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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