How to Hire a Good Web Developer or Good Programmer - Practical Advice

How to hire a good web developer or a programmer from the Philippines. Hey, my name is John and I am talking today about how to hire a really good developer or programmer or web person for you from the Philippines. So in my last video I talked about the difference between a web developer and a programmer. And really the difference is what are they working on? Are they working on front end stuff like user interfacing stuff, which would be more of a web developer is the word that we're using today. Or are they working on backend stuff that a customer never sees like database interaction or custom software, whatever that would be more of a programmer. Now oftentimes the word developer gets used for both of them. I'll give you seven steps today for how to hire a good web developer or a good programmer and this process is going to be similar. So the first step is to decide what you're looking for. You have to know. You can't just go out and say I need someone to build my website and then say I expect you to write custom software. That's not going to work. So go watch my previous video about what's the difference? If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, go watch my past video. The first step is to figure out exactly the role that you're looking for. Maybe it's someone to do Ruby on Rails or maybe It's Python and MySQL. Oftentimes people will make this mistake of saying like, oh, I need someone who knows this API. That's a specific set of experience within set of knowledge within a role. You're defining the role here, not oh, I need this API experience because any, any programmer is gonna be able to learn this API. Okay, so then step two, once you define the role is to go on to onlinejobs ph and start browsing some resumes, searching for that role that you're looking for. Maybe you're searching for web developer, maybe you're searching for php, mysql, whatever it is that you're searching for your role, search that term and you're going to start to browse the resumes. And the purpose here is for you to get a good idea of what exists out there. Like what skills can I find? Can I find people with these skills? How much are they looking to make and what are the secondary skills that this person might have. So you might go on and say, oh, I need a front end developer, someone to build my website for me and you're going to find, oh, I found someone who knows HTML and css and they also know some SEO so that when they go to build it, they're going to make it SEO friendly. Just so you know, onlinejobs PH has over a million profiles of Filipino workers that they've put their profiles up there, basically uploaded their resumes, and you can search them and sort them and narrow it down and find really, really good people that you might be interested in hiring. So this brings me to step three, which would be to post a job. So you've looked at a bunch of profiles and you know pretty darn well, like, what the role is and what skills you're looking for and how much you're looking to pay based off of what people are asking for in their resumes. And so when you go to post this, you're going to write your job description, you're going to write your title, you're going to give your salary. You've already figured those things out because you browse the resumes now. If you want more in detail about how to post a job, I have a full system@1vaoa.com where I will walk you through this whole process in detail of like, hey, here are some very good tips on how to post a job. It's so good that I guarantee that you'll find a good person with it. So step number four then, to interview people by asking lots of questions. So in the interview process, often people want to jump right to a Skype interview, and that's the wrong thing to do. And this is the kind of thing that I'll cover in the one VAOA training. If you spend your time doing Skype interviews, you're going to jump from having 30 applicants to two instantly. And those two probably aren't the best programmers or web developers. They're probably just the two who are most comfortable with getting on a Skype interview with you. So there's a better way to do the interview process. You're going to ask a lot of questions over a bunch of emails and start to narrow it down by who drops out, who doesn't answer questions, who doesn't pay attention to details, who takes too long to respond. So there's a whole bunch of things that, again, I'll cover this in the one VAOA training program, the whole detail and exactly the questions that I ask. And obviously there's too much to cover in this video. But that's the next step. Ask a bunch of questions at the end your questions, once you've narrowed it down, like people have dropped themselves out of the process and you've dropped people out because they've answered wrong or whatever. Then's the time to do the Skype interview. So step number five is to narrow it down from the final three or four or whatever with a test. So now you're going to give people a test. And maybe this test is if you're hiring a web designer, you're going to ask them to design this specific page of your website. Other test options is take this Photoshop design and turn it into a HTML file. So PSD to HTML is a good one. Or you can say make this responsive. Once you've done those, those two things, those are pretty good, pretty good indicators of like how good a front end person is. If you have a friend that can look at the code, they're gonna see it's clean, it works well and it loads quickly during the test. Is a very common way of like weeding down to the final person so that you, you get a really, really good idea of their kind of work. Now just so you know, when I say I test, it doesn't mean get them to do a whole bunch of work for you for free. So if this test is going to take more than 30 minutes or so, you need to pay for it. So you need to pay them. Say, hey, I'm asking you to do this thing. Like I'm asking you to design this page of my website as a test. I will pay you $50 for designing this page. Now if you do that three or four times, it gets kind of expensive. But you're also going to get a really good idea of like how good these people are. And you're going to get multiple options of things for your website that you wouldn't have thought of before. So step six is to negotiate terms. You figured out who you want, and maybe you just can't decide between two people. Once you start negotiating terms, like how much do you want to make? What hours are you going to work? How many hours a week are you going to work? Here's what I require. Stuff like that, you'll have a pretty dang good. Like often that'll separate two people when you go to hire them. And I'm not saying that you want to hire the least expensive one or the one who wants the least paid time off because that's not always the case and especially when you're hiring a programmer. Here's a really good piece of advice with programmers and web developers. But programmers, this is a really good indicator. The more experience they have, the better they are. And that's not always the case. But just generally someone who has eight years of experience is going to be pretty dang good, you know that versus someone who has one to two years of experience. I've hired some really good people who have quite a bit of experience for not so much. You just have to really search for it. And so again, I'm not advocating that you underpay people or because people that I've hired that are really good, I raise their salary according to their skill level. But that's another indicator when you're negotiating terms. So negotiating the terms will often weed out one or two other people to give you the final one. And so that brings me to step seven, which is hire. So hiring in the Philippines. Hiring someone in the Philippines isn't the same thing as hiring in the US where like, oh, we have to have you sign all these disclosure documents or we have to have you go through HR training or whatever. In the Philippines, it's like, hey, when can you start? Oh, I can start tomorrow. Oh great. Here's your first task. So you have negotiated your terms and now it's like hire. And they're there and ready to go. So my name is John Jonas and I created onlinejobs ph, which is the largest marketplace for finding these workers in the Philippines. And they are amazing. In the Philippines, there's so much talent you can get there. I often hear people say, well, I know I could hire like a general VA in the Philippines. What about a programmer? Yeah, I have like 31 people on my team now and they include programmers and designers and front end develop web developers or social media people, or content writers or video editors or audio transcription or managers or all kinds of content writers, copywriter, anything that you can get done online. You can find talented people in the Philippines. And onlinejobs PH is that place to find people.