John Jonas explains how to hire VAs for technical work you don't understand, like Facebook ads or SEO. Learn the business goals and conversion path instead of platform details. Evaluate candidates by asking for concrete plans and paid tests, then hire whoever's approach makes the most sense to you.
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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 318, what if you can't teach your OFS? So, as business owners, it's important for us to know what's going on in our business. We need to understand the processes and the whys. We don't necessarily need to understand the how of every little thing. Like, there's details that we don't have to know in order to implement. Give you some examples. If you're on Facebook and you're listening to this, then you've probably seen ads from me. Now, I don't know how Facebook works. I don't know how Facebook ads works. I've logged into the meta advertising platform thingy a couple times because I had to in order to give people access to it, but I hate every single time I do it because I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't know how to find what I'm looking for in there. I don't have Facebook installed on my phone, so you can see that I don't really know what's going on with Facebook and yet I'm running a lot of ads on Facebook. Now. Would my ads be better if I knew more about Facebook? Yeah, probably. It'd probably be a lot better. But there's only so much capacity that I have to deal with things that I need to do. And so instead I hire someone who's good at running Facebook ads. Now here's the how do you do this? Okay, so here's what Caroline asks me. I've watched the intro video and I have a question regards to training. I know that I'm needing someone to do social media marketing, but don't know the technical parts of the meta suite and how to teach them on their resumes. It would say they have Facebook experience. I can have the strategy and wording, but the technical implementation is what I don't have skills in. Not sure how to teach this. So here's my advice. When you're looking for something technical, for example, Facebook ads, understanding the overall. The concept, the process is important and that's what you need to understand. Understanding the technical details of the Facebook, whatever she calls it, the meta suite, is not. Is not important. And that's what you're hiring someone else to do. Someone else should understand those technical details. So then when I hire that person and the way that I'm testing people, because it's hard to test people if you don't know how it works. What I do is I ask for a plan. I want to know, how would you implement this? What would your goals be with our social media? What kind of posts would you create and why and what kind of content are in these posts? What's the goal of this post? What would be your strategy to increase engagement? I'm going to ask a bunch of questions like that. So I'll just give you a real life example from this week. I'm trying to hire someone to do SEO. And I used to be really good at SEO, like 15 years ago, but everything has changed since then and I haven't really kept up and I don't really know what I'm doing. I have a pretty good overview of how it works and I pay attention to the Internet and how things work. And so right now, I'm having three different people do a test with me. The people that got through my asking of questions, my recruiting process. I'm having them do a test and I'm paying them for this test. I'm asking them to give me an audit of what we're currently doing and create a plan for us. And based off of that plan, I will see what I like from different people and I'm going to hire the one that I understand the best, and maybe not that I understand exactly what they're trying to do, but the one that makes the most sense to me. Because there's nothing quite like hiring someone to do something that you don't know how to do and then just being frustrated with the work that they're doing because you don't understand their work. They're not doing things that you understand. It looks to me, or if it looks to you like they're not getting things done, you're not getting results. It's just so, so frustrating. And so for me, one of the things I'm going to do is look at the plans that people are creating and see does this make sense to me because I understand the business, I understand our business goals. They may or may not, but I want what they're doing to make sense and to fit into our overall plan for the business. So then just to continue helping with this, I've hired someone. I'm going to continuously ask questions like for social media, I'm going to ask who are we targeting and are people engaging or why are they engaging or what are they engaging with? For SEO, I'm going to say, what are the keywords that we're targeting and why? How are we targeting these keywords? What are we doing to get links? Are we doing things to increase conversion in addition to just increasing the traffic? Is the SEO also pushing people down the conversion path? Are we telling stories with the content that we're writing? I want to know all of these things and, and I'm going to continuously ask because I don't completely understand SEO or I don't completely understand social media, but I understand as the CEO of the business, which is what you should be that I understand. There are directions that we should be going, there are certain things that we should be doing. I understand an overview of it, which is really all you need to know in order to hire a technical person to do something specialized for you. You do not need to teach them the little details, and especially you don't need to teach the details if you use something like vasmadeeasy.com, which is our site where we have done training for you, that give to someone. Now, the SEO person that I hire, I'm definitely going to give them our SEO training. It puts them in a frame where they know that I care, they know that I want to help them, they know that I want them to succeed. They have a good idea of things that are acceptable to me and things that are not, because the training is going to teach those things. It's just a good place to start with. So even though I didn't create that SEO training, it still gives them a really good framework to work with once we've started. Then asking questions of them as they do work, as they make plans, them think critically, which they're probably already doing, but it lets them know that you want them to think critically, that you're questioning their work, that they need to perform at a high level. So even if you don't understand exactly what's going on, it lets them know you care and you're concerned about it.
