Francis

by Francis
(December 14, 2012)

Here is what my hiring manager wrote to set up the initial communication.

I made it a habit after hiring someone for my team to quickly establish that I need them to use Google mail and Google Chat, Skype and a Dropbox.

You need to really set up and define your ways of communication on front. If you want daily work updates, set this up early in the communication while your applicant is still fresh and motivated to start working.

Also don’t wait for eternities before you sent him the first assignment. You took so long to setup the cooperation.

Why loose time now.

In this case I left communications up to my virtual assistant who helped me as a hiring manager. He took care of all the rest. I only get involved when important questions about for example oDesk payments come up.

But everything else can be smoothly outsourced to your hiring manager if you have one.

Striking While the Iron is Hot

Here what oDesk has notified me just after I opened a new contract

I just started the contract with Roman.

The longer you take to decide which provider you want to hire, the more and more applicants you get. After a time, it gets really hard to overview the mass of your applicants.

That’s why I will suggest you to limit the time you take to hire a person to a maximum of three days. That’s about the time it took for my virtual assistant who acted as a hiring manager for me and me to hire Roman.

The next step is to set up weekly limit on the time your assistant can work for you. This serves both as a security for your money as well as for your managing.

If you limit the work of your newly hired assistant to 10 hours a week, he cannot cost you more than the allocated time limit. So there is not cost explosion here.

Also it would be easier to manage someone who is not working potentially full time for you. You can always expand your weekly hour limit later.

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Comments for Setting up the Communication between My Job Researcher, My Hiring Manager and Me

by Francis
(December 14, 2012)

Give a job opening some time and the applicants will come. Three more applicants have applied and I will take some time to check each of them quickly.

Roman from Bangladesh has a solid profile. He is asking for $1.23 per hour. These numbers come from the fact that oDesk takes 10% cut of all payments. So after oDesk fee, the payment is actually $1.11 per hour.

So if you want to penny pinch, you need to exactly tell what hourly rate you are able to pay after or before oDesk fee. The rest of his profile is actually really solid and if anything I would only think he might be ‘Over Qualified’. So he is a good candidate.

Abdul from Bangladesh is surprising me a little bit. He proposes a rate of $0.40/hr. He also tells me that he has German knowledge. This combination really surprises me.

Such a low payment is hardly ethical.

Also he has already worked 830 hours of work on oDesk, why would Abdul apply for such a low hourly rate. I am really surprised about it.

His work history was showing that he has already worked several jobs at a similar price. If I have would hire him, it would only be to make a big case study and asking him why he is working at these extremely low payments. He also has a great feedback and a lot of hours worked as well.

What’s the secret behind Abdul? (In the end, I rejected his overly low offer.)

Another provider is Jomu and she is also from Bangladesh. Depending on the time you post your job posting, people from different countries are more likely to find the same job opening.

If you really want to target a certain country, you can do so in the job posting or also by posting it at specific hours in time. Jomu’s application letter also passed most of the qualifications. The only thing was she did not pass the test.

So from this point of view, we would have to eliminate her for not reading the job description closely enough.

Only a few hours after the job posting, we already have five applicants and three of them would be qualified for the job.

It’s time to get into the choosing.

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Comments for Screening Through Even More Applicants for the Project ‘Outsourced Job Research’

by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

I have four virtual assistants at the same time on my team right now. This is a new record for some time. Let’s see who we have on our team.

We have my main virtual assistant; then we have my main transcriptionist and then two web researchers from my project of outsourcing the web research for job openings in the area of Chemistry and Biochemistry that I just recently started.

Roman has done a pretty solid job after some rough start where I really shook my head a few times. But the latest results of his research looks pretty solid, I have to say.

I already have a list of 60 enterprises where I could apply. This already helps a lot.

And now we have a double whammy.

Muhammad has joined the team. He is from Pakistan like my main virtual assistant and the good thing about him, he knows his way around in the area of Chemistry and has a basic knowledge of German language which is an awesome asset if you have to research in a German city for local enterprises.

I expect his work to go extremely efficient. I compared his results with Roman directly. My virtual assistant has taken the time to interview Muhammad and gave him some few test questions and then set up a limited contract for 5 hours only to test out how Muhammad will do.

I’m really excited!

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Comments for The Team’s Growing and Growing