MBA1025 Q&A Wednesday: Where can I hire great remote team members?

Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because we know how much your business means to you. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me at omar00mba.net so I can answer it right here on the show. Today's question is from Nick and Nick asks where can I hire great remote team members? That's a great question, Nick, because when you post on job boards, often you're flooded with CVs and applications. And the majority of those job boards have applicants that are looking for a physical job, an office to walk into somewhere in their local area. What Nick's looking for is a place where he can post a job where the applicants know this is a remote job. He's looking for that specific skill set where people can manage themselves autonomously. Where do you find these people? Where do you post these jobs? And how do you set yourself up to make things a little easier when it comes to filtering these applications? That's what I'll be sharing with you in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 BA show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro, a step by step system to help you quickly discover thousands of profitable, easy to rank keywords for almost any niche. Visit longtailpro.commba and use coupon code MBA for a free trial and and 30% off your subscription forever. Again, that's longtailpro.commba, and use code MBA. So Nick asked the question, where can he find great remote team members to hire? Well, there's specific places where you can post jobs where the applicants know it's a remote job as well as the fact that they may even have experience as a remote team member at other places in their previous work history. Now, Nick, if this is your first time hiring somebody as a remote team member, it's totally fine. Running a remote team has become more and more popular and useful, really in today's modern business world. Even big companies like Apple and Uber, they have physical offices, but they still hire people remotely as well because they're trying to find the best talent around the world. But like I mentioned at the start, there is a special skill set for those who work remotely. They need to be able to self manage themselves. They have to be excellent communicators, really written and obviously verbal. They need to know how to use certain tools to be able to communicate with you, whether it's Slack or Basecamp or project management tools like Trello. And they need to know how to manage their time. This is not insignificant. There are many people that can't make that transition from an office job to a remote job because hey, no one's breathing down their back. They don't have to check in or walk into an office at a certain time and therefore they drop the ball and let down their employer. So I want to share with you some resources that have helped us find some great remote players. The first is a website called WeWork remotely. This is a very cool and simple job board and it's all catered to remote teams and remote workers. WeWork remotely is actually built by the guys behind Basecamp 37 Signals, Jason Fried and David Hanemeier Hansen. It costs $299 to post a job for 30 days for a month, which is pretty reasonable. A lot of people think, oh, that's kind of expensive. I've seen a lot more expensive and it's not bad given the fact that you're really getting a niche type of employee. The other thing is that the top startups and businesses all post there, so they attract the best talent. Our experience with using that tool has been finding a great pool of great candidates. Now, they're all not going to be superstars that apply, but the ones that made our shortlist and our interview list. We're all pretty good hires, we're all pretty qualified and we just basically went with the best fit. I can't say the same about other job boards. WeWork remotely is pretty flexible. When you put your job description, you can hire for part time work, full time work, you choose how many hours you're looking for, you write up the description and you tell the applicants that are searching why exactly they should be working for you. Now, remember I told you that this attracts the best candidates? Well, the best candidates are going to be also the most expensive ones. Now I'm not saying you're going to get ripped off here, but when it comes to the range of pay for whatever you're hiring for, you're not going to be paying on the bottom of that range. I would say be paying at least middle to 75 to 80% of that range. And for me, and from my experience, I'm okay with that. I always say when it comes to hiring, you're either going to pay now or you're going to pay later. You either pay them for what they're worth and they'll work efficiently and they'll get the job done faster. And therefore your business grows and you get an ROI on that hire or you don't pay that salary. You find somebody that's less qualified and therefore is going to be compensated less and they're going to take longer to get to the results you're looking for. Wasting you time and money because of, you know you're going to keep on paying them right while they're trying to get it right. So usually you get what you pay for. You might get lucky once or twice with a hire where somebody is just ambitious, a really good worker, a fast learner, but that's the exception, not the rule. So definitely I highly recommend the resource wework remotely. You're going to spend some time putting this job description together. If you put time in your job description, you're going to get the best candidates. Now before I move on to the next resource, I want to give you a tip when it comes to putting together this job description for your remote player, for your remote teammate, number one, you have to have a way for them to apply for the job. Now some people, they just say, hey, email your resume, your CV to this email. And that's one way to do it. But you're gonna get a flood of emails with a whole bunch of resumes and it's really hard to organize them when they're in your inbox. So what we like to do, and actually this is a brilliant idea from Nicole, my business partner, and that's to create a Google form. Google forms are free to create and basically you're creating a questionnaire. And actually Google Forms has a template for job applications. You could just edit it and it's a basic form of maybe 12 to 15 questions. And some of them are just simple like name, email address, phone number, what city you're going to be working from. And then you want to put some qualifying questions depending on the position you're trying to hire, ask them specific questions about their experience, when's the last time they've improved their skills? Why do they want to work for your company in the first place? What attracted them to the job ad, Are they available, the hours you're looking for, all these things, and then ask them to post a link to their CV, their resume or, or their LinkedIn as well as they can write their cover letter right in the form. So on the job posting in WeWork remotely or otherwise, I put a link to that Google form in the area where I say to apply for this position, go to this link and complete this application. This makes our lives so much easier because when I go to the Google form, I can just see all the responses and Google organizes them for me, nice and neat. So I can go to each application and read their answer and just scroll through. I can then earmark who I like so I can shortlist them for an interview. Pretty cool, right? That's going to save you a lot of headaches. So what other resources can you use to find great remote team members? Well, one resource that a lot of people recommend is upwork and I've used upwork a lot. Now upwork is mainly where a lot of freelancers live. It's where you can find a lot of great freelancers who, whether it's in tech, whether it's in customer service, whether it's in marketing. And there are a ton of people that have their profile up on upwork. So you can scan through and look through all these people even before you put up a job post. Putting up a job post is free with upwork. Now the way upwork makes their money is that when you hire them, they get paid through upwork. So upwork takes a part of that, pay a percentage, and it's pretty straightforward. So you put a credit card on file, upwork charges you, and then they pass on the rest of the money to the freelancer or the hire. Now, even though you know there's a lot of freelancers there, there's plenty of people looking to find a full time job or even, you know, lots of hours, like 30 hours a week. If you made the effort to write your whole job description and all that stuff with WeWork remotely, you might as well post a job on upwork as well. The thing about upwork is that they have their own application process, so you don't need to include that link to the Google form. And in fact, I recommend you don't because you want to separate the candidates that come from WeWork remotely. Those candidates will apply through the Google form and those who come from upwork will go through your upwork application process and you'll see it in your upwork account. And you can ask qualifying questions as well, prescreening questions before you flag them for an interview or not. And you can actually run the interviews within upwork with their video Chat upwork kind of makes it super simple. Now, there are a couple more advantages I want to share with you when it comes to upwork. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address. You needed to register your business. You needed to open up a business bank account. You even needed to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. But if you work from home like a lot of us do, you don't want to put your home address and have your customers show up to your door. And you don't want to spend the extra money every single month on having a business office. This is where Earth classmail comes in. They hook you up with a swanky business address and all the mail that gets sent there gets scanned and uploaded to your account in the cloud. That means you never have to check physical mail ever again. You could see it anywhere, anytime, from your phone or your laptop. Pretty cool. So cool. We signed up. We absolutely love it. And we've been using Earth classmail for over a year now. And Earth classmail wants to hook you up with a free month so you can get started with your business address. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH. Again, that's earthclassmail.com MBAMONTH coupon code MBAMONTH. A couple benefits to upwork you want to consider. Number one, if you have a budget, a very specific budget for this hire, Upwork allows you to filter in the job posting. So you actually, when you create the job posting, you could say, how much are you willing to pay for this person per hour? And they have these different ranges, these different buckets of hourly wage. And when you choose the wage or the range you are looking for, this saves you some time because only those who are okay with that pay or that pay range are going to apply. And even those who are outside that range, they can see the job posting. So and adjust their pay or their pay range to kind of fit within your range. So that's pretty cool. The other thing is, if you don't want to worry about invoicing and paying payroll, if you want to pay somebody, you know, once a week with your credit card and have that, you know, hooked up to your accounting software and just all be automated, upwork is very, very convenient in that way. Upwork also has a work diary for each contractor or freelancer so you could see what they worked on and they do snapshots, like screenshots of everything they've done in the hours they worked or the hours they're billing you for. So it's very transparent and they kind of take care of everything for you. Now, the one downside of upwork is that it's huge. You're going to get tons of applicants. You can have a job up and within 24 hours have 100 cvs, 100 applicants who go through. So you're going to do a lot of filtering and it may be a little discouraging because you might toss aside 70% of the people, maybe even 80% of the people, and be left with, you know, that 20, 15%. That's okay. You have a bigger pool and upwork is a bigger kind of platform. So there you have it, Nick. These are my recommendations when it comes to hiring remote team members. I hope that helps. And if you have a question, you're listening right now. Like, hey, I have a question. When it comes to my business, email me@omar00mba.net I'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesdays. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an iTunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you. And by leaving us a rating review, you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our courses. This month we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build an online course. It's a $500 course we sell over at easycourse co, but every Friday somebody wins it for free. All you got to do is leave us a rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Alright, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Hiring is time consuming, so make sure you put some time on your calendar to do this, to make the job description, to put the ad up, to filter through all the applicants, to shortlist them, to do a first interview, a second or even a third interview. You may want to get other people involved on your team. You know, subject experts like your lead developer or your head of customer support for a support agent. But if this is your first hire, this is still going to take time. You're still going to have to go through this process. So make time in your calendar so you don't get overwhelmed. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.