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 426, increasing your chances of finding a great VA. So everybody wants to find a great VA. Everybody wants to have someone great working for them. Few people are willing to put in the work required to find someone great. Everybody wants to just get a referral. How can I get a referral? You can't. The reason you can't get a referral is because you can't get a referral. If someone has a great va, they're not passing out referrals to that person so that you hire them. Say, hey, oh, you're only making $10 an hour over there. I'll pay you 14 over here. It's just not. That's not the way this works, even though it's the way you want it to work. So in this episode, let me give you some advice on how to increase your chances of finding someone great. First, where you hire matters. Obviously, you're listening to a podcast about the Philippines, but I get a lot of people that are like, oh, I have this really great idea for you. You should start this. Sign an NDA for me. Like, no, I'm not going to sign an NDA for you. Just tell me what your idea is. Oh, okay, fine. How about we start this business in Venezuela? There's really great people in Venezuela. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. What do you mean? Why not? It's such a good idea. No, because people have a better experience in the Philippines. I know you want someone that speaks Spanish, but there's not that many people that want someone that speaks Spanish. And the work ethic is just different in the Philippines versus other places. You definitely increase your chances of finding someone great by sticking with the Philippines. Now that you can't find someone great elsewhere, you definitely can. It's just a lot harder. So along those same lines, here's an email I got from Justin and I'm going to read this to you. So Justin says, I think you're doing a great thing with great people. We've had just great success. When you find the right helpers, there are many things that help the dear, humble Filipino people fit the bill as just genuinely probably the world's best servers. I wish we could all be that humble. These are things that are probably inappropriate to say in public, but it's just abundantly obvious. Some people work harder and it is cultural. We can't deny it probably has something to do with their family faith upbringing. There's just a diligence interwoven into the fabric of Filipino society that is not normal. And yeah, that it's not normal in most other cultures. He continues. Anyway, I think your service is better than upwork in that one. Tracking time brings peace of mind for both parties. Accuracy matters. There's always ways to cheat for the genius few. 2 Trust is the ticket. Allowing for a background check is just a lot of foresight. So you just increase your chances with the Philippines. Next, let me give some specific tips of how I find great people and how I increase my chances right up front. So you're going to go to onlinejobs ph, you're going to search for the skill you're looking for. You're going to post a job or you're going to post a job wherever you're going. So at online jobs, one of the I do two things right up front that will almost guaranteed eliminate bad people and increase the number of good candidates that I get. So first I'm going to require that they put a subject line of something specific when they apply. So in my job post description I will say, hey, when you apply, make your subject line great. Graphic designer, dash your name here, whatever it is. That's what I always put that in. The next thing that I do, and I've talked about this before, is you significantly increase your chances of finding someone qualified when you require them to use a certain number of apply points. So I've talked about apply points before when you require them to use 6 or 8 or 13 apply points. And I just put this in my job, in my job description. Hey, when you apply apply with this many job posts or this many apply points and actually recently hired a programmer and I made them do a programming equation. I made them solve a math equation with a programming specific operator in it that required them to come up with 25 mod 9 and give me the answer of 25 mod 9. Now if you're not a programmer, you don't know what that means, but if you are, then you know. And I said use 25 mod 9 as the number of applied points when you apply and a lot of people just use one or a lot of people just use 10. And neither of those were correct. Those that did apply correctly, I knew they knew what they were talking about. I knew that they were highly qualified and I actually ended up hiring two of them and they've both worked out really, really well. So these two things are require specific subject line and number two have them use a Specific number of apply points. So now two more things towards increasing your chances of hiring a great va. Number one, go into this with the attitude of knowing you're hiring a person, not a skill. Very often we need someone that knows go high level or something specific, right? And so you want the best go high level expert when the reality is you want someone that you can work with, someone who's diligent and hard working and willing to up every day they can learn go high level. Like maybe that takes a week or a month, but the right personality goes so much farther towards hiring a great va. So that's one, you're hiring a person, not a skill. Look for personality in that same vein. Number two is use disc. The DISC personality test gives you a really good idea of what this person is going to be like after you hire them. Like what do they have a propensity towards? Are they really detail oriented? Are they really driven? Are they really social? The DISC personality test will give you a good idea of these things. Now if you don't know how the disc works or you don't know how it works within your role, we recently created a blog post which is so I was so excited about this onlinejobs Ph Disc D I S C where we list a whole bunch of roles and the type of disc personalities that you're looking for. So for example, for a salesperson, you're looking for someone with high D and probably high I as the secondary thing. Well, now that you know you're looking for high D, high I when you get job applicants, if they are high S or high C, well that's not the right person for your role. And not that that can't be the right person for your role, but you just increase your chances by hiring the right personality type. If you're hiring someone to do data entry, that's different than someone who's going to do sales, you want a different personality type because someone with high S and high C are going to be a much better assistant. They're conscientious, they're detail oriented, they're going to show up every day. That's a much better situation than someone who's really a driver and they really want to push things. That's not a great assistant. That person is a salesperson. So I think that was five tips for today. Sum those up. They are go to the Philippines. You just increase your chances by going to the Philippines, your chances are just higher. Number two, when you're making your job post, make them do specific things in order to get your attention in order to get in front of you. Don't waste your time looking at crappy applicants that are not that are not qualified for your job. That significantly increases your chances of finding someone good. Number three, you're hiring a person with a personality, not a skill. And then number four, look at the personality, look at the disc and match their disc profile with your roles disc profile and you'll get the right kind of person.