Business

Last week I was chatting with a potential new client about coming on board with our On Demand Web Guy service. They were totally sold on the concept but there was one obstacle.

The boss had told my contact to outsource. “Try Upwork” was the advice.

Possibly the worst outsourcing advice ever.

But this is so common. I see it in Facebook groups, forums and just about everywhere.

Person 1: I need someone to do X and Y and would like to hire someone offshore

Well meaning person 2: Try Upwork, it’s great!

These kind of job boards are just that. A job board, maybe with a few extra bells and whistles like time tracking.

They are not a sure fire way to find great people offshore. In fact, it is really freaking hard to find good people if you don’t know what you are doing.

We’ve hired a lot of people over our 6ish years in business. Some casual, some full time. We’ve been burned badly. If I had to put a figure on the money we’ve essentially thrown away at bad hiring choices, it’s at least 20k.

But hiring is a skill that can be learned. Out of our last 10 hires, only one has turned out to be average. The rest are serious A players.

When we hired our project manager, the process went so well that we ended up with 3 amazing candidates who were solid hires. I ended up choosing one, and posting in Super Fast Business (James Schramko’s forum) about the 2 others. They were both snapped up within a couple of days.

Then I got a bunch of questions about how our hiring process worked, and how it was able to generate such good hires.

This post outlines our exact hiring process, at least right now. This is always being tweaked and changed, but it should give you an idea.

So far this has been a help to many people, so hopefully you get something out of this as well.

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Two months back I went looking for a project manager to add to our team. If you’ve hired overseas before, you’ll know it can be incredibly hard to find someone who is a good match to you, your team, and who performs.

The A-player is elusive. But so, so good when you find them. Crappy hires are stressful and can cause real problems for your business.

To make sure you get it right the first time, start by planning out the process.

That process should include:

• Writing the job description
• Identifying how much you want to pay
• Actively seeking applicants
• Creating a method for short listing applicants
• Creating a test task to filter out the capable people
• Interviewing

Side Note: I don’t think an interview is always required. It depends on the role. More on this later.

Job Description

Below is our standard formula.

There are so many drone-like boring job posts.  Try to be a little different or fun (as long as they’ll have some fun in their role and you aren’t going to bore them to death). Don’t be fake as they’ll just end up disappointed when they come on board. You’ll see some of this in the example job post below.

Headline

A good headline that says the role and a reason why they’d want to work with us

Questions & Intro

Sometimes we lead with a few questions at the beginning, similar to a landing page or copy. Like:

• Do you want to be part of a fun team that…
• Do you want to be paid on time every time
• Would you like flexible working hours
• If that sounds good, you might be a good fit!

Skills & Traits

A dot point list of the absolutely required skills/traits, followed by “bonus points” skills.

Any other requirements

Like equipment, internet speed

The Role

The kind of things they will do as part of the role. Give them a clear idea of what they’ll be doing.

Secret Word

Somewhere in the job post, mention a word that they must use in the application so you know they have read the post. If they don’t mention this word, you ignore the application unless they look ridiculously good.

Past Work

If they are a designer or developer, you might want to see what they have done in the past. If so I like to request a specific number of samples. Like “3 to 5”. If you get a copy-and-paste application with 20 samples, you can ignore that application based on attention to detail.

Any other details

Like start date. Are you looking to start someone ASAP or in a few weeks?

What Next

Let them know what they next stages are. Like a test task or interview if required.

Sample Job Post

[Headline]

Website Project Manager, Technical VA with amazing English to join a fun Aussie team

[Intro]

We’re looking for a fun, friendly person with amazing English to help manage website projects.

[Skills & Traits]

The main skills and traits we are looking for are:

– Amazing written English as you will be in regular contact with clients

– An understanding of WordPress, or a willingness to learn

– A love for technology and the web (you will have to look at lots of websites!)

– A friendly, fun attitude

– Happy to learn new skills and discover things on your own

– Attention to detail when testing websites for mistakes and problems

We don’t have time to micro manage – we will expect you to manage your own time and do what it takes to get things done!

[Any other requirements]

You will need a microphone so that we can have a voice interview.

[The Role]

Your major role would be managing website changes and website jobs

This includes things like:

– Reading emails from clients and turning them into tasks for web developers (you’ll be kind of like a translator from clients to developers)

– Communicating with designers where custom design is required

– Adding tasks as Trello cards for designers and developers

– Checking work done by web developers to make sure it is what the client asked for

– Responding to clients to inform them that work has been completed, and to ask for feedback

– Thoroughly checking websites to find mistakes and problems

If you have some spare time, some other things you might do are:

– Updating company documentation and procedures

– Posting to social media accounts

– Processing new clients

– If a client asks for help with their website, you might log in and try to work out how to do it so that you can tell them

[What Next] [Secret Word]

Please mention the word octopus in your application so we know you have read the post. If you are shortlisted, we will send you a 2 hour paid test with some typical tasks which you might have to handle as part of your job.

[Pay]

(In this job description, we also added monthly pay as it was a full time role. This is displayed in the header when applicant view the job)

Seeking Out Applicants

The next stage involves you searching for the kind of person you want.

So start searching. Use advanced search to filter down into the exact skills you are looking for, the exact country/region (if required) and whatever other criteria.

Go through the results. Any headlines/people that stand out, open them in a new browser tab.

When you’ve got 10 or so, send them a message inviting them to apply.

“Hi [name]

I saw your profile and it looks like you’d be a great fit for this role: [link]

Would you be interested in applying?

Cheers

James”

You won’t get 10 responses. You’ll be lucky to get 2 but those 2 have often ended up being one of the top people.

Shortlisting

You’ll likely get a ton of applicants. Sometimes 80… so you’ll need to filter these as quickly as possible.

First Pass

Go through an open each applicant in a tab. If you can see a headline and summary that is bad or doesn’t line up with the role, you can skip that person.

Scan through and look for the secret word, poor communication, failure to follow any instructions in your post, red flags or even a bad gut feeling. You’d be surprised how often a bad gut feeling that I’ve ignored resulted in a bad hire.

Close all the tabs that you don’t like.

For everyone else, put their name, email (if you have it) and link to their profile in a spreadsheet.

Scoring

Now come up with a set of “areas” you think are important for the job, that you can score out of 10.

For this project manager job, I used:

• English because they’d be dealing with clients directly. I got an idea of their language by looking at their profile and application. Bear in mind their profile will likely be better than their real skills due to proofreading. And some of their application will be copy and pasted
• Skills – how close their profile skills matched what I was after
• Application – how good their application letter was. Did they talk about specifics to the role or just copy and paste? How well did they follow instructions?

Add these three columns to your spreadsheet, along with a notes column and a pay column, if applicable.

Go through and score each applicant, and create a “total” column to add up all of your criteria.

Then use conditional formatting to colour code that column based on score.

It will look something like this:

In my notes column, you can see I’ve written “web dev” for some. Meaning that they were clearly a web developer applying for a Project Manager role. So something to consider when weighing people up.

Now pick the best 5 to run a test with. You can see above that I included a wildcard that I just had a good feeling about despite having a low score.

On a side note, if there are any you are unsure of, you can always shoot a couple of messages back and forward and use that as part of the criteria.

Testing

This is by far the most important part of the whole process.

A proper test weeds out people that are not right for your business.

I think it is important to do a paid test. Mainly because you are asking them to spend a couple of hours doing something. So don’t be an asshole and pay them. It doesn’t need to be much. In the Philippines we’ll often pay $20 USD for a couple of hours testing.

I’ll give you an example of our testing below, but you need to plan this out for your business.

• Will social posts be a critical part of the role? Ask them to come up with a short social description for 5 blog posts
• Will they be emailing clients? Give them some sample emails from clients and ask them to respond
• Will they be following an internal process you already created? Give them access to the process and tell them to follow it

Create a few of these tasks and put them together in a Google document. Share the link with everyone you are testing.

Sample Test Tasks

Here’s a question I got on this part of the process.

I’m interested in your scoring system and what that consisted of. Is this something you’ve created or is there somewhere I can learn this from?

My response: I kind of just made it up. I created two test tasks….

The point being that this is not an exact science. If you come up with some tasks that they will be doing on the daily, you’ll be fine.

Task One

We had two client websites on our development server, which are now live, so they weren’t needed any more.

We have a document about the kinds of stuff we check over to make sure a client site is ready to go. Things like menus working, forms working, consistency of spacing etc. This was sent to applicants.

Based on that list, I asked our developers to “break” various things on 2 sites.

Applicants got one point for each thing we broke that they identified. Many of them picked up things that I didn’t even notice and they got bonus points for that.

They did all of this in a Google doc which they shared and linked me to.

Task Two

I sent them two emails from clients. Clients write some really crappy emails so they can be hard to understand.

They had to convert the emails into a “task list” for developers in Trello. If they didn’t understand or needed clarification from the client, they added cards in a different column in Trello.

They then made the board public and sent me the link.

For each “task” I identified in the email, they got a point based on how well the task was identified. Most of them struggled with this and got half marks for most items.

Interview

Because communication was an important part of this role, I included an interview as part of the score. For developer roles, I almost never do this and to this day have not spoken to some of by developers by voice…. ever.

Their interview score was just what I thought of them on the voice interview out of 20, including English speaking. I used 20 to make it a higher weighting compared to the tests because it was pretty important for this role

Scoring the Results

For each task, there was a scoring system. So they got a point for each point for each part the did right, and bonus points for anything they did where they actually identified mistakes of mine. This table was quite large, so I’ve included a small part below.

After this I totalled all of their points for each section, and colour coded each row with conditional formatting.

Making The Hire

From the above you can see we had a couple of really close applicants. In the end the hire came down to gut feeling between the two.

The next steps were simply to:

• Pay everyone for the test task
• Let down the people not getting the job, honestly
• Let the successful applicant know their start date and talk about pay

The process of bringing on new people is a whole post in itself. Stay tuned for part 2.

Have you hired anyone in the past and had it be a total disaster? Maybe you’ve got your own system that is working amazingly well?

Let me know in the comments! And please share if you think this will benefit someone 🙂

Are you rubbish at remembering to catch up with people? (I sure am)

Whether it be mates you haven’t seen in a while, cool people you met at events or clients, it is SO hard to keep up with everyone. For a long time, I’ve wanted a system that would pop up every so often and say “Oi, you haven’t seen Steve in ages. Don’t be a prick. Go see him.”

I’m definitely not the only one. My search for a “Social CRM” has yielded only threads of people asking for one. Most people end up using a full blown CRM, which seems overkill.

Like pretty much everyone in the online biz space, I freaking love Trello. After spending a bit of time messing around with Trello and Zapier, I’ve managed to build a pretty simple CRM that does exactly what I wanted in the beginning.

You only need to create two Zaps and one Trello board.

The basic premise is to set a due date on when you should catch up with each person. If you contact that person, add a comment on their card and the due date will be reset to a period determined by the label you applied in Trello. If the due date is reached, we’ll create a to-do in another app.

Step 1 – Create your Trello contact board

I broke mine down into lists (columns) that categorise where I know that person from. Local business, certain events, friends, whatever. This is optional. You could also just write it in the card name. If you use labels for this, there may be some issues with the Zap. I haven’t tested this.

Step 2 – Create Trello Labels

The labels are used to determine how often you want to see someone. For example, if you have say 30, this would mean you want a reminder if you haven’t spoken to someone in 30 days.

Open the menu on the right and edit labels.

In this example I’ve made a 14, 30 and 60 day label. Make sure you only enter a number as this will get used in a formula later.

Step 3 – Create a reset Zap

This Zap will be used to set a due date on each person. Whenever you catch up with someone, you will open your Trello board and put a comment on their name. This zap will look at the label you applied to them and move the due date out appropriately.

In Zapier, create a new Zap. Choose Trello and fire on New Activity.

Connect to your Trello account, then select the board you created in Step 1. Leave it as Any List and Any Card.

Continue through the rest of the trigger step until it asks you to set up an action. At this point you need to hit the + icon to add a new intermediate step.

Add a filter on Type exactly matches commentCard

And now we’ll create the final action. If it doesn’t automatically move onto the action, just click “set up this step” on the left hand side.

Choose Trello and “Update Card” as the action.

Under Card, select “Choose a custom value” – it is right down the bottom of the list. Under the Custom Value for ID, find Step 1 – Data Card ID.

This is the most complex part of the setup. For the Card Due Date:

1. Click the button on the right and find “Step 1 – Date”
2. Enter a “+”
3. Click the button again and find “Step 1 – Card Labels Name”
4. Enter the letter d.

It should look like this. This is taking the existing due date, and adding the number of days as specified by the label name.

And finally, choose Card position as bottom. This will move the card to the bottom of the list, so the people you haven’t spoken to recently will bubble to the top.

Continue through and turn on the zap. I named mine “Social CRM – Update Due Date”.

Step 4 – Create a Task Zap

So far, we have a system that will reset the due date for each person whenever you add a comment on their card.

Now, all we need to do is let you know if that due date is reached. You can use whatever task management app you like here as long as Zapier supports it. So you could use Asana, Teamwork, Basecamp etc.

I use Trello, so I’ll be creating a new card in my “Priority Tasks” Trello board.

Since we’ve been through the various steps on Zapier, I’ll give you the steps without as much guidance. I’m sure you’ll be fine 🙂

1. Create a new Zap
2. Trigger on Trello – New Notification
3. Create a Filter
4. Filter on Data Board Name = (Whatever your Board is named)
5. AND Filter on Type = cardDueSoon

1. Create an action to contact the person. For me this meant to create a Trello Card on my Priority Tasks board in the “A” list with the name “Contact {Data Card Name}” – where the Data Card Name was from the Trello notification.

Step 5 – Creating People

Add your people into your new Trello CRM board.

Whenever you add someone, make sure you do these three things:

1. Add a label to them (from step 3)
2. Set their first due date
3. Subscribe to the card (click the Subscribe button or add yourself to it as a Member). This is required to trigger the notification.

Annnnd we’re done. You now have a reminder system to catch up with the important people in your life.

If you wanted to get creative, you could create some Zaps that when a card is created, automatically add yourself to it and set a due date.

What do you think? Have some ideas to improve it? Let me know below.

Today, a client received what looks like an invoice from Domain Name Corp. They immediately sent me an email asking if I knew anything about it.

Only a month ago did another client receive the same document. That incident resulted in some angry emails to various domain registrants, none of which had anything to do with the document.

On first glance, everything looks completely legitimate. It looks like a real invoice, looks very professional and has various contact information. Even their website looks really good. For all I know they could be a legitimate company, but this practice definitely is not.

With everything looking so “right”, there must be a lot of businesses that fall for this trick.

The first thing that gave it away was the “.com” rather than my clients “.com.au” address. From there, I noticed the “Domain Name Available” and “This is an invitation to register” section further down.

And there it is.

They must have seen that this client owned a .com.au but not the corresponding .com, scraped their address from the ABN registry and sent out this letter.

There’s also the fact that 2 years domain rego should be about $40, yet this is for $249.

They can probably get away with it because even though it looks like one, there is no mention of the word invoice anywhere on the document. Anyone with a business receives invoices for domains and web hosting from time to time. And in my experience, many of them do not know who their hosting company is.

This DNC group must operate on the assumption that some business owners would be so used to this and just pay what they think is a regular invoice.

Super dodgy.

If you get one, there is only one thing you need to do with it – chuck it right in the bin.

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UPDATE 27/05/16:  I’ve sent off an email to the serviced offices which these guys are using as their registered address. We’ll see what comes back…

UPDATE 30/05/16: As suggested by don in the comments, please report this to ScamWatch.

These are the settings I would use:

What type of scam: False billing
How were you contacted: Mail
When were you first contacted: Date the mail arrived
What losses did you suffer: Not applicable (unless you have already paid, select Financial)
Company Details: Copied from invoice
Briefly describe the scam: Domain Name Corp sent a document that is clearly intended to look like a traditional bill or invoice. On closer inspection the bill is to register a new domain. I have never dealt with them before, and this mail was completely unsolicited. The price shown is $249 for two years, 10 times the normal domain registration cost. This document looks very much like a typical invoice, likely aimed at deceiving people who don’t understand domain names.

Optional: Link them to this post so they can see that lots of people are receiving this.

And finally, attach an image of your fake invoice