How To Hire Your First Employee
Welcome to Hero TV today. We’re talking about how to hire your first employee. John Jonas, he’s the one that taught me especially, you know,outsourcing to the Philippines. So stay tuned that’s we’re going to talk about. Okay. So you’re ready to hire your first person. Let me tell you what other people tell you, how to do this. And then I’ll tell you, how I tell you how to do it. Most people will tell you, hey before you answer something and you’re ready to start hiring someone, what I want you to do first is to make a list. Make a list of all the things you do in your business. And I think this is garbage. Make a list of all the things you could outsource and blah blah blah. That’s crap because it’s a giant waste of time and it doesn’t really solve the problem that you need. What you should do to get started hiring your first person is think of one thing that you’re doing that you could teach someone else to do. Not something else but not all the things you need to get done in your business that’s worthless. Think of one thing that you do every day, that you think you could teach someone how to do. And then, go recruit for that one thing. Teach someone to do that one thing. It’s going to take you more time to teach it than it would to do it yourself but after you’ve hired this one person and you’ve taught them how to do it, you have something off, of your plate. All of a sudden, you gain time back. And that changes things. Here’s how you do this. Step one, go to onlinejobs.ph and you’re gonna start recruiting there and like I said in another video, I explained onlinejobs.ph. I also said I own onlinejobs.ph but it is the best place to find remote workers in the Philippines and there’s all kinds of reasons why I hire in the Philippines. So, head to onlinejobs.ph you’re going to find a crazy talent pool there that is super affordable.
So when you go to hire your first person you’re going to do one of two things. You’re going to post a job or you’re going to contact lots of workers. And this is the thing that I often see people make a mistake. They post a job and they get responses back and they find the one or they start looking at workers profiles and they find the one. And so I’ll get an email from someone that says, “hey John I’m shortlisting candidates right now and I found this guy I really want to hire him” and that’s the wrong way to go about this because what are the cultural traits that Filipinos have is they’re super loyal. And there’s loyal almost to it being a fault of their. So that like if they already have a job and you contact them saying, “hey I’m offering you a job” They’re likely to not even respond to you because they’re, they’re loyal to their employer if they respond to you that might put them in jeopardy with the current job. So rather than shortlisting candidates and finding the one, contact lots of people and and describe your job and say, “hey are you interested?”. So for example, in a job posted, I would make, I would give, I would say, “hey I want a video editor and I love someone with experience and this and this and this, these things if you have them are bonus not necessary. Hours are very relaxed and flexible I just want you to get the work done that I give you” Or if I was sending, if I was contacting workers I would say something very similar to that. The one thing that you have to be careful of when you’re recruiting is don’t give them too much. Say, I need this and this. I Some people that’ll say like, here’s like someone I got one time, “John I need someone who can build a website and make it look really nice and design the logo for it and write 50 articles for it and write this custom plug-in using PHP so they’re doing programming work and that’s test number one. Number two, I want them to write 20 articles a day, and number three, I want them to be participating in forums. Number four, I need to create a sales page and a squeeze page opt-in that looks really nice and they can capture emails I want them to write the autoresponder series. I was like, “what the heck?! this person doesn’t exist” So rather than saying, “hey I want you to do this and this and this and this.”when your contacting people, give them a couple specifics like two or three and then some generics. That way, you don’t scare them off. Filipinos get scared off easily. You’ve contacted or you’ve posted your job or you’ve contacted like 30 people. So in order to contact 30 people, you don’t spend too much time shortlisting candidates. You’re just going to contact a whole bunch and see who replies. If you contact 30, Maybe you get 10 who reply. If you post a job you’re going to get 50 responses. Of those 50, you’re going to immediately weed out 35 of them because they were people who just sent you a foreign letter they didn’t really apply. So now with, with the rest of the candidates you have, here’s the process that I go through when I’m hiring. I start asking them questions. I will ask them two or three or four questions in every communication, every email I send, well I’ll just start sending them emails back and forth and asking them questions. And I’ll wait for their response. And so when I do this, I’ll do this ten times. I’ll email them back about ten or fifteen times before I hire someone. And, and what you’ll find is as you ask questions, you’ll see how responsive they are. So if it takes them two or three days to respond, well while you’re interviewing them, it’s probably gonna take in two to three days to respond after you’ve hired them. And that’s frustrating especially when you’re working with a virtual worker. If you ask them four questions in an interview and they only answer three of them, then they ignore the fourth one, what are the chances that when you give them three tasks to do they’re only going to do two of them when you hire them? Pretty good. So like, I get to gauge their responsiveness, I get to gauge their how detail-oriented they are and these are important things to me when I’m hiring. I also get to see their personality as they respond over and over and over again because you know, you can have some a friend help you write your your profile on onlinejobs.ph. It’s really hard to have a friend help you over and over and over and over again, over a ten day period when you’re writing e-mails back and forth every single day. So you get to gauge their English. There’s all Kinds of stuff you get to gauge when you start responding to people over and over again and asking questions. And I’ll have some questions like, where do you live? did you grow up watching Sesame Street or Batibot? Batibot is the filipino version of Sesame Street. And so people who grew up watching Sesame Street tend to have better English. I’ll ask them how much money do you want to make? How much experience have you had? can you send me examples of this? Do you live with your family? or do you live alone? Are you married? you have kids? I’ll ask them specific questions about the job over and over again and then I’ll ask them things like, in the beginning I’ll often ask like, Can you attach a picture of a pink Cadillac to your response. And the only reason I do that is just to see are you paying attention? you know? So I’ll do silly things like that one interview. And really just to gauge, how are you, how do you interact with me? So once you’ve gone through all this, you’re gonna have a gut feeling of who you should hire. Go with your gut. A couple times, I’ve said I really just think I should hire this person but this person looks better on paper.
I’m gonna hire this person. And it usually it ends up better if I go with my gut so stick with, you’ll get impressions as you as you start recruiting people and you email them over and over again. Just something will trigger in your mind like, “oh that’s the guy. That’s the one I want.” So then offer them a job. I see too many times where people say, “hey I want to do a trial with you. I want you to do this work and then I’ll see if I like you or not” And then that often scare people away. It’ll, it’ll scare them there, Filipinos are very scared about doing work and not getting paid. And so unless you, if you don’t offer them a job and you just say, “hey I want to try this” you may have just lost a good candidate who you’ve done this recruiting for. Another thing I avoid when I’m recruiting that first person is, I don’t want to talk to them on the phone because they don’t want to talk to me on the phone. Filipinos are shy. They don’t like to talk. And so if you try and set up a Skype interview with them, they may set up the interview and then not show up. That’s super common. and there’s a couple reasons behind that. One, they’re scared. They’re, you know, you’re a foreign boss and Filipinos look up to foreigners and that’s scary for them. Two, they’re worried that, that you might not understand them and they’re embarrassed about it. Usually their english is pretty good and they know they’ll understand you because they watch American TV and American movies, but they’re worried that you won’t understand them and they’re embarrassed about that. So anything you can do to avoid talking to them or interviewing them on skype is, is a really good idea. I do all my interviewing through email. Unless it’s for a voice position where someone’s going to be talking on the phone. Then I, then yes I definitely need to talk to you on the phone or on skype. Otherwise, I don’t. So then, once you’ve hired them, you you’ve offer them a job, the first thing is to teach them. Teach them what you want them to do. Give them training. Even if they say they know how to do it, go through a training process with them. Like, you hired someone for SEO and they say they know how to do SEO. Say, what would you do? Well, give me a plan here for how would do this and then and then help them modify it. Even if you don’t understand it, it’s probably a good idea to understand some because it’ll make your life easier with them, just Filipino culture, this, this is important in the Filipino culture. Work with them, teach them, train them, show them that you’re there to help them do their job. That is a big deal especially the first time you hire someone. That they know you’re willing to help. If you just set them free and and don’t let them know that you’re willing to help them, do their job, you’re very likely to have problems with this person where they get embarrassment, and they want to disappear. So if you have a disappearing Filipino worker it’s probably because you didn’t put in enough time with them or enough instructions with them or enough feedback. They didn’t trust you enough. So especially in the beginning as you get started, this teaching and training is really really important. So then after they’ve worked for you, in the beginning, I’m going to suggest that you pay them once a week for the first couple months. Filipinos are very scared of not getting paid so if you pay them once a week they’ll they’ll feel better about it. After couple months, you can change to paying paying once a month. Also, and this is super important for me, is require a daily email from them. require daily communication with them. And in that in that communication, you want to ask three things. Number one, what did you work on today. Number two, what problems did you run into and number three, what can I help with? Those are the three things that I require my Filipino workers to respond to me with every single day. I want to know what you worked on because if you didn’t work on something today you have a hard time answering that question. That daily email just makes this work so much better it makes it so much more effective for you, it makes it more effective for them, it makes managing them more effective. So require that from the very very beginning. A daily email of what they worked on every day. Thanks so much for watching hero TV today and thanks so much John. Really appreciate teaching me this stuff and teaching everybody here on Hero TV. Great. I want to share how I found one of my best team members. I gave him a really hard assignment up front and it’s one that that would make most applicants uncomfortable but I was looking for some very specific things worked, okay? I required him and several applicants to apply by video. So he talked jump talked about it’s uncomfortable to be on the phone they’re really shy, and I did get on the phone but I did have him you know pull out his phone and record a video of themselves answering some questions and then they have to figure out how to upload it to YouTube and how to send me the link and a lot of the applicants couldn’t do that or wouldn’t do that and that was a great, great filter I have. I think in that instance, five, maybe six or seven different applicants send me a video. Some better than others. There were a few that were fantastic. The one that just stood way up above the others and that he’s working for me for several years. I highly recommend it when you’re looking for somebody that you just need to really, don’t know, what’s the word? Video interview. I love it. I think it’s a great idea. Remember live on purpose, make a difference, be the hero.