Cracking the code: A strategic Sourcing Playbook for Rapid Nearshore & Offshore Tech Hiring

We are live. Hey Ryan, how's it going? I'm awesome, man.

We are live. It's been, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm actually pretty excited for this because it has been a very long time since you and I have gone live together on us.

On, yeah, exactly, on the same screen. It's been a while. I think it was the last time I was, uh, invited to the Shelly's Alley.

I, you know, it's, it's funny because we haven't talked about that and I've been thinking about them like every Friday Like, this dude does not have me on anywhere.

Uh, you've been on there. You can be a repeat offender though, as many times as you want.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So, all right, so let me, let me kick this thing off. I know we got a lot of people, and I'm going to get this thing live on, on the Work Defined site as well. So as we're doing this, um, so welcome everybody. We are broadcasting live, we're live streaming the Crackin' the Code, uh, training session. So this is something that came up, uh, not too long ago. We were— we, we work with a company called Global Pros, and so we were, uh, we were talking about doing a training session with Shelly, uh, just around sourcing. We haven't done one in a long time, and we thought, hey, let's, let's kick off and let's get this thing moving again. So Shelly agreed to jump in and do this with us. So I appreciate it. We're going to get into some really cool things. Um, but Shelly, for whoever, whatever reason people don't know who you are, give a quick little intro yourself and let's kick this thing off.

Uh, yeah, sure. Well, yeah, if you, uh, you're on my channels, so you probably know who I am. But, um, hello everybody, my name is Shelly and I've been in the business for about 30 years almost, and that is the business of, uh, finding and attracting candidates to employment opportunities. So whatever you want to call it— sourcing, recruiting, talent acquisition— got a million names. But the reason I got invited to this was because when Ryan was working with this company called GlobalPros, he approached me and he said, hey, what do you think about this tool? And they gave me a— well, everybody gets a 14-day trial, but they gave me a 14-day trial and I was kicking it around And it started me thinking about a couple of things. One of those is that I think there's a really big missed opportunity in recruiting to be a true partner in getting work done as opposed to just filling recs. And so, the whole concept of extended workforce kind of started hammering around in my head. Then I had a guest on the show that was one of the biggest worldwide speakers on the subject matter of extended workforce, and that got me thinking. So it's just been, it's been going around in my head. For those of you that are not aware, extended workforce basically is everything that, you know, we used to call the gig economy or the contractor workforce or contract workforce. There's a bunch of different names for it, but basically it's the people that are not your employees but that do the work. So, um, we'll talk a little bit about that. And, you know, it's, it's an opportunity for us to be strategic and help hiring managers get the work done and deliver on the promise of the work instead of just focusing on an FTE. And it does require a little bit of a transition in thinking. So that's kind of what I wanted to, to really talk about today is what all that entails and, you know, what it is, what it isn't, and give you some search tips on how to find contractors or consultants or contingent workers, gig workers, and some other tools like that. So it's going to be, it's going to be a fun session.

And we've got, just so everybody knows, we are streaming on the Work Defined site, we're streaming everywhere you can find Shelly. Uh, Shelly's in, in the Facebook group too, I think, right?

Yep, Facebook.

Yeah, so we're everywhere.

Yeah, everywhere.

Yeah, drop, drop your, drop your comments and quotes in there, we'll pick them up, we'll ask the questions, uh, here to Shelly. And also, uh, everyone on the call will get the free account for global pros to go and test it and break it and play with it and do everything you want to do. So Shelly will show that in a little bit, but enough of that. Shelly, why don't you get me off the screen and kick this out of here, man?

I don't want to see you again until Shelly's Alley.

Let's do it.

All right, buddy, good to see you. Great. Well, you know what I want to do is I want to share my screen because I did prepare some slides for this. So let me do that, and hopefully you don't get seasick with this. Screen in a screen in a screen moment here. But this brings me to the slides. So, as I was mentioning before, this is really— the concept is to leverage what we know about sourcing and what we know about recruiting to help our, our customer, the hiring manager, help them fulfill on the promise of the work that they need done. In other words, to help them deliver on the work without necessarily having to focus on just a full-time hire. Now, some of you out there that have lots of experience in recruiting may have also worked in the business of placing contractors, so you're quite familiar with that space. But this goes beyond just contractors. So what I'm talking about here is, um, the recruiter as an advisor that gets involved with the whole process of opening up a request for an SOW, or contingent workers in a variety of different forms. And that's what I want to talk about here. So it makes— it adds value to us because it extends our, our, uh, our reach into this space where we typically don't delve, especially if you're in a contract, um, a recruiting position, or if you're working directly for a corporation. Some of us that have worked in agency may have experienced placing contingent workers, but not everybody. So, I think recruiting isn't just about hiring. It's about delivering on outcomes. And part of that delivering on the outcome is to get the work done, which you sometimes can get done short-term. Maybe not a long-term or permanent solution, but you certainly can alleviate the pressure and get a lot of, you know, the hurry, hurry, hurry out of the way with some of these solutions. So, what is the extended workforce? First of all, I want to, I want to say that the extended workforce— this is a new definition or a new phrase used to talk about the contingent workforce because it adds more than just contingent workers. So basically, the extended workforce is the entire workforce. And right now, where, where we sit as recruiters, about half of the potential workforce is just not visible to us because they're interested in full-time salaried positions. And we're not really looking at the, you know, these vendors, gig workers, freelancers, consultants that have full-time jobs with an advisory firm where they are leased out for a particular project. So I think to be really forward-thinking, we need to design for the work that's being delivered, not just the headcount. And in some organizations, particularly a couple of the large companies where I've worked at, most recently. Um, in one case, it was 45% of our employer— of our employees— of our, uh, labor was actually coming through VMSs and other, in other contract vehicles like that. So what I'm suggesting is that we have a few more tools at our disposal besides just an FTE hire. We have statement of work consultants, freelancers, gig workers, etc. So what is the mind shift that we need to make in order to, to get to that space? Well, first of all, being aware that you actually could go out and source for people who are going to deliver on the work based on a statement of work, such as a consultant or a freelancer or a gig worker. And there are some differences between these. For example, whether they get paid, uh, 1099, or do they come through W-2 through some, you know, um onboarding, uh, PEO or something like that. Or, you know, they may be invoiced directly. Gig workers, for example, could bill through the platforms like Fiverr or Upwork and things like that. Or they could be employees of partner companies and delivering on the work. So what I'm suggesting is that we don't limit ourselves to just full-time people, but instead consider this as a sourcing alternative to expand the talent pool that's available to our hiring managers, even if it's not a permanent solution. So, what does a hiring manager need from you in order to, to, to go in this direction? Because they're probably already thinking about it or they've had experience with it in the past, but they just didn't involve you. So, as a talent advisor, you need to think of yourself as not a requisition processor and start looking at the options behind or beyond full-time hires to look at the faster access to outcomes, basically. So, if you talk to the hiring managers about this, you can learn together. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be all of a sudden in charge of the SOW. That's typically left to procurement. And there are other parts of the organization that are experienced at this. But you can still be the recruiter and the sourcer that brings that talent in and let the rest of the SOW process, or consulting process, or freelance process take over after you've sourced and interviewed and introduced those candidates. Just not for full-time jobs necessarily. Or why not for both, right? So, what are you going to look at as you go out and you start scoping out? There's 4 big pieces that you're going to need to think about. One of those is talent density. Essentially, where are the— where is the concentration of talent available that does this particular work. And just like with regular talent intelligence and market mapping and talent mapping in the contingent labor and extended workforce, the same thing is true. High concentrations of individuals that are high performers exist in different conclaves around the world, in different cities and countries. And so, we need to identify where should we go for this particular kind of labor. In other words, if you're looking for machine learning experts, for example, what are the geographies where you're more likely to make a match? And this matters because in some cases, we might actually be able to optimize what I like to call cost per head, which is optimizing the impact per contributor. In other words, you may need to hire somebody full-time that is considerably more expensive in the long term than someone who can solve this, this work, or the— that deliver on the outcome in the short term for a lot less money. Not only because they are offshore, because, you know, the extended workforce includes onshore as well as nearshore and offshore, but because they're doing it as a project, and that could significantly reduce the cost. They also have additional resources, and it's not just necessarily one person. It could be a team that delivers on this work output. So how do you source for density of talent? Well, you want to prioritize the capability and the adaptability of the teams that you're looking for, and we'll give you a few examples of how to run some searches. But focus on the project result, focus on the portfolio of the people delivering this, focus on the peer reviews of these consultants and gig workers. Instead of looking at an individual's, you know, work history, basically. It's a different mindset, but it helps you tap into distributed talent that can really outpace the hiring that you're capable of doing full-time locally in your area. Another thing to think about is sometimes with these types of workers, exceptions are made with the whole return to office because it's a contract or a short-term remote work is possible where it wouldn't be for an FTE because of the requirements at that organization or the policies. Second thing that you want to consider is the time zone. Talent is global, and when we start doing this kind of sourcing, it is all over the world across various time zones. Some of these time zones can be, well, directly opposite the time zones where your team or your headquarters conducts their work. So think about using that to your advantage. Sourcing across time zones can work, but you have to have the— you have to have the logic or set it up to be able to work correctly. For example, a couple of different ways that you can handle differences in time zone. One, which I think was invented by American Express, or at least that's the first time that I heard it in the in the very late '90s, early 2000s, follow the sun, which is essentially wherever the, you know, mainstream daylight hours are, there's a team that's located there. So for example, you might have a team in the US that works during our, you know, 8 to 5, and then that shifts to the, you know, to Europe and EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa when it's our evening time and it's now their morning time, and that shifts to Asia and so on. So you you could have development teams that are actually working 24 hours a day by simply being able to hand off the work to the next time zone, if you will. Another way to do it is to overlap time zones where you have, you know, an 8-hour day that the last 4 hours overlaps with the other 8-hour day that's beginning. So ours is ending and theirs is beginning, or the other way around, ours is beginning and theirs is ending, and there can be some collaboration that happens during that time. That allows us to get more work done and have some handoffs there. And another one is to have a fully asynchronous contribution. So this is essentially where you give someone a list of work streams that they're supposed to deliver, and they go and do it on their own, finish that work stream, and bring it back, whatever that piece work is that follows the, the workflow that's being put together. So you could use time zones to your advantage in, um, having 24-hour work, or in having extended workdays, or in simply having more people working at the same time simultaneously, but each of them independently and asynchronously. So another thing that you want to consider is rethinking the, the value and thinking about more than value, uh, sorry, more than hourly rates. Sorry, Thinking more about value than hourly rates, let me correct myself. What I mean by that is you can't just look at this as a factor of cost because you might pay somebody $60 an hour and they deliver on this project in one day, whereas somebody else that you're paying $40 an hour, it takes them 3 days. Well, you ended up paying $120 for that, which is twice as much. So the dollar per hour value isn't really the same as the, uh, value delivered So you don't have to worry necessarily about minimizing hourly spend, but look at total costs. And when you're looking at the total cost, consider the headline rate. That means the rate that you have to pay the individual or the company that provides them. But also, that's the direct dollar per hour, if you will. But also, there's hidden costs. There's ramped-up time. There are overheads. And there may be some churn. There may be some errors, misalignment. These are all things that contribute to cost. But then if you add it all up and you realize the value, the net value that you have, it might actually exceed the value per dollar of a full-time person, at least in the short term. So what should you be tracking? Well, you should be tracking time to impact. In other words, how soon is the value going to be delivered or how soon has this value been delivered by this team? And that may be faster than your FTEs can do, or at least for this particular project. So take that into consideration as well as any costs of having to rework or translate or hand off information, as well as the cost of churn and replacement. By the way, the cost for churn and replacement with full-time hires is also there. So if you lose a full-time employee, you still have to pay for that replacement, and that can be up to 2 times annual salary just from day 1. So there is a cost, and you may not have to replace your SOW team because they'd be, they'd be able to have their own internal contingencies for replacing their team. And so you might consider that as part of your full value, your full cost versus value equation. And then you also need to consider the quality of the outcomes you know, the people that are expecting this work to be delivered may get, you know, better quality with one versus the other. And it's not just about time. So time and cost and, and other overhead and replacement delays, and of course satisfaction. And then finally, remote readiness. Remote readiness is one of those things that can be a little bit tricky to pinpoint, um, to consider. For example, Connectivity and hardware. There are some locations around the world where they have to provide their own hardware because our hardware is not allowed there, and they'll have to connect through a different connection than what we normally connect with. So you might need a separate VPN. They might need equipment to be provided them that they don't normally have. For example, maybe use a particular type of machine. So the connectivity, the, the ability of their connection, their wireless to be on and stable, and other things like that may come into play. So it might be a really inexpensive contract, but now you've got to send them computers and monitors and set up separate VPN and have different, you know, access points and all that other stuff, which just adds to the money. So think about that. Then you also have work environment. Is there a dedicated and safe workspace? Do you have noise control? Do you have the ability to drown out— you don't want an, for example, an offshore team or even an onshore team showing up to a call and, you know, there's all this clatter in the background. That's just going to take away from everybody else's work. You also want to consider whether or not there's some changes in their time zone. In some of the regions you might operate, the time zones are just as big or even bigger than the United States. So even within their own team, there's time zone inconsistencies. Another aspect of remote readiness is Basically, their ability to manage themselves. Are they, you know, easily held accountable? Are they self-accountable? Are they able to communicate efficiently and solve problems proactively, or do they need supervision for any of those? If they do, then that's another layer that you need to add to that. Again, any, any one of these is a flexible factor. I mean, if you, if you know that the team needs to have a little bit more supervision, then you just price that into the whole project. But just be aware of that as one of the factors to consider along with the others that we've talked about. And then what about tool proficiency? You know, I, I often work with assistants and, and project workers in other parts of the world like Kenya and Philippines. And sometimes they're really proficient at a particular tool like maybe Google Workspace, but then I start talking about Slack and, you know, they don't know how to use it, or, or Trello or Evernote or something like that. So now I've got to teach them that tool that my team depends on. And that becomes yet another obstacle. So, think about that. And finally, of course, you have cultural fit, which you would have looked at anyway for full-time. But things like collaboration style. Are there any differences in norms of communication? Are there any differences in decision-making habits? Whether or not they respond to requests the same way. Do you need to essentially translate what you say in order to get it you know, to be put into the right context for them? Or when they communicate with you, do you have to translate that? Or is it going to cause some confusion because of differences in communication? So, putting it all together, you want to kind of conduct a market analysis and decide not only is the type of talent that you're looking for in high density in that area, but also, Is the time zone overlap one that you would like to take advantage of? If it's a good overlap and you want to work simultaneously, or is it the opposite and you actually have a follow the sun? But you have to consider that. In addition to that, you have cost, which is going to vary in different places of the world. And of course, language proficiency. And as we just talked about, remote readiness. For example, if you are looking in the LATAM area, Their proximity to us usually means a better alignment, a closer alignment with time zones, a little bit more overlap, if you will, and very agile teams. And they have strong customer service. But you also have to look at some of the others. For example, are they maybe going to be a little bit more expensive than, say, going out to Southeast Asia and so on? So, you have to weigh and balance all of these factors to make a determination on what your plan is. Also, there's no reason you can't have two regions, right? You just need to know which region to lean on for which type of solution. If you want something that's much lower cost and rapidly scalable in large volume, perhaps you do want to go to Southeast Asia. But if you're looking for something that's a lot more deep, technical, and higher quality, it's probably going to cost more, but you might be looking at Eastern Europe. For example, and so on. I promised I was going to help you with some of the sourcing tools or sourcing techniques, really. So I have some examples of things that you can do in some of the communities that you might already be aware of, like GitHub and Kaggle and Stack Overflow and Reddit. The basic premise here is whenever you use site: and the website, you're essentially searching through all of the content that Google or Bing has indexed for that particular website. So site:github.com is going to search through all of the GitHub repos and profiles and everything. So how do you zoom in on just the ones that you're interested? Well, you want to look for contributors based on the language, and I don't mean English versus Spanish, I mean the programming language. Or you can focus in on a particular type of repo or a number of stars. Stars obviously is, uh, kind of like an internal rating. Look at their recent commit activity. Make sure that it's of, you know, decent volume and in the right field. Sometimes you find somebody who looks great on GitHub, but all their recent commits are in a completely different direction than what you're looking for. If you approach them, they're probably not going to be interested in the work because they've already done that and now they're moving on and doing something that they seem to be more interested in. So make sure that you're looking at recency and also take a look at repos that were forked. That's when a repo was essentially modified and duplicated for a different need that might be closer to your need or further away. And issues, which are the trouble tickets, if you will, of the GitHub. So quite simply, I did an example here, and you can easily just copy and paste this from, um, here, the screen, if you're doing a screenshot. But I want to show you that you want to pay attention to the way that the country is spelled. In some parts of the world they use the spelling differently. So for example, when I was looking for Mexico, I ran into a little bit of a, of trouble not getting a whole lot of results until I realized that I needed to actually use Mexico in Spanish in order to get better results. And that very quickly started bringing back what I was looking for. So be aware that sometimes they, they use their local language when they're putting the name of their local country in their profile. So you might want to add that in addition to the, you know, anglicized words, if you will. So as you can see here, this will extend our search to people that are proficient in Python and have profiles in Mexico. And what I was talking about as far as their recency, here you can see when their commits were most recently updated, which in this case has been a little bit less active recently than before, but that could also be that they've, you know, started working in a project that does not on GitHub, for example. But you can look at the repos that they're working on, and here's where you might find some more recent work, for example. On Kaggle, you want to look for competitions. These are kind of rankings of how the, the, the engineer or the scientist, um, fared in a test of their— a challenge of their, of their coding methodology or their model, for example. So looking for competitions would be a really good way to uncover some interesting talent that has won, like, the Big Data Bowl of 2025, or, you know, or placed in the top 10 or something like that. So you can use that and look for their public notebooks, their rankings, and also frequently they'll have LinkedIn or Upwork links directly on their page. So look for that as well, and you'll have a way to contact them and access them. On Overflow, on Stack Overflow, look for the users. In this case here, you can see I actually added that to the URL. So site:stackoverflow.com/user/ :stackoverflow/users limits the search to just user profiles. All of these will be user profiles, so I can be a little bit more creative and add something like remote freelancer or machine learning or, you know, Python developer or something like that, because I'm looking strictly in just their bios. Oh, this is catchy. This person's username is machine learning. I bet you they get a lot of inquiries. Okay, on Reddit you can also look for things like, for example, self-referencing, hire me, or open to freelance, or looking for work, or looking for gig work. You'll see a lot of gig-based posts on Reddit, so use that kind of language. I have a slide here in a minute that I'll show you that gives you some other examples of language that you can use to look for people that are essentially posting that they're available for gig. See right here, look at that. Um, another technique is that we were talking about global prose from the beginning, and what I discovered is that global prose, the way I have been using it and testing it, works really well in a kind of stream of thought. Write it as, as if you were asking ChatGPT, sort of, you know, like, I'm looking for, etc., etc. And so I created a couple of examples here that I wanted to show you that I've tried. So we'll go with this one here first, and I'm just going to replace the one that I had working on here. Again, it's just I'm looking for a data scientist with a background in informatics, someone who's worked in tech, someone that's, you know, worked with genomic data, knows about, you know, fraud detection, etc. And then I even have like the location base, and I'm just going to hit send. Which will initiate the search. It's asking me to add my company description, but right now I don't want to add that. So the first thing it'll do is it wants to know if I want to do a search on the community that's already here existing in the GlobalPros, or if I want to build my own. For this example, I want to use what's already there and find the experts that exist. And then it wants to know if I'm open to offshore, onshore, or nearshore. I can choose any one of these or all three. Or a combination of them. Hit continue, and it'll think about it for a minute, and then it'll come back with a selection of experts that are in the system and are fully assessed. So they've already, you know, gone through a full gamut of assessments. You even have transparency on their availability and their rate. You know if they're offshore or nearshore, and you see here a match score that indicates how well they match with your query, if you will. But there's a lot more detail than this. If you open the complete profile, you'll see very extensive detail on this particular resource's years of experience and, you know, quality of work, if you will, on each of these areas, even being able to click further on one of these. So you can see that it tells you all the frameworks that they've used, libraries, This is a lot deeper than, say, a LinkedIn profile, which doesn't usually have this kind of depth of information. This is a lot more of like, you know, how are you solutioning what you're doing, right? And then there's, you know, some project descriptions on what they've worked on and if they've had any additional experience, in this case leadership. Now all of this is just part of the tool. It's a, it's a 14-day free trial, which I'm still on, and you can request interviews. What that means basically is you're asking to connect with this person. So if I were to request an interview with this backend developer, they get a notification and, um, they'll, you know, they're told, hey, this person wants to connect with you, and then an introduction is made and we connect. Or I can just get the contact information and reach out to them directly myself. And there it is. So you're getting access to all of that right from here. As far as cost, um, you know, the, the, the plan that I'm testing is the Essential, which is the one where I do it all myself. There is a plan where it's more of a concierge plan, uh, and, and they'll do it for you if you're not getting the results that you expected. You just pay a little bit more and get the, you know, the extra support. But you can start with the Essential and, you know, take your, uh, try your best with that and see if it works. So back to the example here, I want to show you another one that I did. So this was a data scientist. I also did one for an ML developer, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna come clean, I cheated a little bit. I started with, with my train of thought, stream of consciousness, and it was a little messy, so that I went and I put that into my Claude GPT and asked it to kind of clean it up a little bit because I, um, I was going a little off the, off the rails there. So anyways, that's why you see the em dashes in there. So a little bit of assistive technology to assist me with my assistive technology. So there you go. Once again, I want to match with the local pros. Um, I don't know if you saw this, I skipped through it, but there's also a bar that allows you to adjust your budget. So you can limit, for example, you, you can say, you know, show me everybody that's under $9,000 a month or whatever if you have a set budget. But you can see again, the results are pretty quick and they're pretty accurate, um, and very reasonably priced even for onshore. So here's an onshore resource for $8,000 a month. Uh, here's another one about $5,000. And here's, uh, see if I can find an offshore. I'm not getting any on these. Getting a lot of the onshores first. That's okay, it's going to give me 10 at a time. I can, I can dismiss these and look for more and keep going, but the matching is, is pretty good. So I usually find that I get the results that I'm looking for right on here. I might be able to just run this as an offshore real quick. I'm just going to repeat the same thing and see if I can change It's probably an easier way to do this, but here's that bar that I was telling you about. Yeah, it's, it's still keeping my settings from before, so, um, I don't want to waste your time, but the point is I wanted to kind of reset it to just have the offshore show up so you can compare. but I'm sure you catch my drift. So that's Global Pros. Um, okay, so you go back to the slides here. A couple of other places that you might want to look to are some of the online communities where these people work. They, they, they spend their time on repos like GitHub and a lot of other places, Pastebins and things like that, but they also discuss on, on boards, on discussion boards like Discord and Slack. On Discord, you can find Discord groups that are open for you to join. You can search for those, but you know, there's, there's also tons of lists out there. For example, there's a data science Discord, there's a freelance designer Discord, there's a dev core for coding help, and lots of hire me threads. When you go in there, you're able to just connect with an app. So for example, I have a a Discord app right here. I even have my own Discord server. You can do it on your phone or your iPad or your computer. And then once you're in there, you can just actually do searches like for hire me or resume or CV and look for channels like freelance or collabs or job board. You can just use Ctrl+F to find posts that have those words. I'm going to give you a— one of the last slides here is bunch of words that you can use as search phrases in communities like this. Once you find someone, first of all, it's a good idea to kind of get to know the thread a little bit and lurk and read some of the past posts so you get a feel for the environment. But once you find someone, just send them a DM within Discord. It's like a private message. It's like an iMessage on your phone. And most of the time, in fact, they actually get it on their phone. And you can ask to speak with them, connect, send them a Zoom link or whatever. Similarly, Slack has communities like Work From for global workers, Tech Masters for product specialists, um, you know, Indie Hackers and Solo Builders on, on WIP, uh, for example. And similarly, here you can search for hashtag jobs, which are channels, freelance gigs, again resume or CV, or available for hire, etc. And you can browse their profile on Slack. When you click on someone's profile, it actually has a little mini profile that often has a link to their homepage, website, product page, team page, LinkedIn, whatever. On Slack, definitely participate in the discussion before reaching out. This helps you build credibility. Slack channels tend to be a little bit more closed and not as openly public as Discord channels. As promised, here are some of the signals to look for. Now, what I did is I made it easy for you just to be able to copy this. On the left-hand side is a magic search string, if you will, and these are all of the words that you would find on someone's profile or bio or job title if they were available as a, you know, contract worker, gig worker, phrases like self-employed, 1099, fractional, freelance, of course, contractor, temp to hire, contract to hire, etc. Those are good keywords that you can use just about anywhere. You can use this on LinkedIn, in your own ATS, on Google if you add some other limitations to the search, and, you know, like for example, file type for PDF documents and so on. On some of the Social destinations like X and Discord and Slack, look for phrases that are promotional like hire me or booking clients or for hire or DM me for work. I see available immediately often, especially when they just came off of a contract, they go in there, hey, I'm available immediately, know anybody? And they ask their peers. So a few others are some action-oriented signals like taking on new contracts or open to freelance. You'll see these phrases on profiles as well. Open to short-term, open to part-time, seeking new projects, and so on. The last thing I wanted to give you are just some tips on, on some of the outreach that I've used myself when reaching out to project workers and gig workers. Um, because they're in a kind of a different space altogether, they're, they're not as shy about being directly approached. These are a little bit more direct than I would use with a full-time passive candidate. In fact, these, you could argue, may not really even be passive candidates because even if they're on a project, they probably are, you know, looking out for the next project. So just pretty basic, you know, I'm straight up, direct and clear. This works really well on LinkedIn or code repos. Hey, I'm hiring for this contract role. Looks like it matches your skills. Remote, flexible, we move fast. Do you have 10 minutes to talk this week? For example. Or if you are more on the project-based side, you can be a little bit more project-y, I guess. Say you have, you know, I have a scoped and paid project that needs your kind of thinking. Are you interested in hearing more about it? Um, you know, I don't need a resume, I just need results. Are you up for the challenge? Are you game? Something like that. And for some of the peer-to-peer, like Discord and Slack and Reddit, Say something like, I saw your post, I saw your comment, I saw your contribution, thought you might be open to some freelance work. If so, I have a project that might fit your skill set. Let me know if this is within your timeline. Um, you know, curious if you are open to collaborating. And, you know, just drop a couple of hints like, you know, if it's asynchronous friendly or whatever. These are little things that are going to help the contractor decide whether or not to respond back to. You'll see people are a lot more open in this space, but you still want to be, you know, have a little bit of information to tease them to getting them to respond because you do want to have that engagement. So that is all the material that I had today. I would love to open it up to some Q&A, and I think we also might have a few words from, from Ryan here. So let me bring him back on.

I am back on. What's going on, dude? That was awesome.

Cool, cool. Thanks. Yeah, did you see any, uh, any comments on the, on, on the social webs?

Yeah, we've got— so we've got 3 questions I pulled out because we'll have time for those.

Yep.

Let me just read. I'll, I'll do no particular order. Um, this one's taking a shot at old school bullying, but What's your take on old school Boolean versus new tools? And then they put like global pros in quotes because that's what you're showing. Are we losing the art of sourcing by relying too much on automation, or is this just an evolution?

It's an evolution. Probably the easiest way to transition from old school sourcing to, you know, new school AI is to think about it as, as all of the, the, the the editing and trial and error that you used to do with your search strings, with the parentheses and the quotes and all that stuff, essentially that's prompt engineering. You're just doing that in a different way. So you're still doing the same thing with, with AI. You still have to massage the prompt. There's, there's really not a lot of one-shot prompts that just give you exactly what you want. And in fact, if you think that that's going to happen, you're probably going to be really frustrated. Even when you're doing something as simple as generating a basic image, you'll have to kind of, you know, iterate, right? So just like you used to play around with the search string, you're going to do that with, with this. It's the same mentality, it's the same thought process of that iterative approach. The, you know, try this, too big, try this, too small. But I will tell you this, although Boolean, as in like all the advanced syntax and all that stuff, may not be as necessary when you are asking a question from an AI, Do keep in mind that all of these AIs, even if they're searching the web, are using Google. So it's still a search engine ultimately. So you still need to educate it. And if you— easiest way I can describe this to you is if you go into ChatGPT or any of your favorite, you know, Gemini or whatever, and you ask it to put together a search string, what you get is going to have a lot of repetitive job titles in it and a lot of extraneous stuff that you don't want. So they're really not that good at it. You still have to take that and, and, and wean it down and hone it. So you're never really gonna lose the skill. It's just what, what you'll be able to do is get to the results faster because you can take what I did and I got lazy instead of like trying to poke around with ML. And I just said, you know, give me a bunch of stuff to look for in ML, right? And then I took away a bunch of things and put it in there. So you're still gonna do that like you would with a search string. You're just gonna do it with a, with a prompt, and you're going to need to do several attempts. It's not gonna, you know, if like me you've tried to do some sourcing on, on ChatGPT, you probably got 20 results and you're like, hey, this is great, where are the rest? You know, and ChatGPT says, oh yeah, you're right, yeah, let me continue doing that, gives you another 20. And you're like, hey, I told you I needed 100, where's the other 60? Oh yeah, I forgot. And then it gives you another 20. So, you know, that kind of stuff's always gonna— it's always going to vary.

So yeah, it's, it's that. And you know, it's more fun, I'm not gonna lie, it is more fun to use a GPT-style tool because you're talking to somebody instead of— because you're talking to somebody, right?

And, you know, yeah, it's more—

it's more fun.

Not as boring, let's put it that way.

Yeah, yeah. Have you seen— have you seen— I'm sure people listening and watching have, uh, the report. There was a study, I forget where it was done. Those that are using ChatGPT or the like are losing the ability, the cognitive ability to, to think on their own.

I think if you do that— so the— yes, I am hearing about— I'm also hearing about the weird you know, people that get like enamored with their ChatGPT and leave their family for it and stuff like that. So, you know, there's going to be a little bit of that.

I never heard that one as well.

Yeah, it's, it's out there, but you can use it as a replacement for thought. Yeah, it's just not a really good way to use it because these tools don't really think the way that you think they think. Keep in mind that all they're doing is looking for patterns. Patterns, which means the bigger the pattern, the more likely the result is going to be. And bigger patterns usually mean more popular content, more popular ways of thinking. So if you really want to be creative, unique, distinct, innovative, ChatGPT is just a tool to help you get there by brainstorming. But you can use the brainstorming output and then get intellectual with it. So if you use it to just kind of eliminate your thinking, then yeah, I can see what you're talking about. Best way to use it is to play with it and ask it to, you know, iterate. Um, I love going in there and saying, give me 10 ideas, and it'll, it'll give me 8 that are absolutely nonsense. Yeah, but I like 2 of them. I'm like, and I'll say, I like this one, let's see another 10 like that. And, and then it kind of, you know, but you're thinking, you're, you're, yeah, you're still having a disc— yeah, discourse. It's like you and your buddy Sorcerer kind of chatting about, did you try this, did you try that? It's the same thing. So conversation will lead to stimulation, intellectual capacity. But if you're just asking it, hey, give me a search string, and then you just copy and paste it, yes, not going to work. It's going to dumb you down.

All right, next question. So this is more around vetting tech. So when you're vetting tech talent from nearshore or offshore markets, what do you look for beyond the resume, and what should we actually be testing or watching for?

Well, testing is going to need to be really specific to the technology, um, but beyond their, their, let's just say, skill set, you have to be a lot more careful with, with nearshore and offshore talent in some of the other areas that we talked about. Like, for example, the, um, uh, the soft skills, if you will, like their communication skills, their Reliability, right? Cultures— sometimes I'm not going to point any fingers, but sometimes there are places in the world where they have a much more laissez-faire attitude towards showing up to work, and sometimes they just don't come to work that day. And that may actually, you know, put your team at a disadvantage. So if you know that that's a possibility, you've got to have backups and, and ways to factor that in. So look for things like, you know, what's their environment like? Are they Are they in a safe place? Could it be possible that tomorrow they won't be able to come into work because of a natural disaster or, or something else that's preventing, you know? So you have to look beyond that. And also, I would check references. That's huge. They need to be able to give you examples of work that they completed. It's very different than checking references with a full-time employee because they're just going to give you their supervisor or whoever that's going to say nice things about it. With a contractor, you want to literally get directly to the person who was the decision maker or the recipient of their output at their last 2 or 3 similar projects. And it doesn't matter if what you're doing is completely different. You still want to ask for that because you want to check for things like, did, you know, did they hand off efficiently? Were they detailed in their communication? Did they, did they annotate sufficiently? You know, maybe they, they have good command of the English language verbally, but when it comes to writing, not so much, right? So you gotta look a little bit deeper than the kind of things that you would do. You might not even think of asking some of these questions with a full-time employee, but you're totally okay to ask them with a contingent worker, um, because you're basically vetting. As you said, it's not just about the technical skills, right? Right.

All right, well, I think we have time for— yeah, we have one more. Let's do one more. Uh, let me sift through. So I think this is a good one.

You know what, before you ask me that, another thing is the time to impact. That's a big one. So, um, you know, if I, I, I had a project that I needed done and I use, you know, gig workers for, for these kinds of pieces, right? Like I've got a spreadsheet that needs to be manipulated and moved around and cleaned up and everything. Um, so I, I sent it to somebody that I hadn't really worked with before And, you know, 2, 3 days went by and they still haven't finished it. My previous person that is no longer available, um, they moved on to another, you know, they're doing something else now. But my previous person would have pretty much similar, you know, project finished within, let's just say, same day, or at least my overnight, their day, right? And I would come back and it'd be ready. Um, this other resource was a lot less expensive, but it took them like 3 days, and it was— and I still had to kind of rework it. So I would have rather paid another $40 an hour for that other— so, you know, get it done and get it done. Exactly.

Yeah, sorry, get it done and get it done well. All right, I think this is a good one for the last question. Um, I'm gonna reword it a little bit. Um, so apologies, but how do you find legit tech talent off shore, and how do you know that they stacked up to those that you would find onshore? So I reworded the question a little bit to get a little nicer, but I think—

yeah, you know that, uh, a good reword is its own, uh, is its own reward, right? I'm being a little funny there. So I, I think comparing offshore to onshore might not necessarily be apples to apples. You want to look at what is it that you're outsourcing, right? Are you outsourcing the ability to work while your team is, you know, is off work? They're working like follow the sun. Are you outsourcing tasks? For example, you might have the innovative capacity to architect the, you know, create something from scratch onshore, and all you need the offshore team to do is do some testing or do some iterative work. And that, that's really not the same, right? So you want to make sure you're comparing. Do you have that same iterative work in, in, in the onshore? If so, then you're comparing them apples to apples. But if you're comparing an offshore team that's doing piecework with an onshore team that's doing the whole product, that's not a fair comparison. But it's a good question. Um, I think first of all, the, the work product, even if they can't share the actual results they can share the outcome in a write-up, in a handoff for the project, or have the references. That's going to be the biggest one because every project is going to be different, but you will ask questions like, were there any hiccups? When there were hiccups, what happened? How did they handle the, you know, the, the hiccup, the break in work? Did they troubleshoot it or do they wait until you came back online and wasted a whole nother day? Um, so these are the questions that I would ask. Technically, if you're going to ask them the same sort of technical interview questions that you ask your onshore team, then you've already got that covered. I'm, I'm not going to be able to provide any additional information there. I would just dig deeper than just the technical skills. Another thing to think about and be very careful with this is to make sure that the person that you're actually hiring is the person that's actually doing the work. Yeah, because you might be testing their technical skills today, but the person who's delivering the project is somebody else.

Right.

So make sure you have some checks and balances to ensure that the person that you tested is the person that's doing it.

And that's a whole different conversation.

That can, that can work. That works for full-time employees too, by the way.

Everybody. Yeah.

Yes.

Everybody. So Shelly, this has been fantastic and, and really thank you for everyone for coming on. Uh, here, here's what's gonna happen. We're gonna just like a regular session. We will get you the recording, we'll get you all the information that you need, and everybody that attended today, uh, will also get a, a free account over at GlobalPROS. So we'll send you a link, but just go to globalpros.ai, sign up for the account. You're going to get in, you're going to get an extended free account, um, and as you continue to use it, you'll continue to get more. And so we'll explain that in the email, uh, this way you can go and get it. Um, Shelly's using it, I'm using it, you guys should use it. Give it a shot. But look for that email. Shelly, again, thank you so much. We'll see you all next time.

You're very welcome.

Yeah, we'll see you guys next time. Thank you for coming out.