MBA1925 Q&A Wednesday: How do I hire for a skill I am not an expert in?

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Hey all. Welcome to the Hunter $mba show. No fluff, just the good stuff every single day with our 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014 with my business partner and today is Q and A Wednesday. Every Wednesday we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask just go ahead and email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Sasha Homer. Love the podcast. I got a question for you. I'm looking to hire somebody on my team with skills I am not an expert in. I'm an engineer but I'm looking for a highly talented copywriter to help with our marketing and our website. I don't know what good copy is, I don't know what high converting copy looks like, but I know it's important to the success of my business. How do I find somebody that's a good fit for my team that will do a good job without knowing what a good job looks like? Would love your help on this. Thanks so much Sasha. Love this question Sasha because it's very common. A lot of entrepreneurs when they start scaling their business, and they start looking to improve parts of their business that they're not so great at. They're not really sure how to find these people, let alone hire them and know if they're good. Well, in today's lesson, I'm gonna break down how you can stop worrying and start hiring experts that you need. You don't need to know it all. You don't need to be an expert at everything to hire an expert. And I'm gonna show you how in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So Sasha is looking to hire a copywriter, but basically Sasha needs to hire for skill that they don't possess. The first thing I want to say is this is actually a really good moment in your business because now you are moving from self employment to entrepreneurship. This is real entrepreneurship. When you start building and scaling your business where you're not doing everything, but instead you're managing the process of getting things done. You're recognizing the fact that you can't be great at everything, you can't learn fast enough to know everything under the sun, and that your job as the leader of your business is to find the best talent, to be the coach, to be the person that brings in the talent to run your organization and succeed to the highest level. But how do you recognize? How do you hire? How do you find people that have skills you're not very acquainted with? If you're listening and you're looking to hire somebody that has skills that you don't have, then take some notes and jot down my advice. This is not the first time you've been asked this question because it's quite common. And I want to address it and simplify this process for you in today's lesson number one. A lot of entrepreneurs delay these types of hires because they feel overwhelmed. They feel like, I don't know what to look for. I don't know who's good and who's not. I don't want to get hoodwinked. Right? I don't want to get tricked into hiring somebody that's going to be a waste of money. So they actually delay hiring A position that they really need and they slow down the progress of their business. You got to be careful of this. So apply what you learned today so that you don't delay anymore. The first thing we have to recognize is that, okay, you are not an expert at copywriting in this example, Sasha, who asked today's question, but you can get an expert that does know about copywriting. Not to hire on your team, but to help you make the hire. And there are lots of these types of people that are out there, people that are high levels at very big companies that are looking for side gigs or looking for ways to occupy their time doing fun projects with smaller businesses. And they usually use the title advisor. So like marketing and copywriting advisor, they're going to be expensive, but you're going to use their expertise wisely. For example, for a copywriting expert, somebody that has written copy for big time websites, has a success track record that can actually drill down and say, hey, my copy has converted X amount of sales this month for this business. So you're going to look for these types of people. You're looking for the experts, the advisors, the people that you just simply can't afford on a full time basis. They're going to be expensive. They're going to be 100, 150, $200 an hour, maybe even more. But this is okay because they're not going to work for you full time. They're going to help you find great talent. You don't need this super duper expert at the start. You need somebody that's going to meet your needs and be able to have a good attitude and grow into the role. Speaking of need, this is the first thing you're going to establish with your expert. So you're going to look for this expert, any kind of job site, like WeWork remotely or Upwork or Freelancer. I recommend you find an expert that has a time zone that is not too dissimilar to yours. So that way you can work together to make this hire pretty quickly and sync together. And once you find this expert, the first thing you're going to establish is what do you need. Now these experts, their job is to be able to extract what your business is all about, the weaknesses you have and the needs you need to fill. You're just probably going to just say it in plain English like, hey, our conversion rate on our website really sucks. Okay, I wrote the copy, it's not that great. I need a great copywriter to audit our website, you know, to read our copy, to improve it to do some testing maybe, what do you think? And often these experts in any field will do an audit, will give you a report and say, hey, these are the areas you need immediate help with and this is who you should hire this type of person. And because they're not going for the job themselves, their job is to find you somebody. They're gonna get you what you need and not anything less or anything more. They might say, hey, your copy is not too bad, but it needs better formatting or you just need better blog posts or something like that and find you a good writer that is an expert at that. So after they kind of have a discussion with you, they're gonna find out what your needs are and then you can come together with your expert and, and agree on a job description. This is basically the job posting you're going to create together to put out there to attract the talent you need. A lot of people don't make this hire just the fact they get stuck at creating a job description. They're not really sure what to write and who to attract. They don't even know what they need. So this is a really good valuable step from there. You're going to post the job description and the job opening on some of these online job sites. ZipRecruiter is one that actually, you know, aggregates or I should say spreads. Your ZipRecruiter is an option I've heard that is quite good at putting your job posts on different sites, but just a warning, it puts it out there to a lot of sites. So be ready to field through these applications. Personally, when I'm hiring for a job, I like to have a Google form where the applicant will fill out. Part of the form is a video they submit where they talk a little bit about themselves and their experiences. And I asked them to submit some of their previous work so we can take a look at the quality of the work they do before we even screen them in for an interview. Now you hired an expert, utilize them. You can get them to screen through these CVs and through these applications they can okay the ones they think that you can pass them through for an interview. And of course even beforehand they can help you put together the application too to make sure the screening process is pretty rigorous to make their life easier too, when they're going through applications. From there, I recommend that you do an initial interview yourself or anybody else on the team with you to do a cultural fit interview. If they're not a good cultural fit, if they're not a good Fit for your team, they don't share the same values. If you don't want to spend time with them day in and day out, there's no reason to pass them on to the technical interview. It's sort of like another filter. You're trying to minimize as much time as possible that you're going to need to ask your hired expert to use to help you make the hire. So if they pass a cultural interview, they pass the initial meet and greet with you and the questions you have to see if they're the type of employee teammate you want to work with. Then they move on to the technical interview. There you can set up some appointments with your applicant along with your expert, and they can interview them and you can be on the interview with them as well. Or they can just do themselves and they can write up some notes on their opinion of how that interview went, how the applicant did. They can recommend to hire them or not. And from there you make a choice based on your preference from your initial interview who you'd like to hire. Now, what's great about this process is often it's going to be hard because you'll have more than one qualified candidate. That's great because your business might grow in the future and some candidates might be good for new positions that come up in the future. So you have a database of great talent now. So this is good money spent just going through this process with your hired experts.

Expert.

And from there your expert is pretty much done. You can thank them and ask them, hey, can I reach out to you if I need any help in the future? Maybe through evaluations, when you evaluate that new hire or onboarding or whatever it is. But what I found is hiring an expert to go through the process of hiring a new employee saves you so much time and money in the long run because you make a great hire. There's nothing worse than making a bad hire, spending tons of money, training them, helping them out the first, you know, three to six months, and realizing they're not a good fit, you let them go. You have to do the whole process over. Think of all the salary and cash that goes out the door in that mistake. What I found is that, you know, your expert really is not going to spend too much time in the process. I found between 20 to 30 hours. So you're going to spend anything between maybe 2,000 to $4,000 to find a good hire. But that's far, far less money than if you hired, let's say, a recruitment company that charges 10 to 20% of the annual salary of the new and you learn a ton in the process by working with that expert.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's Question how do I hire for a skill I'm not an expert in? Well, find somebody that is an expert. Hire them for 20 to 30 hours to find you a great candidate or candidates. And by the way, in my experience, over time as your business starts to grow and you have the opportunity to hire high caliber people, those experts you call upon to help you hire, they love working with you and they're interested in working full time with you. So you build relationships with really high quality people that can really help build your business. So even if you can't afford to hire them right now, later in the future, you've built that rapport, that relationship. They know the business. They know who you are, they know how you work. Hey, things might change in their world, in their job, and a lot of times they'll be happy to join your team. So that's kind of a hidden benefit of this process. Well, Sasha, I hope today's episode helped answer your question. And if you're listening and you had a similar question in your head, ask Sasha's Give this episode another listen, write down some notes, take down the steps and implement. Get started. You won't regret it. And of course, if you have a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar100mba.net and I'll make sure to answer right here on Q and A Wednesday. That wraps up today's episode. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. After doing this a few times in my experience, hiring an expert to find great qualified candidates, I start to realize this is the skill I need to cultivate. The skill to be able to find great talent. The skill to be able to find people that can help me build my business better. You start to realize, you know, in order to build a skyscraper of a business, you can't pick up a hammer and do it all yourself. You're going to need other people to make it happen. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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