In Depth Hiring Guide for Virtual Assistants in the Philippines - Course Video 9 - John Jonas

Hey, this is John and in this video I want to talk about hiring, the actual process. You've recruited someone, you're ready to hire them, what do you do? What's the process? So for me, I want to talk about four different things. One, the welcome email. Two, my policies and expectations. Three, tracking, time tracking and then for the initial first task. And I'm going to cover all these things for you and help, help you get really good at doing this. So in my initial welcome email, I've recruited them, I've decided they're the person. I tell them, great, you're hired. I want you to start on this date and then I'll tell them. Here are my expectations. I expect you to work 40 hours a week. I expect you to not have another job. I expect you to spend your time working for me and be productive. Here's the salary that I expect to pay you. I'll very often tell them I'm really excited to work with you. I expect this to be a long term relationship and I think you're going to be a great worker and I'm excited to have you working. As part of this welcome email, I will attach to them a document which I've created which is my policies and expectations. So that is 40 hours a week. I also have that I expect them to be honest. I have that I don't have specific paid time off or number of days that they're allowed to take off. I let, and I tell them this, I let you take off whatever days you need. I just want to know ahead of time. And I expect you to not take advantage of me either and be honest in what you're doing. I tell them that I expect an email every day and I tell them the three questions that I ask in that email. I tell them that I cannot have them disappearing. And this goes in every email, in every welcome email that I send. It's also in my policies, you cannot disappear. And this is such a big problem that I tell it multiple times. I need you to come to me when you have a problem. And then I detail payments. So I've talked about their salary, how much I'm going to pay them, which usually I've worked that out during the recruiting process. I tell them that I'll pay you monthly. I tell them how I'm going to pay them. I tell them that I expect an invoice every month on the same day of the month so I can pay them accordingly. So that's kind of my policies in what I tell them how I Expect them to work. The next part of that email is about tracking time tracking. So I've gone through quite a few different things over the years of how I track employees time, from kind of both extremes of not doing any tracking at all to doing somewhat of a time tracker that generalizes, but it gives specifics of categories where they spent their time, all the way to screenshot time tracking like you spent this many minutes and here are the screenshots of that time. So every employer is different and employees are different, and different employers have different comfort levels here, and I have a different comfort level than others. So I'm not going to tell you one of these things is right. There are advantages to each of them. Right now we are doing time tracking based on performance. I don't track their time. I just look at how well they perform. And that has worked well for me. And it probably has something to do with my personality. I have other friends who track their time based on either like rescue time or time proof available at online jobs where they say, okay, I'm going to pay you this much an hour and you work this many hours. And so here's how much I'm going to pay you. I have other. We have tried something in the past where we said, we're going to pay you full time as long as you record at least 24 hours. So if you get 24 hours in a week, we're going to pay you full time. Anything less than 24 hours, we're going to pay you hourly at this hourly rate, hourly rate. So over 24, and we'll pay you your full salary under 24, and we'll pay you hourly. So it's kind of a. It's kind of just a thing where you need to decide how you want to do it. I have some that do a hybrid where they have certain employees, they pay them the same amount every single month, but they have other employees that, whether they work full time or part time, they pay them hourly. That'll all depend on how you work it out with that worker. One of the important things that I have seen here is that if you'll set the expectation up front if you're going to do time tracking, it's a lot easier than it is to not do time tracking and, and then try and implement it later. Often it's an invasion of privacy. There's no two ways about it. It's going to track everything they're doing on the computers. And Filipinos are scared of that because they don't want you to see them on Facebook. And, you know, every worker anywhere in the world needs a distraction from their work sometimes. And when they get on Facebook, they're very concerned about it. And so they'll turn off their time tracker every time they get on Facebook. Every time they go to the bathroom, they'll turn it off. And so it can become a distraction. However, if you're going to do it, my experience is that it's better to do it up front than it is to implement it later down the road. There are ways of implementing it later down the road where you say things like, I need to know where we're spending our time in our business, or I don't feel like everybody on the team is being productive. And so I would like to have some time tracking. I'm not singling anybody out here. And I think it's important that you do things like this because if you single people out, they will get very scared of losing their job. And very often when Filipinos get scared of losing their job, they disappear, because rather than being fired, they would rather disappear. It's easier for them. And so that's a risk you take with it. So the fourth piece of this initial beginning the hiring and starting to work with them is the task, the first thing you're going to have them do. I've tried this a couple different ways, and one of the things that I found to be most successful is to provide them training on their first task and to ask them to summarize that task for me, then to implement it. So in providing the training, what I found is so important here is that I give them a video of me where they hear my voice and see what I want them to do. So I'll use Jane and record myself talking through the video. And it may not be. It may not even be the full instructions or not talking through the video, talking through the tasks that they're going to do. And I might just be talking about the instructions that I'm giving them from something else. Maybe I have some written instructions somewhere else. I still find that it's really important to record that video up front. So they hear my voice, they know I'm real. They start to feel a little bit of trust. Recording that video gives them trust in you. So I will say, hey, here's your first task. Here's what I want you to do. Here's the general overview. Here's some more specific instructions. And here it is on the page. Now, when you have questions, I want you to come to me. I think you might have questions. With this piece or this piece. So I'll go into it in pretty good detail. It only takes me five minutes to create it. But I think it's super important that you create this initial video of them hearing your voice in the beginning. As you work with them, you'll start to provide feedback. They'll give you some work that they've done, and you'll see it and you'll say, oh, man, this is not so good. I need to correct this. And you give them some positive feedback, and I'll talk about some of that, the management side of this in the next video. But your initial goal with this in the beginning is to get this person proficient at one thing, have success with one thing with them. And so whether you start them off with a hard task or an easy task, work towards succeeding in that one thing. Because once you've had success with this person, it makes the rest of your relationship and having success with an employee overall so much easier. Get one successful task completed and then repeat, and then repeat, and that will make a big difference. Okay, so you've had this person working for you for a little bit. Now you're going through the first task, or maybe you're working on the second round of it. I have something here that I use to evaluate work, and so I'm going to look at this as you look at it. So first of all, I'm going to. And I tell them when I hire them, we're going to evaluate in a couple weeks how this is going, and we'll see if we raise your salary or if we continue working. So my first thing is, if this hasn't worked out at all, I'm going to let them go. Like, if things just are not working out at all, I don't want to go through the pain of having to do this. However, if we've had a little bit of success and I can tell things are progressing, I really want to try and work with that person. That's why I spent all the time recruiting, and I thought they were going to be good. That's why I hired them. And so now if I have to go back and recruit again, my chances of finding someone who I think is going to be good, as good as this person, you know, I just did that. So I'm going to work really hard to try and keep this person working for me. My next thing is, if it's not working out, the first place I look is at myself to see maybe my instructions haven't been as clear as I thought they were. And Often even when I look back at my instructions and say, yeah, these are super clear, as I go get further down the road with this person, I'll see. Oh yeah, okay, there was a miscommunication. It was my fault. So the first thing to do is look inwards at yourself, especially in the beginning of this. After that, if there's an obvious problem, can we work through this? And if we can work through it, is it my fault or is it their fault? And if we can't work through it, then you know, I'm going to have to let them go. And that's okay if it's there, if it's my problem, I need to correct it. And maybe that might be I'm not nice enough, maybe it might be that I'm not understanding enough. If it's their problem, we've got to look at some things. So do they not understand what I asked them to do? Are they working for multiple people and they're not spending enough time on things? You know, those are, these are fixable problems. Did you hire them? Did you hire them part time or on contract work where as a contractor, maybe they don't want to put in the time or the effort to figure this out. Where a full time worker might, Are they not smart enough to do this? I've come up with times where maybe they're just not smart enough to do this and I might need to change the tasks that I have this person doing or maybe it's just not going to work out. So those are things to evaluate as you consider, you know, the initial evaluation, like the month in evaluation. Other things that you might come up with are did they overstate their skills or are your expectations too high? Maybe they didn't overstate them, but maybe you expected. Like I mentioned in another video, I had a friend that said I need a really great programmer and what he really wanted was a designer webmaster. You know, were your expectations different than what you actually hired for? And lastly, did you ask them to do too much or did you ask them to do something that they don't like, like to do or that? So that in that same situation, the guy that my friend hired, he told him up front, I don't like doing this, but I'll do it the first time. This is not something I want to do. And my friend then came back to me and said, oh, he's not very good at this. Well, you know, he told you up front I don't like doing that. That's kind of my evaluation tree of what I'LL do as I evaluate stuff. And you may find this. This happens sooner than a month in. But I generally recommend, even if you're having problems in the beginning, give it a month and see if you can work through it. See if you can look at yourself and make it work for a month. Because if you do, that's when you get really, really good employees.