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How to find people to hire for outsourcing
It’s easy to talk about ‘oh I need to outsource this’ or ‘I need to outsource that’. But talk is cheap.
How do you actually find someone to hire to do these jobs we have been talking about?
After you analyze your own daily tasks and things that you do, you will inevitably find that you should be hiring people to do some of the work for you that is worth a lower value than what you can do via other tasks.
So what next? How do you actually then GET someone to actually do those things? How do you find people? Where do you search?
For one-off, small jobs, you can use fiverr.com
But Anthony and I both use upwork.com more regularly, especially when a task is more ongoing and in depth.
Some quick tips about using upwork.com:
- Have a clearly defined role / task the person will have (one example is when I hired someone to make subtitles for videos. That was the only thing I hired the person to do)
- Don’t post jobs publicly. Rather create a job and make it viewable only to those who you invite, otherwise your inbox will be FLOODED and you ended up creating more work for yourself.
- Don’t hire the cheapest people. Hire cheap and you will get low quality work typically. Spend a little more to get better quality
- Ask a few screening questions. Anthony likes to add in ‘final question: add 2+7 and write the answer at the top of your response to this job’. There are lots of people who don’t read your job description and will just copy and paste. You don’t want to hire that person.
In the next episode, we will be talking about on-ramping your virtual assistants and how to streamline tasks.
Between Anthony and I, we probably have 7 virtual assistants or more doing various things like designing cover photos, editing videos, writing certain blog posts, creating branding, etc. You can expand beyond yourself when you work this way.
This Week’s Challenge
Make a profile on UpWork and test the waters, whether that is just making a job posting or exploring the site. Get your feet wet a little bit and see what is out there.
GET AFTER IT!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Ryan: I’m Dr. Ryan Debell. Welcome back once again to the Health Fit Biz Podcast for episode number 26. In this episode Dr. Anthony Gustin and I talked about the, well, we continue our discussion on outsourcing but what we’ll specifically talk about in this episode is how to actually find people to outsource to, how do you look for those people, how do you find them, what’s the best way. So we go over that so that’s actually, you know, where things actually happen. It’s easy to talk about, “Oh you know this task is something that we should outsource but how do you actually go about doing it?” So that what’s this episode is all about. We talk about how we’ve done it and we talk about what that process step wise actually looks like. So without further a do, let’s listen in to episode number 26.
Ryan: Well, hello there, Dr. Anthony Gustin.
Anthony: Hey there, Dr. Ryan. And welcome to yet another episode.
Ryan: of the…
Anthony: Health Fit Business Podcast. I’m your guest host, Dr. Anthony Gustin. This is Dr. Ryan with me today.
Ryan: Yes.
Anthony: Are we in our thirties yet? Where we at?
Ryan: This is episode number 26.
Anthony: Hah! So close.
Ryan: And what are we talking about? I think what we’re talking about is on this topic of outsourcing things which we’ve been kind of discussing over the last several weeks. How to know which tasks to outsource, how to audit your time, et cetera et cetera… But you know, where does the rubber really hit the road? And I think this is where people have been issued. They know what they need to outsource but they don’t know how to start actually doing it. So it’s easy identify what you do but actually doing it is orders of magnitude more challenging for most people especially when they haven’t done it before. So, we’re gonna talk about how to do that, right?
Anthony: We are. Yeah. And I think…
Ryan: Please tell me that’s the problem we’re gonna solve today, Anthony.
Anthony: I think this is one of those nebulous terms, outsourcing, where people hear a lot and I think either they have no idea what the hell that is or think it’s a bad thing like, “Oh send our jobs to Mexico or send our jobs to China” type of thing, you know? Outsourcing, like what we talk about last few weeks, is getting someone else to do the work for you and with the Internet now it’s so easy to find people. Before like you have to put up a job listing in a newspaper and see who applied. That was an awful process. Now you can interview people and get tons of data collection and who you want to work for your very specific role immediately like overnight. It’s much more easy nowadays and much cheaper than before. So I know you do the same thing, with the main platform we use to outsource and hire people for for specific tasks is Upwork.com used to be… Not Elance. Was it Elance?
Ryan: No, was Elance. Our Elance… Elance and Upwork merged or something and they just made it Upwork.com.
Anthony: Yeah. Upwork. Yes, so obviously we’ll include that in show notes. But I said when I was talking about this detailed job descriptions and so for detailed roles, so I’m not gonna just think outsource, I need to outsource stuff. I’m gonna look for an outsourcer. Right? What you need to look for and what you need to try to find is very very specific roles. And so I think we talked about last time or time before that kinda the positions that we have told. And so people that I’ve hired from Upwork for example, we have a graphic designer, Margot. She’s awesome. We have a, I have a content writer for few mother sites who just writes post, nothing else. I have a person that helps me posts on websites. I have a guy who does graphic mockups for products, that’s all he does. Not graphic design but just, he’s rendering mockups. I have somebody who…
Ryan: He did the journal, right?
Anthony: Yeah. He did the journal. And then we have somebody who designs physical product packaging. Not a graphic design so it’s different. I have somebody who does… we have somebody who design the type setting for the book. I have a copy editor. So as you can see here, very very very specific roles I don’t have a general assistant online that does all these stuff. They’re very very defined. So…
Ryan: Can you imagine if you try to do all these things yourself?
Anthony: Yeah. I used to try to do all these things. It didn’t work out long.
Ryan: It’s terrible. You have no time. You can’t get anything done. It’s like… They’ll be like trying to build a high rise building all by yourself like just set a pride like, “I wanna build this building in this city and I’m gonna build it just me.”
Anthony: Yeah. “I’m gonna put a concrete. I’m gonna dig the holes. I’m gonna put a rebar. I’m gonna lift this thing.” No.
Ryan: It’s a good way to not get something done quickly or well, actually. You just sacrifice. You sacrifice a lot.
Anthony: Right. And so the more specific the job role that you want to hire for outsource, the easier it is to hire somebody on Upwork for it or I mean there’s tons of these sites. There’s Fivver in which you need in too later and there’s a couple there of sites, kinda like outsourcing sites.
Ryan: Those are like one off too. If you’re gonna need Fivvers good like, “Hey I need a picture made once.”
Anthony: Yeah. And I just don’t like a having to manage from platforms. So Upwork, well, have some quirks. It’s the best one that I found for ongoing projects. So, I really just have everybody on there than having to manage from different platforms. Just a personal preference. But the more specific you can have the listings and the requirements, the better you’ll get quick and high quality responses.
Ryan: Yes, absolutely. So, I don’t quite as many as you but the ones that I use the most would be my data gathering. So when I’m doing marketing for events I have… Her job is to just gather data about potential people, people like in market to using offline marketing tactics. Things like fliers, et cetera, et cetera. But I don’t have, you know like you, she’s not also going to do my design work. That’s somebody else.
Anthony: Right.
Ryan: So you have to narrowly define these things. Now people aren’t gonna be really be familiar like, “What is Upwork? And how does that process actually work?” Essentially, what you do is you make a profile and then you can post a job. There’s multiple ways to do it. You can post a job right at the description of what you’re looking for, how many hours per week. Those are the types of things that you’re able to do. So think of this as sort of like, kind of like Craigslist. Or you’re gonna go on there and post something and then people will respond to that and sort of apply. That is, I think you’ll agree to this Anthony, a very inefficient way of doing it ‘cause you get so many people applying that… I think it’s actually better for you to search somebody out and then you can essentially hire them now or ask them to do a job.
Anthony: Yeah.
Ryan: And you can search by where in the world they are by what their rate is and like what I would do, what I do is I try to find somebody that specifically does the task I’m looking to have done and then I’ll hire like several people for that and I’ll see which one does the best job. I know you do it this way as well, so I just… One example would be, I started subtitling certain videos on my Instagram and on my blogs so that if someone’s not listening to the audio they can still like understand what is happening and so I hired several different people who do subtitling and I looked for people who have some sort of a medical background so the girl, the gal that does it she has a nursing degree and she does subtitling. So she understands all the language and then so what I do is I tested with her and several others and I chose the one that did the best job and then we have a nice little system that in place for this but we’ll talk about that in another episode. I’m assuming you do it the similar way or do you do some different ways?
Anthony: Right. So more so, but three big mistakes I kept making early on when trying to hire people on these platforms. Mistake number one was, like you said, just putting up a job listing. You’ll get blasted for like 500 spam accounts. It’s just awful like trying to manage all that and like sort through it. Terrible. So, I would not recommend at all posting on there like looking for people to apply for you. So like you said, I make a job. Make it private and then search by different criteria I want then look through list of 30, 40, 50 people. And then by 10, 20, 30 people, just depending on how many people I want. Mistake number two, not being clear with my instructions or my needs of that the project that needed to happen and putting in filtering questions in that ad. So even if you request people to have interview with you, if you’re not very clear and if you don’t have a few kind of questions or examples of what you want done you’re gonna still have spam accounts of people who just are not gonna be a good fit. And so, for instance I will lay out every single step, give examples and then ask something like, “Before you write anythings else at the top of your post tell me what two plus seven is.”
Ryan: To see if he’s actually reading it.
Anthony: Yeah. So then I know that person can follow instructions. So, I put up at the end to make sure that they reading everything clearly and then have them put it in the beginning of the next message so that when filter through 30 messages, I just delete the ones that don’t have nine in the front.
Ryan: Yeah. Because you know a lot of these people, they’re just copying and pasting the same thing to a million different jobs and they’re not actually reading and not really understand what it is.
Anthony: Mistake number three would be trying to get the cheapest work possible. And I think you…
Ryan: We’ve both done this.
Anthony: And then this is I think a…
Ryan: Everyone just start there.
Anthony: Yeah. So here kind of some to back it up a little bit, here’s the kind of phases you probably go through if you’re trying to do this. One, you don’t know what the hell to do and you don’t do anything. Two, you think you can do everything. Three, you know you can’t so sought to outsource but you don’t wanna pay for it so you hire the cheapest thing possible. That creates more headaches than not doing anything at all because this person gonna not provide good work, not communicate, fall to pits of planet, just drag you out. It’s terrible. So my advice, mistake number three, do not try to go with the absolutely cheapest person possible. You will save so much time to have such a better quality product if you just pay a little bit more upfront and then it doesn’t even have to much like there’s really great quality people you can get in different countries which to them is great livable wages but for is like $4 to $7 an hour. So there’s definitely affordable options out there if you’re starting up but trying to get the absolute lowest price person is not the way you should go about it. So think about quality first. And so those three things, want to find me kind of master that and took that out of equation really changed things about how quickly I was able to delegate tasks that needed to get delegated.
Ryan: Now I wanna hear on a point that the I wanna make sure what you address. Because I can see people thinking this. “Oh you guys are hiring people for $4 to $5 an hour from another country. That’s so bad.”
Anthony: Yeah.
Ryan: Right? I mean that’s inevitable people would think that. What’s the counter?
Anthony: Well, the counter is that you’re just an extreme nationalist and for some reason you can’t think that other people are humans who are just strange but like I said these people are, it would be much more impactful for someone in the Philippines to be making a livable wage for them than it would be here somebody who’s gonna use an extra dollar a week to go buy a larger thing as Starbucks.
Ryan: Yeah.
Anthony: The impact you can make is actually far greater hiring people from different countries who are in much worse position than we are here.
Ryan: Yeah. If you’re paying them $5 to $7 per hour like you said that can do a lot for them and they want that job so it’s not like an evil thing. Humanitarian wise, it could actually be quite a good thing.
Anthony: Right. And you can pay a few extra if you want or kind of give bonuses all the time if they do a good work. So, like you were saying earlier though about finding the people who actually work for you so like I say previously, I use… I make a very very clear job description with that kind of filtering process at the end that I ask about 20 people or so from different regions. So like you said, different people gonna have different strengths so sometimes I don’t care about locations. Sometimes I want somebody in the US. Sometimes for instance Philippines. They’re very very high quality in English and their timezone is really really good for me because they’re essentially working when I’m asleep so I have somebody working on my business 24 hours a day. If I hire everybody in United States, there’s only eight to twelve hours of work that could be done. So, I find people regionally that I need for a task or not and then once the people are invited then I will narrow it down like you said to maybe five or six people. I give them all a very very small task and hire however hourly rate they have and say spend in more than two or three hours on this. And all the stuff is many books including for our work where I heard about these stuff originally. And then from those six, I narrow it down to maybe two or three and then give them maybe a three to five hour task in which you can still use this like all the stuff from this as you want, right? And so instance…
Ryan: Like the stuff they do.
Anthony: Yeah and so I have five different people I’m not gonna have give them all the same exact task. I’m gonna give them all the same things but in different ways so if they’re all quality I can just use all of it. I paid their work. And then from the two to three people sometimes their work is so good that I just keep all of them so like, “This one’s I will have to narrow down to two content writers and I just kept both of them because they’re both good.” But if one then blows you under the water, I’m gonna keep that one.
Ryan: Yeah and sometimes…
Anthony: And so it’s kinda… Go ahead.
Ryan: I was gonna say in some times, you have a lot of stuff that is actually you need more than one person for even on the same task.
Anthony: Yeah. Their ability isn’t a 100% what you would need or vice versa.
Ryan: Yeah. And you know, it’s not like they work only for you. A lot of times these freelancers they, you know, they have multiple people they’re working with and sometimes you need a lot done so you could task to different people at the same time. So yeah, I think that the… Hopefully, I guess people kind of starting thing like, “Lift up the veil.” I feel like a lot times were talking about outsourcing, they don’t actually tell you how they do it. It’s like a secret they don’t want you to know.
Anthony: Yeah. I mean I don’t care if people know that I’m hiring people from Upwork to help me do things like why should that be a secret?
Ryan: Right. It shouldn’t. If anything more people need to know so that it can help them help more people and…
Anthony: Right. There… Like I wouldn’t be able to do anything that I’m doing now if I was hiring full time US-space-people. Sorry.
Ryan: No. It wouldn’t be possible.
Anthony: I need freelancers for lifetime to do these stuff. I don’t, like I don’t need a full time content writer. I don’t need a full time graphic designer right now. So as you’re starting to build up companies, you probably will get that point but I’m so far away from that right now. Whereas, if I had to hire somebody full time or even part time in San Francisco. No way.
Ryan: You know, there’s… Yeah would be strategically… It wouldn’t make sense you know if depending what the going rate is. So what’s the, do you have any more to add to that or do you wanna talk about this weekly challenge?
Anthony: Yeah. I think the challenge, I think I know you can get to this to but I think it would be, obviously to get after it but… I would say go make an Upwork. So obviously, so if you have the Daily Domination Journal, you can go through the daily task awareness you can see what you need to delegate. Listen to the previous episodes if you haven’t about what you should be outsourcing.
Ryan: Yup. 24 and 25.
Anthony: Yes. Figure out just one or two things that you think should be outsourced then go make an Upwork profile and at least play around with it. Don’t have to hire somebody but just play around with it and try interviewing at least a couple of people just to see what’s out there and see what’s available. That’s my suggestion.
Ryan: I love it. Sounds great. I think that’s exactly right. So yeah, you just gotta get after it.
Anthony: Get after it.
Ryan: Thank you guys for tuning in to this episode of the Health Fit Business podcast. If you found it helpful, please share with someone that you think it would also help and leave us a five-star rating on iTunes. Make sure also to go to healthfit.biz and sign up for the email notifications to which you can find right on the homepage so that you get all the updated podcasts and blog posts sent directly to you. Until then, we will see you next time.
End.
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