Virtual Employees – Tips For Virtual Employers
The biggest thing when you are hiring staff and virtual employees is to remember that this is your business here. If you had a bricks and mortar store or a bricks and mortar business and you’re hiring someone locally, how much effort would you go to to hire that person? They’re going to be in your office, they’re going to be using your resources. You go through a serious induction process or job interview process to get the right people to help you complete assignments such as SEO services.
Rules change when we do business online, because of the fact that it is an internet business. An example here is when you hire someone from the Philippines as a lot of people thought of working online as a totally different business. But since it is a small business, then you should treat this as a serious business. You have to make an effort to do this work correctly, wherever your work location is, treat the hiring process as a serious procedure because these guys, when hired, are going to help you in your business. Simply because your enterprise is global, the principles shouldn’t change. That’s the biggest thing I do believe, individuals need to have that mind shift.
You can assess someone’s productivity levels through the task portion of the candidate selection process. Give them a trial task to do and observe how they go about completing the jobs as required. This will help you get an idea on how they do these tasks and how they manage their time as well. It can also offer you additional ideas of what this person is capable of doing. Along the way you will be able to refine what is the average task for the person, as you also refine the procedures within your SEO company and virtual assistant companies as he stays in the company.
Before I interview someone I send a pre-interview set of questions. This helps me select a few of the top people that will continue to the next hiring phase. Some people recommend that we use SurveyMonkey as well as other web-based survey sites for this task. We may move like that, but right now it’s just email that we are using to send these questions.
Something I do to prescreen is I say, ok, in order to apply for this job say on oDesk, you have to set up a WordPress blog. I had a meeting with someone last week and I want you to send a thank you email for them and they just do this WordPress blog because that is a good way to get them to prescreen themselves and jump through hoops. That’s a big hoop and something that really works.
Not long ago I hired someone to add to my team of virtual employees, they jumped through all the hoops, they worked very well, they worked for me personally during that duration, when things started to change. They have all the reasons not to be productive enough as the days went by. The thing is they’re really good worker, but the thing is straight after a couple of days, as these issues happen. I’ve hardly been thinking whether to continue working together with them or cut ties with them.
I have a mantra that says hire slow, fire quick. If they’re not right and I get the feeling straight up, I’m very lenient and I hope all my guys will say that. I’m very understanding and if someone says that some issues come up, I’m very understanding, but there is a point where you just have to say enough is enough. I will tell her, to be honest, I’m a bit worried about your productivity, I feel like you’re not delivering. What I need you to do is make sure over the next week that you show me you can do this job. Then if she doesn’t, then I’ll just say we did talk about this, I’m going to have to let you go.
This is one of the advantages of hiring the right virtual employees, the reason I’ve historically gone to an outsource company that has an office, Hubport Interactive, because they’re responsible for the resources that the person uses, the computer, their connection and that sort of thing. There is an advantage to that, so there is someone there, on the ground managing that person, being responsible to make sure they turn up to work and do what they need to do. Obviously you pay a slight premium for that, you’ve got to cover the costs of the project managers at the company but there are some definite advantages to that.
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