Outsourcing Work

[robertbanking]

Hello everyone, hope you are having a good day.

I am outsourcing some tasks in my small digital marketing business such as bookkeeping and management of some of my website designs and a virtual assistant. I have a good relationship with my virtual assistant who i already have hired freelance. They will be freelance rather than working physically in an office. Can anyone kindly advise what i need to be careful of when selecting candidates please? Does anyone recommend any sites they used or job posting sites to outsource there staff please?

Thank you so much for any support you can give. Take care and stay healthy and positive!

 

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[K1 Lambo]

Hello everyone, hope you are having a good day.

I am outsourcing some tasks in my small digital marketing business such as bookkeeping and management of some of my website designs and a virtual assistant. I have a good relationship with my virtual assistant who i already have hired freelance. They will be freelance rather than working physically in an office. Can anyone kindly advise what i need to be careful of when selecting candidates please? Does anyone recommend any sites they used or job posting sites to outsource there staff please?

Thank you so much for any support you can give. Take care and stay healthy and positive!

It's very similar to how you would hire a regular person in office.
Make sure they show you social proof(case studies, results, testimonials etc). You really want to make sure that the guy who you're hiring is qualified to do the work and not just some "digital wannabe" who thinks he's good. No, look for guys who are good and passionate at what they do.

Two questions you can ask him/her are the following:
1. What's your greatest accomplishment? - This one is great to see if the person is disciplined, relentless and committed to the job.
2. What's the biggest obstacle that you overcame? Very similar to the first one, but approaching it from a different angle. Shows how the candidate deals with failure, perseverance and attitude towards learning.

You can learn a lot about a person in a couple of minutes just by asking these questions.

 

[OverByte]

Get very specific with your processes and document them

hire multiple people for the task on trial period and evaluate, the go with the best

 

[Johnny boy]

Much, much more important than your hiring selection process is the procedures and systems you have in place to keep employees in line, proper incentives, and how you limit risk.

I would be terrified in having a virtual assistant doing bookkeeping.

One day you'll wake up to an email like this: "Give me $2000 or I'll delete everything and you'll have no records".

Or finding a way to sneak money out of the business or hide something.

Happens ALL the time.

When hiring out of country for remote work, you need to create some new commandments just like CENTS but for managing people. If I had to make some up on the spot it would be

Control: same as the fastlane, but if an employee can do something to kick you out of your own software or login to somewhere and F*ck you over in a big way, you are their slave, not the other way around. Do not underestimate the capacity for employees to destroy your business because you accidently hired some little SJW who thinks you're oppressing them, or their mom got sick and they need money quickly and justified robbing you because you're wealthy.

Incentives: Whatever you reward, you get more of. Whatever you punish, you get less of. A job that pays hourly punishes efficient workers and rewards lazy workers hiding from managers. So you will get more lazy workers and less efficient workers because of the incentives you created. Find a low-effort way to create a system that naturally enforces the right kind of incentives. For example my lawn care company. Each crew gets 8-10 jobs a day to do. They get paid the same per day like a salary, and they get to go home once they are done with the jobs, but have to come back if there are any complaints. Because of that: 1. I don't have to track hours. 2. I don't have to tell them to do better work. 3. They are incentivised to work quickly but good enough to not get complaints. 4. The fast workers are rewarded and the slow lazy workers are punished. Our employees really like their jobs though because they get to work 4-5 hours a day and get paid for 8, and I'm not breathing down their neck barking orders at them.

Surveillance: In other words...quality control. How do you make sure work is getting done and getting done right? For what we do it's very easy, the customer calls us in a couple hours when they get home and we know exactly who was there and when, and we send them back. You can't hide. Find a way to make your employees feel that they can't hide if they want to be a piece of shit. The little voice in their head will go "I think I'll just do it the right way, they'll know I was cutting corners" and then all is good. 90% of the time people want to cut corners. I do too. We are all the same. I do it and I make much more than the employees, imagine how much less motivated they are than me?! Thinking that employees have 'passion' for their work and would never cut corners is naïve. In the last paragraph I said I'm not barking orders at them or watching them, but they still have accountability.

What you want is to find a balance that limits risk and maximizes the work that remote employees do. You want them to login to their employee account that has extremely limited functionality that allows them to do ZERO damage to your business. You want to be able to accurately track and manage their productivity in a way that makes it obvious when they are not doing what they were hired to do. You need to properly incentivize them so they are naturally punished for not working and rewarded for doing good work.

If you do these things, you will find that employees do better, regardless of your selection processes and who you hire.

 

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[DoingDeals]

One tip in Venezuela you can get the doctors & lawyers educated level personal assistants for very low cost, because in their economy there's no work.

 

[Deleted85763]

Hello everyone, hope you are having a good day.

I am outsourcing some tasks in my small digital marketing business such as bookkeeping and management of some of my website designs and a virtual assistant. I have a good relationship with my virtual assistant who i already have hired freelance. They will be freelance rather than working physically in an office. Can anyone kindly advise what i need to be careful of when selecting candidates please? Does anyone recommend any sites they used or job posting sites to outsource there staff please?

Thank you so much for any support you can give. Take care and stay healthy and positive!

I do limited outsourcing but it is very controlled. I make absolutely sure I get what is promised. Early in my career I outsourced a company to do marketing for a list of 1000 potential customers. I knew I had a great product and was very surprised that I received not one single inquiry.

So I called some of the potential customers and every one of them said to the effect "I didn't receive anything from you. I am very interested now though." I went back to the outsourced marketer that I paid and told them what happened. They said "Well, I can do it again." I said "No, that won't be necessary." I didn't ever go back to them after that and the lesson was learned - always verify that the services you have paid for was actually provided!

I was able to sell the product shortly after and made such a great profit that I wasnt't interested in pursuing the dishonest marketer for a refund for the relatively small amount I paid them.