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The first hire is always the hardest. One of our listeners is in the process of hiring their first team member. They have a list of tasks they need done in order to devote that time somewhere else.
What is the best way to hire help for your online business?
I’ve put together a five-step process to hiring a new team member. It’s the process that I’ve used time and again to integrate new members to my team.
Step One: Do the Task Yourself
Generally, I do the task myself at least three times. The first time is to just test it. See how it’s done. Learn how it’s done yourself. The second is to create a standard operating procedure, or SOP. Using a Word doc or a Google doc, whichever you like, just write down the steps to actually creating the task yourself. The third time you do it is to test the standard operating procedure. Once you’ve written it, follow the SOP through from start to finish to make sure it actually works to get the task done in the way that you wanted it done. And that the SOP is actually workable.
Step Two: Record the Task
Make a video of yourself or the screen as you complete the task, following the SOP. I use ScreenFlow, and you can find that at the GradBlogger resource page at gradblogger.com/resources. I use this just to record my screen while I voice-over the steps of the process.
The biggest feedback I’ve had from people that I’ve hired is that they really liked these videos when we’re doing these first tasks because it shows them exactly what to do. And you not only have the written SOP as a resource but do a video of yourself doing the SOP as well.
Step Three: Ask Applicants to Complete a Paid Trial
Pick at least three of your applicants to complete a task. Let them know why they are doing the task – the goal it accomplishes – before providing the instructional video and SOP. Be respectful of their time and effort by paying them for their work and by letting them know that there are other applicants also doing a similar trial. Let each applicant know you’re going to decide who you want to actually bring to the team once everyone has completed the trial.
Once your applicants have done the task, evaluate and rank their performance of each applicant. You can do this any way you want. You can just go on gut feel. Who you liked working with the best. Who created the best result. You could also create a matrix with rankings from one to five on communication and on effectiveness and what the thing looked like, or there’s all kinds of ways to rank performance.
Step Four: Start by Taking Small steps
Once you’ve made your choice and let the other applicants know that it’s not them (without burning bridges, of course!), ask your new contractor to complete a small batch of tasks within a fixed period. I recommend paying the full rate that you would normally and be up front about this batch of jobs as you both start to work out the kinks of your new relationship.
This is a great place to get your new hire to provide feedback on your SOP and your process. Get them to recommend places for improvement. This also tests their ability to interact with you and the business systems that you have.
Step Five: Hire or Set Them Free
If everything has worked out, bring your new hire within your team. If you’ve run into hiccups, you can return to the applicants who originally complete the trial task. If all else fails, take a step further back and bring in a new batch of applicants.
To give you an idea of this process in practice, here’s an example here from DustSafetyScience:
Back in 2018, I switched over from my previous blog and built a whole new website at Dust Safety Science. I also had a large event coming up and really wanted to have my website populated with the type of material for people at the conference to see.
I was only two months out and I wanted to get 70 blog posts up. So I created this whole process of developing blog content with a curation and repurposing strategy.
I began by writing up the first five incident updates myself, and this allowed me to create the SOPs. With the SOP, with an example result, and with the video I created of following the SOP, I went on Upwork to find applicants. I hired ten content writers as a test and asked them all to write the exact same blog post.
At the end of that test round, I had ten of the exact same posts from ten different writers plus the version that I wrote. Some of the writers were better than mine. Some were worse than mine. Some didn’t even follow the right instructions and wrote something completely off the wall. So it was really great to do this test run. It was really interesting to see.
I had also picked people with lots of different backgrounds and different price points. A few of them were charging very low prices, a few that were charging medium, and some charging higher prices, which gave me an idea of what the quality difference might be.
Then I ranked the applicants based on how good the post was, what their overall cost was, what the communication ability was. I ranked this list and then pared it down to five.
I gave each of these five writers five more posts each, all different. Once completed, I had 25 new posts for the blog. They wrote them up, I read them over. Then we pared down to two.
Two writers, five more posts, ten more articles for my blog. By this point, I had narrowed it down to my top candidate. I had over half the posts I wanted for my blog before the event and asked my new hire to complete the rest of the posts to finish out that blog content for that conference.
I was impressed enough to hire the content writer, and they’ve been with our team now for almost two years from that hiring process.
This five-step process allowed me to review different price points, different skill levels, and the communication with those in different regions of the world. And it really allowed us to then pull that in and say, who is the best fit for our team? That’s how we were able to hire somebody who’s amazing now. A critical member of our team, but also without the stress and anxiety of thinking, well, is this going to work out?
Once you have a team that’s doing these sort of things, they could do really this whole process for you. They could learn how to do the task themselves. If they don’t want to do it over the long term, then they can write the SOP. They can test the SOP, take the video of themselves doing it. They could even go on Upwork and start to initiate the job process. Then you can just really come in and evaluate with them the results from the testing process when you’re doing the hiring.
Do you have questions about your online business? Share them in the comments below or send it to our listener mailbox. Your question may be featured on a future episode of the GradBlogger podcast.
