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by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

So, Roman is on our team now and I’m really looking forward to what sort of work he is about to deliver.

He’s going to deliver, right?

Well, perhaps I should have some patience.

Right after my hiring manager and main virtual assistant opened the job for him and also right after they had a lively discussion via chat; I don’t see Roman starting to work yet. This surprised me a little but this is not the first time it happened.

Right after you have opened a contract with a provider, it’s not rare that a provider will start working right away. His job is sort of done. He got you, the employer, to take the time and open a contract with him. So now you want something from him – his work.

Of course the employee cannot play that game in definitively since the employer will fire him. But for some time, it’s okay. I have experienced this more than once. So there’s no point in getting angry especially since my hiring manager gave him until tomorrow as a deadline to update us.

So, I’ll patiently wait for tomorrow.

If I would have wanted the work to start right away, I would have needed to spell it out. Never leave any doubt to anything. If you need to get work done now; say so, in the job opening, right after you hired the person and in all subsequent communication.

That’s the only way to stay on track. Else, you will have to adjust to the schedule of your virtual worker not the other way around.

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Comments for Give Your Freshly Hired Virtual Worker an Initial Boost Right After You Hire Him

by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

After a good night of sleep and screening several other applicants, my virtual assistant presented me with the most highly suited applicant from our list which is Roman from Bangladesh.

He did pass the test especially since he wrote the needed translation at the beginning of the email. Also, he was fast to communicate when my virtual assistant who acted as a Hiring Manager for me went back to get in touch with him.

A high responsiveness is extremely important for a virtual assistant especially if the task is time sensitive.

Talking about time sensitivity, my VA normally updates me once a day. That’s what I have asked him. But since he knows this task is time-sensitive, he let me know about this candidate beforehand. He even organized it so that he would be ready for a Skype interview.

I’ll go ahead and say, “Thanks, dear virtual assistant, but I just jumped into the water. Let’s try out working with him.”

I’m really excited.

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COMMENTS FOR DOUBLE CHECKING THE MOST SUITABLE CANDIDATE FOR THE JOB RESEARCH TASK

by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

If you follow my project about outsourcing my job search efforts closely; you will ask yourself the question;

“Setting up the cooperation and outsourcing the research – Was it worth the time?”

Actually, I took about two hours to record my ideas and the plan for the instructions for the provider or contractor in order for him to complete the task of researching job openings for me.

It was not much of a loss of time because I did the following;

I simply worked through the job search myself as I would’ve done and recorded what I was doing with the free screen recording software “Jing” as I was going.

So the additional time invested was pretty minimal.

Perhaps of those two hours, one hour was “wasted” in order for me to set up a system where someone else could outsource the whole process.

You also have to be aware of the fact that my virtual assistant has been trained to be a hiring manager. In other words, he can take care of hiring, managing and screening through different applicants for me. This is some time I invested beforehand and from which I reap the rewards right now.

So if you would have the idea of outsourcing your job research for your special situation yourself, you need to be aware of the time you will need to find an applicant, manage him, take care of paying him and etc.

Another question is about the money. Was it worth the money?

How much did this experiment actually cost me?

As it is still running at the time of writing this blog post, I cannot give you the sum yet, but you have to invest in to the hourly rate of a researcher between $1 and $4 an hour depending on the quality, qualifications and personality of the personal assistant and the time you need to manage him or whatever the time is worth to you.

Compare that with professional career search services. In many of them you pay hundreds of dollars. Some of them have monthly costs of about $10 a month and the results of those services are menial to say the least.

In some cases, of course, you will find a perfect job opportunity to apply to, but in many cases, you will need to do the searching yourself.

So decide it for yourself. If you have tried out every paid job search in the book, why not have someone else help you find or research the internet for you for the places around where you live for a job opportunity.

It was this sort of time consideration which made me decide that it is time to outsource this whole process. I have spent hundreds of hours and a few weeks and month doing the research already. So I know I can do it myself.

But now it’s about numbers. It’s a number’s game and to increase those numbers, I will use the help of a virtual assistant to do the job searching for me.

Bottom line

Yes, it is worth it.

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Comments for Outsourcing My Job Search, Was It worth the Time?

by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

If you are reading this blog post, that means that you can follow along in real time as I hire a virtual assistant to do job research for me. I already shared my thoughts about the first applicant, Melisa from Indonesia, in another blog post.

Now let’s have a look at Ashley from the Philippines. First of all, every time I hire someone to do an outsourced job for me; I have in mind that we have a section of case studies showcasing different profiles of virtual assistants from all over the world.

My goal is really to have case studies from providers from different countries. So, this applicant coming from the Philippines is somehow a disadvantage for her. Ashley doesn’t know it yet but I’m looking forward to have as international of a team as I can possibly have. But, perhaps we should have a closer look at her skills first.

So the first thing I usually look at when deciding if I hire someone is her hourly rate. Ashley’s hourly rate is $2.50 per hour. This is not too much to ask even for a research job. It all depends on the location of the provider.

Unfortunately, my budget is extremely tight and there’s not much room for me to be overly generous especially if the research takes much time. So probably this price tag already is a no go area.
But let’s have a closer look at her profile first. All qualifications are matched on the job description. She has the work experience and she has the feedback – excellent feedback, by the way.

Also, I see that she has several other projects at the same time still in progress. If I wanted to hire her almost full time, I would know that she already has other contracts with other people. If you are in a similar position when hiring, you should look out for that.

One detail that disgruntled me was;

– first, she didn’t answer the test question within the job position. This means she did not read the job description closely enough.

– Another really small detail confirms this. She writes, “This letter is to express my interest in discussing the research expert position posted here on oDesk.“

The rest of the letter could apply to any other job opening and after the research expert, there are two spaces. I strongly think that this is a copy pasted cover letter where only the position has been changed. Therefore, this applicant will not be a good choice.

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Comments for Screening Applicants for This Job: Melisa Gets Competition from Ashley from the Philippines

by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

As we set up the applicants test a little bit harder and we have also made the conditions for this job pretty harsh, I was not surprised to see that we don’t have dozens of applicants right after posting the job.

In fact only a few hours after we opened the post, we have one first applicant – a female candidate from Indonesia. I’m personally curious about her because I have never worked with an applicant from Indonesia before.

A quick glance to the price tag says, okay she’s within an extremely reasonable price range; $1 per hour for basic research is so reasonable it borders on cheap, but I’m working on a tight schedule so let’s see how the other qualifications of this applicant are.

She does not have enough work experience or feedback score.

What does this tell me?

She is, in fact, a relatively new oDesk worker who only probably wants to increase her feedback rate.

When I check in to her profile, I see that she only had one fixed-priced job that gave her bad feedback.

So this does not necessarily mean that she does bad work. It only means that perhaps if I would need a blogger writer, like the past job was, I would want another provider, Or that her previous employer was a mean guy.

So just in case no one else would apply to this job, I could really imagine giving her a chance.

She passed the little test of translating a German word “Unternehmen” into English “business”. Also, her cover letter is really focused on the job opening and it is free of English mistakes.

All these are great signs that this could indeed be a very capable applicant. So let’s keep her in mind when we will hire someone after good nights of sleep.

You don’t need to hire anyone right away. You can always sleep over it and hire them.

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Comments for Interviewing the First Applicants for the Project of Outsourcing My Job Research

by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

My plan is to have someone research possible job openings in my area for me. Since I know that hiring and especially managing applicants is really time-consuming and I don’t have any minute to spare right now, I decided to outsource the whole process to my main virtual assistant.

Since I have trained him in this whole process before, I am going to make use of his newly gained skill.

What use would it be to train your virtual assistant and then do the task yourself?

How we found a reasonably tough test to filter out the right applicants

In order to find the right applicants out of hundreds of people applying to your job, especially if it is one as easy as researching, it is always wise to put a little test in your job offering. I already talked about the so-called Sunshine test.

This time, the research would be pretty challenging and furthermore, German knowledge will be the key. Of course, I expect that not many applicants will actually bring German language skills to the table. However, there are different levels of skills when it comes to use translation tools online.

Actually, the first test I wanted to do was way too hard. My test question was to determine on which German trains line, a certain specific station was. In order to answer that, the applicant will have to research the location of the train station in Google maps, determine what the train station near that place was and then on which train station line it was.

My virtual assistant stopped me here. This test was just too hard. If we would have gone along with using this test, we would probably have weeded out all applicants. That’s no good. So I decided to use a simple translation test and asked for the translation of the German word for “Enterprise”.

This not only screens the applicants who are willing to do a simple translation research for a job opening, but also it will be one of most important words that will come up in all the research.

How the actual applicants screening went?

I will tell you that in another blog post.

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