John Jonas walks through his method for hiring virtual assistants from the Philippines using email screening and paid test tasks instead of Skype interviews. He focuses on attention to detail, response speed, and English ability, then has candidates complete a paid trial before hiring.
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Hey, and welcome to video three in the how to Hire a Great Virtual Assistant series. In this video, I'm going to cover the interviewing and the weeding out process. If you follow this, it's super effective. There are lots of ways to interview. What I'm about to show you is my way. It doesn't mean it's the right way. It doesn't mean that there aren't better ways. This is just my way of doing this. A lot of other people will teach you other ways of doing things and that's perfectly fine. Find what works for you. So first, if you've done what I've suggested in other videos, you have a whole bunch of applications that have already come to you. Any one of those applications who didn't follow your directions, just get rid of it. Don't even look at it any further. Ignore it. If you have tons of applications, you can start to look at them without looking in very much detail. Don't spend a lot of time on any single application. Just look briefly and only reply to them if they really stand out to you. If you have less than 20 applications, then reply to every one of them. And this is where my weed out process begins. So what I do is I'm going to ask every single one of those people 1, 2, 3, 4 questions across 5, 6, 10 emails. I don't do a Skype interview. And this is going to be contrary to what a lot of people will tell you. But in the Philippines, if you're trying to do a Skype interview, they don't want to do it. So here's what will happen. You'll have 10 potential candidates. Any one of those 10 could be perfect for your job unless you require voice in this job position. That's the only situation where I would say do a Skype interview. So you have 10 candidates. You're going to try and schedule Skype interviews. Only half of them are going to schedule the interview because they're too scared to do the interview. Of those half who schedule the interview, only one or two is going to show up. Outside of that, you just lost eight or nine potentially really good candidates. And maybe the one or two show up aren't that good. They're just confident in themselves. So that's why I do not recommend a Skype interview. Here's what I do. So I send these emails to them with questions in them. And in those questions, I'm going to look for specific things in the answer. Here are examples of some of the questions I'm going to send to people Things like, do you already have another job? If so, where are you working? How many hours are you working? How much money are you looking to make? Have you worked for foreign employers before? How long have you been doing whatever this is that you're doing? Send me a link to your onlinejobs PH profile. Send me three references and examples of your best work. Tell me about a problem that you've had in the past and how you solved it. Please write a paragraph of why I should hire you. Don't send me a list of your experience. I don't want to know. You're dedicated and hardworking. I want you to tell me why I should hire you versus other people. When are you able to start? Do you have your own computer and Internet access? How fast is your Internet connection? Will you work from home or from Internet cafe? Where are you located? In the Philippines? Who do you live with? Do you live with your parents? Are you married? Do you have kids? What school did you go to? What elementary school? How long have you had your college degree? Or are you still working on your college degree? What are your future plans? I'm going to ask tons of questions and I'm going to do this across multiple emails. I will also include questions in there about more in more detail about the specific skills. If this is a technical position, if it's a programmer, if it's a designer, if it's a video editor, if it's a webmaster kind of person, those people, I'm going to ask more specific questions. For anybody else, that's pretty much my question process. Now here's what happens in this process. I'm going to pay attention to specific things that go on. Number one, I'm going to pay attention to their attention to detail. So if I ask them four questions in an email and they only answer three of them, I know that the chances of me giving them four tasks after they've been hired and them only doing three of them is pretty high. And that doesn't work for me. I'm going to pay attention to how quickly they respond. If they respond twice a day because I know that they're on the other side of the world from me. If they respond twice a day to me, awesome. I love it. If it takes them three days to respond, what are the chances of them taking three days to respond after I've hired them? Like that doesn't work for me. I'm going to pay attention to their command of English. Like do they understand English slang? Do they reply with slang? Do they. Is their English Good. Or are there little oddities in their English? Depending on the position I'm hiring for, that may not matter to me, but it might. I'm going to pay attention to their variance from their profile on onlinejobs ph, which I'm not going to look into detail at the profile at first, but after a while I'm going to look at the profile. So in doing all of these things, what I have found is that most people are going to weed themselves out. Most people aren't going to stick with this process. They're probably just going to stop responding to you. Of those that go through the whole process, I'm probably going to get a gut feeling for which one of them I should hire based on the responses I've gotten. You're going to see like, this person has better skills than this person. This person's a different cost than this person. You're going to have a pretty dang good idea of who they are if you're undecided. Still, now's a good time to do a test. You can have them do a test task. There are a couple key things here. Number one, let them know it's a test. And if you're doing it to multiple people, let them know that there's multiple people taking this test. That's important. Also, let them know you will pay them for the test and tell them how much you're going to pay them and tell them you're going to pay them regardless of how the test turns out. Otherwise, they're super hesitant to do work without getting paid. So that's a really big deal. So at this point, you're ready to hire someone if you do the test, hire whoever does it best. So you've hired someone. Now you're at the point where you're ready to start working. In the next video, I'm going to cover the first thing, like the hiring email and the first task you do and what your goals are with this. I'm John Jonas from onlinejobs ph, the largest and safest marketplace for finding virtual workers in the Philippines.
