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by Francis
(December 20, 2012)

Finally, having virtual assistants work on researching job opportunities for me will be wrapped up soon. I’ve gotten some great job interview opportunities but those were mostly based on me attending job fairs. I’ve learned a lot on how to do job research effectively.

If you want to use my best tips and free job search websites, be sure to research for jobs smartly. Quality is way more important than quantity.

Summing Up the Work of My Researchers

Roman did a great job. He researched over 200 possible places where I could call and apply for jobs; only in the area of Chemistry, Biochemistry and localized in and around of Munich. Muhammad, on the other side, was very tough to work with. Managing him has been a real challenge to my virtual assistant. This has been posted elsewhere.

This Research Is My Ace in the Sleeve

To be honest, I wanted to stay in Munich very badly. Mostly out of private reasons but I also just like it here. It’s my home. If I would not have found anything at all in Munich, I would have been forced to look globally for work.

Now this research that I got from both from Muhammad and especially from Roman, are my ace in the sleeve, tightly tucked away in case I ever need another job opportunity in Munich.

It’s a good feeling to have some pre-researched data where I could quickly crank out a lot of applications to useful places that I could even pay a visit personally to if I wanted.

Doing the research has been a fun ride.

The Cost of My Research

What did this whole outsourcing my job research experiment cost me, actually?

I hired Roman for $1.23 an hour, Muhammad was hired for $1.11 an hour. Roman’s work was the most useful. He has worked in total for 40 hours and 10 minutes. So, I paid him just under $50. When I compared his results with some professional job research websites that have premium services, this was pretty cheap.

Actually, I paid $163 at one time for a professional job research website and have gotten no results whatsoever out of it.

I’m very happy with the results I got from Roman. Muhammad, on the other side, mostly took a waste time of my virtual assistant and his research did not give us much results. He has researched a few places after finally getting set up.

Some of his research overlaps with Roman’s, of course. I will consolidate the data and use it whenever I will need it. In sum, he has only worked 5 hours. But I have made more costly experiments on Fiverr before.

So on the financial side, there was no big loss from working with Muhammad. We did learn a lot about managing a team of virtual assistants though.

Closing Remarks

As I said, outsourcing my job research was fun. I hope you could follow along with my posts. Please excuse me if some of them were pretty chaotic. You also have to know that many of my posts were transcribed from audio recordings that I made before.

Still, I hope you could get out something out of this research series.

I’d love it if you leave me a comment on what you learned from me or if you have some follow up questions. I try to be as transparent as I could. Please call me out if I withheld some information that is important to you.

See you in the comments.

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Comments for Wrapping Up the Outsourced Job Research

by Francis
(December 20, 2012)

It’s just been a month since I hired Roman to research job opportunities for me. He has worked 30 hours for now and therefore, I have spent $36 up to now.

He has researched over a hundred places in Munich complete with contact information, the career’s webpage and the location. Everything is nicely spread out in a spreadsheet.

It’s time to assess how far he has gotten in researching the whole city. I’ve asked him about making a schematic illustration about which places in Munich he has already taken care of. Unfortunately, the communication is a little bit lacking. That might be because my virtual assistant is away at the moment or a problem on his side.

In comparison, the cooperation with Muhammad was disturbingly demotivating to say the least. I’ll save that for a series of other posts.

The hardest part of the whole job search is yet to come. I’ll have to take that list of over a hundred job contact opportunities and phone or email each one of them. If after all that, I cannot find a place to work then it’s probably time to cut corners and change the location.

P.S. – While Roman focused on scouting the web for job opportunities in the areas of Chemistry or Biochemistry, I took the freed up time to visit a few job fairs and send out a few more job applications on my own.

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Comments for Outsourced Job Research with Roman – One Month after Hiring

 

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