In Depth Recruiting for Virtual Assistants - Part 1 - Course Video 7 - John Jonas

In this set, we're going to cover this in more depth, in more detail. I'm going to get into things about recruiting and evaluating who you're going to recruit and exactly how to hire people and how to manage them. We're going to go into really good depth on this stuff so that you can get really good at it. The better you get at this, the more success you'll have. The better off you're going to be at getting other people to do your work for you so you can live a better lifestyle. And in the end, that's my goal with this, is for you to live a better lifestyle through outsourcing, through being good at outsourcing. So as we go through this, I want you to think about the details of things that I'm talking about. I want you to pay attention to how you're sending emails to workers and to what things you say when you're recruiting them, which will make a big difference on your ability to find really great workers versus just okay workers. And it'll make a big difference on the experience you have as you hire workers, to having really great experience and being able to replace yourself versus just having a little bit of extra help. We're going to get into depth on how I recruit people and tactics you can use to get better workers. So my first thing that I want you to understand is don't be like this guy. Here's an email I got from someone and he says to me first I want to hire a Filipino who can one study the nanoblogging system and build WordPress blogs using Thesis theme, create good header graphic design and logo and write articles creating videos and do social bookmarking using social bot. So your first requirement is that you want someone who can build WordPress, do graphic design, write good content, do social media and create videos. That's a lot. Second, I need him her to reply forum posts at least 20 forum posts a day and provide tips and value to the forum community. So they need to be really smart and participate in forums every day. Third, I need him or her to create an opt in page in my blog and write a pre sale sales letter. So you want him to be a copywriter and to be able to create opt in forms. Fourth, I need him or her to write a 30 page ebook 15 page free report. This is ridiculous. There's no such thing as this person that this guy's looking for. And surprisingly he's not the only one like this. I've had quite a few emails from people saying I need someone who can do all these things. That person doesn't exist. So as you recruit, find one or two skills that you're looking for and narrow it down. In the beginning, I'm looking for this and this skill. And then I'm also looking for other things that I've talked about before. Dedicated worker, consistent work. And I'll show you how to get those in this video. So when I'm recruiting a new worker, I'm always using onlinejobs.ph. it's the only website I use. I own it and I've told you that. But it is the biggest and the best place to find people. So I'm gonna focus on it. Before I do that, though, I'm give you a couple other options just in case you don't want to use what I use. You can try and use Craigslist. Manila.craigslist.org is an option. I've never actually seen someone successfully recruit someone from Craigslist. And I think a big part of that is that there's quite a few scams. Craigslist is very unmoderated in this area. And so there's a lot of scams. There's scams from employers and so Filipinos don't trust it. And then they're scammed from workers, which just make it hard. It's an option. It's not a very good option. Another option is bestjobs.ph. when I first started, Best Jobs was amazing. They've gone way downhill since then. The number of resumes they have has shrunk instead of grown. It's another option. Another option is easyoutsource.com it's not as good as online jobs, but it's pretty good so that, you know, that's another option. Another option is a website that's actually run in the Philippines. Ph.jobstreet.com they're pretty expensive, but they have a large pool of workers and you can post a job and you'll get some good responses. Another option is to go use a recruiting agency. So when I got started, this is what I did. I was@agentsofvalue.com they are a recruiting agency. They have workers in the Philippines. They recruit those workers and bring them into the office and they mark up their salaries and lease them back to you. There's thousands of companies that'll do this. A couple other bigger ones are 1, 2, 3, employee. There's tons of companies that'll do this. Where they get an office in the Philippines and bring the workers in and mark them up. You know, it's an okay situation. At least they give them to you full time where they only work for you and they provide them a computer and Internet access, which they already have at home. Some of the problems, I lost a worker in the very beginning doing this because they couldn't handle the office politics. They were a good worker, but there's politics in the office and they didn't like it, so they quit. The markup, the salary markup, using them will also be sick to $10,000 a year difference, which you know is acceptable. It didn't work for me. So those are a couple other options. Now I'm going to focus on onlinejobs ph so at online jobs there are a couple options for how you're going to recruit people. One option is to post a job and the second option is to browse through resumes and contact workers. You can use a combination of both, which I do very often. So in posting a job on onlinejobs ph I have a couple specific things you can and should and shouldn't do, and then I have some examples for you. So number one, when you're posting a job, be specific with a couple things, but don't be too specific with everything. Don't tell them all of your employment policies up front. Don't tell them they'll need to work on 18 different things you'll want them to work. You'll want to give them very specific things of a couple tasks, but then leave it generic. The problem is that if a Filipino thinks that they're not qualified to do one of the six things that you list, they won't even apply. And then you're losing good candidates who could have done all the things but they weren't sure. And they don't want to disappoint you. They don't want to let you down. Other things that will happen as you post a job, you're going to get a lot of responses and some, a lot of those, some of those responses are just going to be junk. They're not going to be people that you want to work with. And there's very little we can do about it, although I'll give you some tactics where you can avoid that. You'll need to filter through those job responses after you've posted and kind of narrow it down to who's responding well. And then you'll have to respond and communicate with them a whole bunch at that point. It's very similar to browsing through resumes and contacting them where you're going to communicate and narrow them down through your communication and your interview process. When you post a job, you're probably going to get a couple really great responses as you do this, just make sure that you're filtering. Make sure that you're filtering workers, because anybody who's trying to scam someone from the Philippines, that person is probably responding to job offers rather than waiting for people to find them and find their resume. So you'll need to do a little bit better filtering if you've posted a job. But you'll probably also have more options. Whichever one of these you use, or if you use a combination of both, I have a couple tips for you. Number one, if you're hiring a designer or a webmaster or a programmer, always verify their skills. Or an English writer, verify their skills. Look to see examples of their work, see their design work, look at websites they've built in the past, look at samples of their writing, get them to send you samples, or ask them to write something new for you. It can be short one paragraph which will give you a good sample of their work. Also, you should be aware that different regions of the country will demand different salaries. So if you're hiring someone in Manila, they're going to be the highest paid workers in the Philippines. And they have a huge talent pool in Manila because it's the biggest city. Someone in Davao is going to be paid less and the salaries can be double from Davao to Manila, who you're hiring. And you could hire the same person from Davao or from Manila, and it's going to cost you twice as much in Manila. I'm not saying it's not good to hire Manila because there's a lot more talent there, but you can usually find people in outlying areas that have really good skills and it'll cost you quite a bit less. Another thing that you should be aware of is that sometimes, usually you're going to get what you pay for. Not always, but usually. So if someone is saying they have lots and lots of experience but their salary asking price is really low, that's a red flag and you should just be aware of it. Be careful of that. They could be someone who is working for eight different employers and they are skilled, but they're not giving you the time that you want them to give you. So another tip that I have for you is to ask them to take a test. Once you've kind of narrowed it down or you're narrowing it down, ask them to take a test. Maybe it's a test you find online, maybe it's a test that's available at onlinejobs Ph. But if you can ask them to take a test. Often what we find is that workers who are trying to scam someone aren't willing to take a test and you'll filter out problems that way. Another thing that kind of throws a red flag to me as I recruit is if someone has too few skills or too has too few skills or too many skills. So someone who says they're really good at everything in my experience is just not right. Something's wrong there. And then someone who has said that they haven't given themselves any four or five star ratings in online jobs tells me they're not confident enough in themselves to be a functional worker. I want to look for someone who says they're good at some things, but they also recognize they're not good at everything. So those are some of my tips as you, as you move forward with this, of things to look for and things to watch out for. Okay, so let's talk for a minute about if you're going to contact workers, things that you should do. And some of these principles are the same for posting a job versus contacting workers. One of the things that I see people make a mistake often is I'll get an email from someone that says I'm shortlisting my list of potential candidates who I'm going to contact. That's the wrong way of approaching this. The way to approach contacting workers is to contact a whole bunch and see who responds. Going back to the Filipino loyalty thing, if someone has a job already in the Philippines, they're likely to not even respond to your job inquiry. That's how loyal they are. And so if you are contacting people who already have jobs and you've shortlisted it to three and all three of them have jobs, they're not even going to respond and you're going to be really disappointed. So what I recommend you do is contact 30 people.