My Outsourced Job Search

by Francis

Did you ever have this like situation that you have to make a hard choice between two options? I sure did and in this case, it was the choice between two job opportunities.

I stressed myself out a lot before doing this choice. I could have saved myself much pain and stress if I would have relied on some help by my virtual assistant.

How Can A Virtual Assistant Help You With Life Decisions?

There are several tasks that a VA can do to make your hard choice easier and you should get all the help you can get.

After all, it’s your life, right?

In the case of a decision about a job opportunity, a good start would be to have your virtual assistant do a thorough background check over the enterprises in question. In this case, he could use glassdoors.

After you have the right background information about your potential employers, it’s time to make a hard decision.

It would be bad if you made your decision based on emotions and not with a cool head. Fortunately, there is a tool that would help you rationally make hard life decisions.

Come up with a few questions about your future employer?

What’s important to you?

What are some must have criteria?

And, what is less important?

Then honestly answer the questions with this decision-making software. The answer you will get in the end is a rational, logical answer with the right choice.

Now it’s your turn.

Do you continue your research?

Or, do you go with a cool headed decision?

Comments for Do You Have To Choose Between Two Job Opportunities – Make Sure You Make the Right Life Decision

by Francis
(January 09, 2013)

Here is what resulted from the research of job opportunities by Roman. After investing $40, he came up with a collection in excel sheet of over 200 companies in the area of Munich that are chemistry related.

Each search result has:

1. Name of the Company
2. Company Website
3. Career URL
4. Contact Email of the concerned HR employee
5. Telephone number
6. URL of the Contact us page (if necessary)

In other words, if you need a job related to Chemistry in the area of Munich like I did; you could simply use this excel sheet.

How It Would Come In Useful?

You could simply call up every enterprise in this excel sheet. Of course, it makes sense to read about the company first. That’s why there is the link to the company website right next to it. Inform yourself if this company needs anyone and, if the phone call works well, you can send in your CV.

Some of these companies are smaller and don’t advertise job vacancies on the big job search websites. In other words, having this information at your fingertips will give you an edge over your competition.

What If You Are Not In Munich?

I am aware that chances are very big that you are not a chemist, not living in Munich. If that’s the case, this case study can still be of interest to you.

You can simply copy my procedure and get job research done for whatever city you are living in and for whatever branch of work you are in. Just make sure that you get the same sort of information from your web researcher.

Was This A Good Investment Of Money?

Here is the deal.

This research cost me about $40. In the time I was looking for a job, I was also registered on different headhunting websites. Many of them offered premium packages so that your CV is sent around to different headhunters.

I invested once about 157 dollars in to a service that would send around my CV once. The results were zero. Here, I invested $40 and got the contact information of 200 companies.

If I were to call all of them up, I am a 100% sure that I would get more feedback than from hiring the same headhunting service again.

Side Note: I don’t want to share which headhunting service I was using because I was not successful with it. Just keep staying skeptic if someone wants your money for any headhunting service.

Here Is How You Can Get This Outsourced Research

I’m sharing my research with you. That is mainly because I don’t need it urgently anymore because I have already found a job.

By the way, if you want to know what advice I would have given myself at the start of my job search, be sure to check out my top tips about the job hunt.

You can download the excel sheet with the researched data below. All I would like you to do for that is to share the message about this outsourced job project via one of your favorite social networks. It will be done with a click of a button.

Please Leave a Comment If You Have a Question or You Learn Something

I don’t want you to only read about my outsourced job project. I want you to learn from it and implement it in your own lives.

Perhaps, you need something else researched. Many of the lessons from the whole hiring and managing process up to the results and the price range of a virtual assistant apply for many many other researched tasks as well.

So feel free to jump in to the discussion below and post us a question. Leave us a remark or if you have criticism feel free to share it too.

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Comments for Final Results of the Job Search Project – 200 Chemistry Enterprises in the Area of Munich

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

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’