SNM218: Are You Ready To Hire A-players For Your Remote Company with Noel Andrews

Noel Andrews: Know what it is that you want to do, have a list of what are the tasks? And, be sensible about how quick you can onboard some of these things, cuz some of it's gonna be your own capacity to take questions, to explain it, to do the loom videos like you talked about. So, anything that you can do in advance that when they start they've got stuff to be just digging into.

So, for instance, you record a bunch of loom videos on how to do something. They can be creating the SOPs. They can watch you do them. They can start doing them for the first times. Jonathan Green: Hello, everyone. Welcome to an amazing episode of the Serve No Master podcast. We have a very special guest today Noel Andrews.

And we're gonna talk about the process of hiring, especially hiring your very first employee, because I know I made a lot of mistakes and I'm sure we wanna help you to avoid those mistakes. And so, we're very special to have this amazing guest today. Noel, thank you so much for being here. Noel Andrews: Hey Jonathan. No worries. Really good to be here. Jonathan Green: So, I'd like to just get right into it. Cause I've been thinking about this a lot today.

As I've hired my entire staff, I've hired through your platform. And so, I'm very familiar with it and that's one of the ways we've become close over the years. And I've been through so much staff turnover and I'd love to talk about maybe the mindset that someone should have before they make their first hire. One thing I've seen at least is that people often go I want someone to do my social media, but they don't have more of a definition.

They don't really know what they want someone to do. Other, they want someone to do something good. Can you tell me a little bit about what someone you have in mind when they make their first hire and how they know it's time? When is the right moment? Noel Andrews: So, when is the right moment? It's normally a few months ago or a few years ago before you're hiring.

So, many of the people that we work with and then I spend my time hanging out with are just like, oh, I wish I'd done that sooner. And I had that moment myself quite recently. So, I finally hired my own executive assistant and to actually help me with things, I've done it loads for kind of other people. I've done it loads for the business. But finally got someone helping me with my staff, personal stuff, things like that. And again, I should have done a lot earlier.

In terms of the mindset I think there's a big thing around just thinking about what you want. And what's most important for you kind what's most gonna make the difference. And it's important to think about this from a life perspective, as well as a work perspective. So, we wanna kind of work to live, not the other way around. And so, definitely thinking what do you wanna actually enable? Is it all about the growth? Is it all about the hustle? Is it all about, freeing up time?

And then you can prioritize the things that are most important to get someone else to do, whether it's things that you don't know to do or aren't good at, or whether it's things that, you just wanna get off your own plate. Jonathan Green: Okay. That's really wonderful. So, someone makes that decision. They go, okay, you know what? I wanna get more of my time back. So, I want to give someone the task to take the most of my time. They make that decision.

How should they then approach the hiring process? What's the right way to start? Do they go right into posting it on social media? Do they go right to using a job platform? How do they write the job listing? Which can be very challenging in a way that gets the right applicants. What's the best way to approach that? Noel Andrews: Yeah.

So, first step is think about specifically what they want to do, because that's gonna inform where you go and look for the person it's gonna inform the platform that you use, how much you're gonna need to pay and things like that. So, I find, making a list of all the things that you are doing. That's taking your time right now and then prioritizing those ones that you wanna delegate or feel you can delegate.

Generally, you might often, or business owners often think, oh, that's gonna be too much work or it's gonna be too hard to delegate. Generally. That's not the case, but it just takes a bit of practice and being clear and building up to the harder thing. So, first of all, yeah, get clear on what you want.

Potentially get some advice, if you want to do things yourself, then you cancreate a great job post there's loads of, good examples, check out jobrack.eu for instance, and you can see some good examples. We've got some guides there as well, so that can help you craft the job post, which needs to be not just about what you want, but about what they want as well. That stage, what you want to do.

You've prepared a bit of a job post, then you've got to figure out where do you go and actually advertise? And how do you find the people? A lot of it's gonna be down to, do you have any particular time zone requirements?

Have you got any particular skills or language requirements or do you just want, the best possible people you can hire for, a sensible amount of money and obviously, you, and I know that, if that's the case, then it's Eastern Europe is the place they're head to? But yeah, I think you've got to just think about what you want, what restrictions are there that might mean that you need to go to a particular kind of place.

If you need a, native English copywriter or kind of content writer, then you know, that's gonna limit you a little bit more than if you need someone to be let's say you want a virtual assistant to help you negotiate with, Chinese manufacturers, then you know that person's probably gonna be in China. So, it's thinking through those kinds of things.

And then, there's a wealth of kind of resources and places that you can get help from in terms of actually posting an ad and then crucially, decide actually, do you want to do this yourself or do you actually want to get someone to do it for you and take all of the hard work of hiring off your plate? Jonathan Green: That's a really good point because I actually dread hiring.

For me the hiring process usually takes about six weeks to post the ad, give it enough time for people to respond. You think, oh, I'm gonna get all the responses in the first hour and you always fall in love with the first candidate, but you never hire the first candidate. And then there's this whole process.

And so, that's why I have just gotten burned out on doing is I'm like, oh, that's why sometimes when it's a rough employee, I'm like, I don't know if I wanna let this person go. Cause I don't wanna go through the hiring process again because getting that right person does take time. One other challenge that I face, as we've talked about this personally, is that every book I read about company management and leadership and I read 'em all. Acts like you get lifetime employees.

If I hire someone they're gonna be there for 30 years oh, the first three months, you're just training. The first six months you're just getting to know each other. That's not our generation. In my twenties, I went through five or six jobs and everyone I know now switches jobs every six months or a year. Often not because they hate their job just cause they wanna try something new, they're bored or they're just looking for that next adventure. It's not even always chasing a higher pay rate.

So, how long should someone expect their first employee to last and what are some things they can do to make the relationship last longer? Or should we just have the expectation of the shorter relationships these days? Noel Andrews: Yeah, so we definitely don't need to have the kind of expectation of a short relationship, but you do have to work at it to encourage them to stay and make sure that they're growing and give them more opportunity. Most people want that.

Like I said, most people don't wanna be doing the same thing day in, day out for forever more. So, in terms of how long should you expect? Let's say it's a virtual assistant, helping take things off your plate. If you hire and you focus on someone that wants to be an assistant, not someone that's just doing this because they see it as their route into like their first remote job for instance.

If you hire someone that wants to do it, then you know, a year, two years or more is very possible. And that's definitely what we focus on. And, but it's, the key is focusing and finding someone that actually wants to do the things that you want to do rather than someone that just sees it as a, an easy way to make some dollars working remotely and that's really key. I listened to a delegate and done workshop by Remit Seth recently.

And that was a big thing he made, he said, if you are looking for a high level virtual assistant focused on someone that wants to be a virtual assistant and we've got fantastic people that, are at the early stage of that kind of their career, we've got people that, want to do this for lifelong. Ultimately, it all comes down to you, giving them a bit of a variety of what things that they can get stuck into and slowly, give them more and more responsibility.

But the crucial thing is, onboard them fast, right? With any hire, the quicker you onboard them. The better job that they can do and the faster they can help you. And the key thing there is just about being organized, investing your time in them and, yeah, just really once you've hiring the hard bit, but it's just the first hard bit, cuz then you've actually gotta keep them and communicate with them and learn to delegate to them. And yeah, communication's definitely like probably the most important thing.

Jonathan Green: That's something really good. Cause it leads what I was talking at the beginning. When you give someone amorphous idea of what you want them to do, run my social media channel. If you aren't really specific. Like I had a meeting with my social media manager yesterday and I said, you're not hitting your metrics. And he goes how do I know? And I said we have the metrics software, which you have the log into, which you're supposed to track.

And I looked in our scheduling software and they're both empty. He's like, we didn't have any good content. I was like your entire job is a published content. So, if there's no content, then why do I have you and because I gave him very clear metrics. The first day I hired him. I said, the first thing I'm gonna look at is growth.

So, if we have a ton of new followers, we're getting a ton of engagement, a ton of clicks from Instagram, then I'm not gonna check your work. If I'm not seeing that I'm gonna go into all the schedulers and see if stuff is going on. If we're not putting out content on the schedule we established it's binary either you did it, or you didn't. I can very easily measure it. It's an easy way to assess cuz I can track it.

That's an important element is that when you hire your first person, sometimes you're so afraid of hurting their feelings. You either don't give them very clear goals or you're afraid to use any type of tracking metric. I use like many remote employees. I use a software called Time Doctor that remotes people, screens. And every time I hire someone and in the process, I put in my ads, you always say we use screen tracking. I want someone up front.

We have to do it because that's the same thing as having a manager walk around the floor of the office around the cubicles. And whenever someone says to me, oh, I wanna do it. But I only wanna manually put in my time or I don't wanna do screenshots. That to me, that's an instant we're not working together. That's someone just saying, oh, I'm gonna steal from you. That's what I hear. What do you think about that part of the process?

How can someone put their systems in place the right kind of tracking and have that right mindset of, it's not that I don't trust an employee. It's creating an environment for me where there's not the risk of miscommunication because I know if someone's tracking their own time and they work for 52 minutes, they're gonna round that up and they're gonna say it was an hour, or they're gonna round it up even by a minute. And that adds up.

And when I look at their work, if I can't see it in my time tracker, I could think that they're up to something. Whereas if I can see in the time tracker, they're really doing it took too long, then I know it's a different problem than I can actually correct it. Noel Andrews: Yeah. So, I think there's a few things here. So, one is, I am a big fan of time tracking software. Ironically, I don't use it to track time.

So, in the conventional way, cuz I'm generally, I want to trust, but validate in a sense it's similar to your approach, right? So, we have it because we wanna know what people are spending their time on, cuz that's how we can identify efficiencies. That's how we know whether we're profitable, things like that.

But the team do know that actually, if we ever have any calls to look at it and we look at it and it's not what we expect, then, we are gonna assume the worst because that's what you can do. We're doing a lot of work around KPIs and metrics at the moment. So, as we've grown, we've tripled our team in the last kind of eight months. And we are now putting in employee scorecards that we're using for monthly reviews.

People have got individual KPIs and they know that, these are the key numbers that they're responsible for, that they're gunning for. And that's very linked to like business metrics as well. And it's not the only thing we have, but it is something that we're being really clear with people because the danger when you have a small team is it's a lovely place to work. And you're very chill and you're very relaxed and you're all having fun. And it's yeah, but we're a business as well.

And actually, having a sense bit of hustle and a bit of pace within a business is really good. And so, actually just driving that little bit maturing that bit, I think is really key. And you can do that from the very start. So, knowing, like you said, with your social media manager, what the metrics are for that role? When it's someone to be your assistant and taking tasks off your plate, that can be a little bit harder, in terms of what should those metrics be?

So, one of mine is, around, there's a quality metric a little bit. So, I only want to explain things once or twice, once I've explained it, and it's an accepted thing it should be getting done right. Then every time, we have SOPs and guides in place for that. I think the vast majority of people are absolutely trustworthy. I'm for giving a bit of flexibility. I think time tracking can be useful cause it supports invoicing, things like that.

And just setting clear expectations about what it is you want when you're expecting to be online and available to you when you want them to check in saying hello at the start of the end of the day, things like that. Jonathan Green: You've had a couple of big terms that I wanna make sure our audience knows what they mean. A KPI is a key performance indicator. And what I like to do, what I've learned.

And this is over the last few years, I've gotten better and better hiring is that you, if you can tell someone, oh, at the end of the week, this is the number I look at to see if you did your job. For example, one of the big events we do is we run promotions to other authors and I measure how many people participate in one of those events. So, I'll look at the end, run the numbers and say how many people encounter this event?

How many new visitors, how many attendees. And if that number's really low then I look at how many authors should we get? Then I look at how many do we outreach to? And I start going deeper and deeper, but that first metric, if the first metric is good. If your result is good, then nothing else matters. Cuz you've hit that main metric. And so, that's the first thing, right? Having one thing that each person knows, oh, this is what I'm gonna get measured for.

Whether it's the number of posts they put out per week or the number of engagements they get or the number of new followers, that's one thing. And then the other thing you mentioned, SOP very important is the stand operating procedure. Which the best way to do this, that I learned is that everything I do, I record it in a loom video.

And then I, or I have someone on my team turn that into a PDF with screenshots of each step so that someone has an instruction manual. And the really great thing is when you can get your employees to make their own SOPs so that when they leave or they get promoted, which happens in my team, then the next person has that instruction manual. Those are really great things you brought up. I just wanna make sure some of our audiences that are hiring the first person.

They're very new and they go, I know the first time I saw that I've heard it called KPIs. I've also heard it called rocks where it's everyone's in charge of one metric, they track. So, you're hiring your first new person and you talked about how it's a really chill place. And that's a really good thing to bring up. My first team that I built around eight years ago, I told everyone we're family we're all in it together.

And one of my employees was working 30 minutes a week in billing me for 40. And he was like, how can you fire me? When I caught him. I was like you're straight up stealing from me. It's guess what? If my sister did that to me, she'd be fired too. And I had this idea cuz we create what we think is the perfect workplace. And I do think that there's a lot of really bad literature out there.

A lot of the books there about leading companies and leading teams are very misleading, cuz they're built on the employee mindset of the 1960s where, when someone got their job, they worked at that company for 40 years. We don't see that. Now we don't even see CEOs who stay with the same company for 40 years, everyone job hobbs. And so, that's sometimes I read those books and I feel really bad. Like when you said, oh, a virtual assistant can stay.

I was like, please don't say 10 years, please. Don't say 10 years. Cause I was like, oh my gosh, no one stays with me for 10 years. But yeah, that's what I found two years. This kind of my sweet spot. I originally was at six months. I had a lot of six-month turnover, but now almost all my employees have been with me for two years. In fact, I got a message from another employee a couple days ago. He's like it's time for my two-year raise.

And I was like, oh, I guess it's been two years. Which is good. I was like, wow, it's been two years. That's amazing. So, it is being aware of that. So, how can people prepare themselves for the onboarding process? What's that like, how long should it take? What should they have ready in advance and how can they tell if the person is living up to expectation.

If I hire someone, should they be a hundred percent as good as me, 80% as good as me, 120% as good as me. What's the number to look for? What's the dream? Noel Andrews: Yeah. So, some of that depends on the tasks you are gonna get to do, but in general, so in terms of preparing for the onboarding, know what it is that you want to do, have a list of what are the tasks?

And, be sensible about how quick you can onboard some of these things. Cause some of it's gonna be your own capacity to take questions, to explain it. To do the loom videos, like you talked about. So, anything that you can do in advance, that when they start, they've got stuff to be just digging into. So, for instance, you record a bunch of loom videos on how to do something. They can be creating the SOPs. They can watch you do them.

They can start doing them for the first times. You wanna make sure that any systems access they need. So, let's say you using a password manager, like Last Pass or One Password. That they've got access to the passwords they need that you've created them an email account so that they can create documents, share documents. This isn't the time to go cheap on it.

So, this is definitely the time to give them a proper, at your company email address, not let 'em use their own email account because then, if they do move on at some stage, then you've got their emails, you've got their access to their files, things like that. So, that's super simple things to do, to get started. Plan your time, right? Have time in your diary for, let's say it's an hour or a couple of hours on the first day and then gradually reducing down.

But a little bit of time, every day goes a long way to just being able to say, Hey, have they got any questions? What's the next things they're gonna work on and build out from there. In terms of how long it should take. Depends on the complexity. If they're just coming in to do a couple of things, let's say social media post, it could be really quick, just like a day or so.

If you've got a list, I was chatting to someone yesterday, he's got 85 tasks. He wants to delegate. That's probably gonna take a few weeks and to build up and like delegate all those down. You might start doing, a fewer day and some of that's gonna be your capacity to, onboard explain things like that, but you want it done right.

And then in terms of efficiency, my aim is that the tasks that I'm delegating down, I want them to be done as well as I can do them, near enough from the second or third time they're being done. I almost say pass or failed, it's not about have they done it gold standard? No, cuz I don't do stuff to a gold standard.

If I need a laundry collection arranging, or if I need a, an office booking or I need some travel plans doing, they've either done it. Or they haven't done it. And so, I see it very much almost a lot more binary of just saying, Hey, I'm expecting them. We've agreed to process that we've trained. They've said yes, they understand it. And they're happy once they've said yes, they're happy then I'm expecting it to just be done correctly.

Jonathan Green: I think that's one of the things that we forget to check for when we're hiring is there's three levels. There's someone who can do a task with very clear instructions. There's someone who can be a little bit of a free thinker, and they can a little bit think outside the box. They have a little bit of activity, and then there's the person who could actually write SOPs and come up with new ideas and implement.

And I think sometimes we try to hire the third category all the time. And I can tell you one of the things I used to do is always try to hire for intelligence. I have some employees who are not high in that metric, but they're also so good at the specific tasks I gave them. I had someone working on a task last week that I couldn't do. I failed that I tried to do it. It's a repetitive task or research task.

I couldn't find a good result. And he sent me 25, really good results in a couple of hours. And I was like, man, you are so good at this one thing. And I think that's the thing, to put people in the right role. I had him doing the wrong tasks for a while, but now anytime client comes and he goes, Hey, I wanna find a hundred people that fit this category. I can put him on. And he comes up with that spreadsheet every time.

Sometimes I have to tell him where to look, I'll say, oh, try this website or that website there. And he goes to the races. But he could never do that high level creative thinking, but he's so good at his task. And it's like a train. You put a train in the right direction. It always gets to the station. And I think that's an important lesson is that we're not looking for a me, cuz I would never work for me.

I would never wanna be an employee role. What we're looking for is someone who, whatever, once you know what the task is, you find someone what's the right skillset for that task. Now. I wanna jump back one step. I realized we got into the onboarding process, but when someone's in the hiring process and through the onboarding process, what are red flags that when they see them, they should immediately pull out.

Like I had an employee, someone I hired might have even told you a story, but I hired him in the very first day. He started sending me all these really aggressive emails being like where's my contract. Where are these other things? He's I expect a written contract. Sent to my country from your lawyer. I'm like we don't have a lawyer. I don't have that many employees. I have sub 20 employees. We don't have a legal team. We don't have an HR team.

We have a small team and that immediately, or there's the person who doesn't show up on the first day and then shows up on the second day. So, those are obvious ones, but what are some other signs either in the early hiring process all the way through the onboarding period where you should eject immediately? Noel Andrews: So, if, when you schedule an interview with them, if their camera doesn't work right, or they don't come on camera, stop straight away, reschedule the interview.

If they do it second time, ditch them. There is zero reason these days for why someone can't come on video, literally zero, right? If their laptop camera's not working, they can use their phone. So, video is the number one, right? You gotta see the person because from time to time, it does happen that people will, impersonate and say that they're from a particular place when they're not. So, video is number one. When they come into the onboarding side of things.

I'm a big fan of set them, give them some videos to watch and then ask them some questions. If they're asking you questions that have been covered in the video, a few questions might be fine, but actually if they've repeatedly doing it, it's like, are they actually paying attention?

If they got the attention to detail that you need, I'm a big fan of hiring, the kind of people that I tend to hire I want 'em to be able to pick up projects and kind of bigger tasks for me. So, I'm hiring for what a friend of mine calls the 82 FSOs, the ability to figure stuff. And, like I said, sometimes with your spreadsheet guys, sometimes you don't need that.

But a lot of the time, if you don't have a significant team, then that's the kind of thing you want. You don't want to have to think. I need to prescriptively document everything. So, yeah. If they don't come on video red flag, you know move away. If they're not paying attention to things, if they're not having that attention to detail.

One of my pet hates is when I ask someone to create a document and share a link with me, if they don't either set it as an open access link, if it's nonsense, which is what I tell 'em to do, or they haven't shared with me and they send me the link and I can't access it, it's almost immediate termination, right? Because it's the most annoying thing on the planet. So, come on. I have no time for it.

And the other one for me is I go to some degree to train people how to work with me. I'm a bit eccentric. So, for instance, if you wanna ask me a question, ask me a question. That's cool, but do it in a single slack message, right? Don't say, Hey Noel, can I ask you a question and then in individual messages, because I've been disturbed by the, Hey Noel. Then I'm watching the, X, Y Z's typing, prompt, waiting for the next thing.

And it's can I ask you a question? So, I'm like, no, just give it to me in one message. Nice and clearly. So, be clear about what you want and then if they don't follow those things, they're the kind of red flag. Jonathan Green: I think that's really good, cuz that points out you have a different communication style to me like that wouldn't bother me. I have it set up, but I also, if they send a message, they shouldn't expect an immediate response.

For example, I'm on this call with you right now. I'm not checking my team messages. And I have that expectation, but I do expect them always responded within 24 hours. That's what I've set up. So, if they've written that longer message, it I'll see it all at once, but that's really good.

It's interesting that you mentioned, I can't tell you how many people, this is why I don't think anyone should use Google Drive, cuz they send me that link and it's always, it's almost always 90% time it's locked or especially I've never had a web developer send me a link to the websites they've worked on and at least one wasn't dead. I've never seen that. I've never seen it where they're all active links. And I think that's to me again, it's the same thing.

It's a massive red flag when there's parts of your resume that are broken. And I've seen this on Upwork profiles and I've seen this everywhere I've ever worked with web design. There are always links to dead websites. That's easy to check. Cuz you just click each click again. If it says 4 0 4, take that off your resume. So, I think that's a really good point.

One of the things that I do and I'd love to get your thoughts on this is I'll ask someone, like a series of three questions in the early part of the interview process and the email part before the interview. And then I'll say, do you have any questions for me or I'll say, can you ask three questions for me? And what I look for are questions that are like. How much money will I make? When is my first vacation?

Or how do you deal with a problem employee? If they say things like that or how do you do with an employee who pushes back and I'm like, it's little early in the game to do push back to me, those are big red flags. I'm looking for someone who actually visited my website or asks specific questions about, oh, what are the other people I'm gonna work with be like, what's the company culture? What kind of projects will I be working on? Those questions.

I like, but when I hear questions like do I ha have to work in a specific time zone? That's answered first of all, my job posting. Cause you even know that because I post like 50 jobs in your platform. So, you've seen that that's always in my posting. All those, anything that's in the posting that they don't notice? I don't like, or if they're asking questions that tell me that they're really not caring about the company, they just want any job, not this job.

That's what I'm looking for in that screening process. What do you think about that part of it? Noel Andrews: Yeah, so I definitely agree. I always like to see good questions from them without a doubt, do they really care? Are they really interested? And I think the one danger though, from employers a lot of the time is that they can expect too much too early.

So, when you're in the interview, it's perfect reason to expect that they've had a little bit of look at your site and they've got some good questions for you. A lot of, I see employers that, in the application form, they want tons and tons of detail, and they, tell me why you are really excited to work for my company. And at that point, you are probably one of 10 people that they've applied to because lots of employers don't even respond to candidates, which is really poor.

And so, it's about managing your expectations that each stage of the process. But yeah, when you're at interviews, you want someone that's interested, that's awake, that's excited to be joining in with you. And that it is an exciting opportunity to join them. Even if you are not excited by the particular things that you are delegating down, you want someone that is, that really gets into research or spreadsheets or, organizing and like organizing the CEO's life, things like that.

Jonathan Green: And I think as well, is that as you hire more employees, you realize that different personalities fit different types of jobs. My experience has been people who are good at SEO are very standoffish. There's a reason SEO people are like kept in the basement like IT. I hired an amazing SEO through your platform who got poached by a massive company. Who offered her a huge amount of money, cuz she was way too good for my team. She was so standoffish. Everyone's she's so rude.

And I was like, that's basically what you get with SEO people. Like I expect that just like I expect copywriters to always be weird when you talk, but really good in writing. What kind of expectations? How can you figure out if someone has the right personality for a job? Like they say, oh, when you hire a salesperson, you want a salesperson. You find a little bit annoying cuz they'll push harder in sales. I don't know if I like that.

Do I wanna hire someone who's annoying, but I've seen that. What do you think about the personality stuff? Cause I've seen people they're really obsessed with a disc score or the Myers Brigg test or the colors one. Now there's a new one called colors. Noel Andrews: Yeah. Jonathan Green: How much does that personality stuff matter? Noel Andrews: So, I use the personality stuff to provoke good conversation and interview.

So, as whenever we always test our candidates, when they're applying for roles with us, and one of the things it'll be, Hey, head to 16 personalities.com and just do the quick personality test. And I'm not, I don't really care what it says. What I wanna do is then discuss it with them and say, Hey, what did you think about it? Do you agree with it? Do you not agree with, what do you agree? What do you disagree with of the profile?

And it's just about self-awareness and that's generally what I'm looking for. I am less worried about specific personality types for specific roles, but I've gotta be able to get on with them. And by that is communicate effectively. I need to be able to feel that they can, give me some pushback and kind of challenge me, but also that I can challenge them where we can have a good, constructive debate and discussion on something.

Not that, they're gonna be too fragile or, they're gonna be too like opinionated to even listen and actually hear feedback. So, they're the kind of things I'm looking for. I'm really looking for what are the kind of people that fit in. I'm doing some work at the moment around values. What's important to us, a job rack and what the most important things. And for me is like energy is like number one.

So, when I do a quick, I either see a video or I jump on a quick screening call, I'm looking to say, are they awake? Do they feel alive? And that's what I'm looking for. I'm a very energetic person. I always want that in every kind of person. Some will have it, less than others, right? So, your average developer is headphones on cranking away, cranking out code, right? Your average kind of, virtual assistant or kind of customer support.

Person's gonna be a bit bouncier and livelier, but there's a kind of a non-negotiable minimum for me that I'm always looking for. Jonathan Green: There's another test that I've done recently again and got this from a friend of mine who's really good hiring is that there's a 12 minute IQ test. You can take online for free. I forget the name. I have it written down. And what I say to was like, Hey, I need you to shoot a video of you taking the test.

And this is because if you haven't take a screenshot, people will mess with a screenshot. And so, you have them do the video and I don't actually even care about the score of the test so much as if they can find it, which you can, if you just copy and paste. But I wrote into Google, you'll find the test. It's free, takes 12 minutes.

And then if they can successfully record it like a screen capture of 12 minutes and send it to me, like I'm testing these other things. And of course, I look at the score as well, a little bit, and I took it myself. It is nerve-wracking to try and do a 12-minute test. You see the clock going? I get it. I did it myself if it recorded myself so I could see what it felt like. So, I'm asking people to do it.

And it's amazing to me, the number of people that can successfully do that. So, I can then just look at the people who are able to do this task, which is important because I send a huge amount of video communication to my team. I probably record 20 loom videos a week. Cuz when someone asks a question, I can shoot a loom video and this is a very good practice for SOPs. And then I can reuse it on the next time someone asks that question.

So, now I have this massive list of answers to questions. And then we put in a project management software. So, what other types of tests or questions do you think someone should ask as part of their process? Noel Andrews: So, when we are doing a test like that, we do the same as you. So, we will ask things like, so here's the five test tasks that we'd like to think about.

We'd like you to respond with a Google doc and put all of your answers and all of your work into the Google doc. Please ensure you share it with an open link and reply it with an email with this subject to us. So, again, we are looking, can they ship, can they create a Google doc? Can they share a link with it? That's open access. Can they put the subject line in the email? Okay. How do they communicate in the email?

Do they actually format it nicely and, address it, semiprofessionally? So, there's all things like that. We're just looking to see how easy is it to communicate with them. Because any team member, you want it to be easy, right? If it feels a bit painful and you're in the hiring process, it's not gonna get any easier once you've hired them. So, you want to basically, just to feel like it's enjoyable communicating with them. Jonathan Green: There's this challenge.

When someone seems really good at the core task, where they seem like great on paper, but then all these other little things happen and you get into what I call the negotiation faze. We go, yeah, it's really annoying, but maybe this was a one-time thing. Like you start doing that kind of like when you're in a bad relationship where you go, maybe just she's bad at first dates. Maybe the second date will be really good.

Oh, she's mean on second dates too, but she's gonna get nicer. Can't get meaner, and you start to get emotionally invested. One of the things that I started to do was have someone else on my team do the first interview because if I like someone that will affect hiring them, even though it doesn't really matter because I'm not friends with my employees, we're not doing video calls all the time like besties, right?

The longest caucus is usually that the longest video call I do is usually when I interview someone. So, I sometimes get, I know that about myself is that if I like someone I'll wanna hire them, even if someone's better. And then also we do that thing. We're like, they're not. So, that way I'll hire, someone's not as good, but I like them, or we can have someone who's, they're probably good at the job, there'll be friction.

Now for me, the most important thing to me is I don't wanna work with people I don't like. Like everyone on my team right now I like, I don't have anyone on the team I dislike. I actually lost a few people before the new year. And that was good because they were causing the main friction. And when they were gone, yeah. Less work was getting done, but my stress level went down.

So, the way I assess my team is how annoyed I am when I'm doing payroll. And if paying someone like annoys me, I go, then I shouldn't have them here. So, right now when I process payroll, I don't feel bad about I'm not annoyed by anyone. So, that's one of the ways I measure. I dunno if everyone else does that's a personal thing for me. Noel Andrews: Yeah. That's an unusual one. I'm not heard of that before. Generally.

I wanna feel good when we are on our team meeting. We're on calls, things like that. I wanna feel good. Then it's enjoyable. I wanna feel pleased when I'm looking at the work they're doing and just to feel good. And then, so during the hiring process if you are someone like you, that kind of almost like love at first sight, right? And then you wanna jump into the first one, then get someone else to do it for you.

Or, we have a service where we do exactly that for you. We handle a hiring processs and it helps us stop you either getting weary of, oh God, I've got so many people candidates to review or getting kind sucked in, cuz there's some really good people out there that are great at interviews, but that just aren't actually good at the job. And it's just getting down into that.

And some of that is, I've got one friend that does really long interviews because people can only keep up a pretense for so long. I'm not a fan of that approach. I just I like to go quite hard on the interview, really dig in what happened. Tell me about that. Tell me, how did you deal with that? How did you feel really digging in, generally, like I said, like vast majority of people are trustworthy and can do what they say they can do?

And you can identify it very quickly in that test task. If the test task that they do for you, doesn't make you feel good. Then just trust that. Trust your instinct. Jonathan Green: I love that topic there of the test task. This is something that most new hires don't know about or don't think of. So, I'll tell you about a couple of mine. I have a video editor on my team. If you read his profile, nothing about video, his entire profile was a general virtual assistant.

And basically, to every single person who applied, I sent them the same. I think it's a 30 to 42nd video clip from a video that I posted years ago. And I say, this is a video I've already posted your work. We're not gonna reuse the work. This is a test. This should take you less than an hour, edit it and make it look. And here's a bunch of my other videos.

And in the link, actually, they could actually see the other version we published of it a long time ago to see what we did with the previous data editor and I believe that the task should be one hour or less. I don't ask people for a task longer than that. And I will ask and I'll look to see whose video looks the best. And I never read actually until after I'd hired him.

I didn't read what his profile said because I just looked, he applied for a video job and he did the best video by country mile. He is oh, I'm not even a video guy. I'm like, no, you are now because your test was the best one. So, I put a lot of weight into the test and the same thing. When I'm doing hiring a researcher, we do a lot of cold outreach, I own particular process, it's different than everyone else's. I say, here's the process.

Here's a training video. It's about five-minute video make a spreadsheet of how many contact emails you could find using this process in an hour. And I say, tell me how long it took you. And so, most people take 20 minutes to learn the process, 40 minutes to do it. And the average person turns in 20 contacts. I've had people turning eight or four and I'm like, what happened here? And then one of the people on my team, she turned in 40.

I was like, okay, and now she's a leader of her team. So, I think the tests are so important. How can someone develop a test and how hard should it be? I know there are certain people who think, and I understand this when they're being hired, they think, oh, you're trying to get free work outta them. Like I know I've known authors who send 12 different chapters to 12 editors for a test, which is unethical of course.

How can you get more people to do the test and realize you're not trying to get free work outta them? And at the same time, then you can really get that sense of what to measures. How can someone develop those tests? Noel Andrews: Yeah, the simplest way is to offer to on the Goodwill site is just offer to pay, right? Especially if you're hiring a virtual assistant, that's not gonna be on a huge hour rate.

It's not very expensive to offer, to pay in the first place. So, that can help one way. And we often say, Hey, if you'd like to be paid for your time, we're happy to offer a gesture. And it doesn't need to even be the hourly rate, just a gesture. Just show that, you are taking it. In terms of how to develop the test, use the tasks that you want 'em to do.

So, for me, if they're gonna be doing travel arrangements and it's great with the kind of the COVID side of things, cuz it's complicated. So, you can say, Hey, I'm gonna be traveling to Bulgaria. Then I'm gonna come back to London for one night, then I'm gonna fly out to Mexico and then I'm gonna fly back to London after two weeks, tell me what I need to do to comply with the COVID testing and regulations, et cetera. If they're gonna be doing social media post.

Say, Hey, give me, five examples of a post that you might put on our Facebook page to our Facebook group on a Monday morning, for instance. So, that means they've gotta go on research and you start to get feel from that. But the main thing is, yeah. Use the kind of things that you want them to do. If it's a project manager, you might say things like, tell me how you would be coming in, you're gonna take over some existing projects.

Tell me how you would audit the project and you know, know what state it's in at the point, you're handing it over. So, whatever, just think about the task you want 'em to do, and then give them a scenario of that. Let's say travel arrangements, right? You want to get a train somewhere, you wanna get a flight somewhere, get them to look it up and give you some options and just see how they do it.

What questions they ask you, things like that, and just keep it nice and simple. Like you said, up to an hour or so of work, maybe three or fourth, other things they could be quite small and really, it's looking around the edges. How do they communicate? How do they ask you any questions? So, for instance, if you set them the COVID travel arrangements, one, do they come back to you and say, are you vaccinated?

You had two jobs or have you had three, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, just keep it pretty simple, but use real work. I'm not a big fan of these like generic test platforms that do, typing tests or English tests. It's much more about how do they actually do the things you want them to do. Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think that's a really great piece of advice because I've had people who are great at other companies.

But what I do is very unique and somebody who works for me might not be good at working because your business is very different to mine. And so, that's important to understand. We all have a different company culture. We all have a different communication style. We all have a different way that we want them to ask questions. So, it's definitely, that's a really great. Give them a test that's a real task. You would assign them. And that's exactly why I've given the same video task.

We hired a second video person given him the same test as they gave the first guy. And I had him judge all the applicants. I said, here's yours from five years ago. I kept it. Judge everyone else says who's as closest to yours or who do you think you can turn, train to be, do our style. I think that's really wonderful. And it's been amazing. Thank you so much for giving your time, I know it's really valuable.

I'd like to ask you one final question as we wind down. If you could go back in time to, before you hired your very first person, what advice would you give that younger version of yourself? Noel Andrews: Hire more people faster. I think that'll be the kind the main thing is cuz that's what's driven growth. With the first person, I think trust your instincts right.

The very first person I hired for Job Rack, I needed someone that could do and be like a Jack of all trades. Do all kinds of different stuff. And so, energy and passion were more important than deep skills. So, just recognizing what it is you need and what's important to you and you, don't just keep communicating. Jonathan Green: That's wonderful. Thank you so much for giving your time. I know your time is very precious. Noel, your website is jobrack.eu. It's an amazing platform.

Can you tell someone, I use it a lot of course? But how is your platform different? Cuz there's so many hirings. What's the USP or what's unique about Job Rack and why is that such a wonderful platform? Noel Andrews: Yeah. So, the number one thing is that, we are helpful and friendly. There's like I said, there's tons of hiring platforms out there. There's tons of faceless hiring platforms out there. We pride ourselves in being helpful and friendly.

So, we will help you, whether it's giving you some guidance about salary, giving you some guidance about how to write a job post, jumping on a call with you to chat about the kind of tasks you wanna kind of delegate and outsource. We are there and I've got a whole team and myself, we are there to help you, whether that's just giving you some free advice or whether that's actually, taking over the hiring process for you and saving you time, effort and energy.

We're helpful and friendly. Jonathan Green: That's definitely, absolutely true. I know that because when I first started posting jobs, I had some trouble getting applicants and you guys got me a whole bunch and you showed me how to do that. So, now when I post, I get almost too many applicants, so that's absolutely true. Thank you so much for spending your time, it's been amazing having you here. Thank you so much Noel. Noel Andrews: No worries, Jonathan. Great chat.