Hiring and Vetting E-commerce Freelancers to Scale Quicker

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:40

Hello, and welcome to episode number 34 marketing interruption. I'm your host Andrew Maff toe and today I'm going to talk about vetting and finding perfect e-commerce freelancers, which sounds like it could be an anomaly compared to the some of the things I've heard e-commerce sellers say in the past. It's not that difficult to find them. You just have to find a way to easily into the process. A lot of people are always really worried about outsourcing. Some people are really worried about hiring in house, maybe that's for another podcast. But for the ones that are really worried about hiring for outsourcing, a got an order to go. So Upwork is a great one fiber, it kind of depends what you want. If you want someone who's going to possibly be a part of your team, or be with you for more than a month or two, and isn't like project based, I would stick to Upwork or something like that. But I fiber to me is nice if you kind of just want something done quick. Free up is another great one. Nathaniel Hirsch. Boy HubStaff another one credo design pickle who's doing nuts right now. So they were I thought they were a joke when they came out. And now design pickle is huge. So that's another one where you just pay a monthly fee, and you get a designer that they work with. It's awesome look into them. So what we want to talk about is how do you vet them? How do you know if they're a good culture fit, which is definitely still a thing even though remote? And how do you manage them? And how do you help them scale. So obviously, with everything that's going on right now, even as cases start to come down, we're probably going to end up hiring remotely or temp or something like that a lot more often. And for a long time before everyone kind of gets more comfortable to bring people back in house if they ever do. So when you're posting your job description, my preference is to make it super long. Put as much detail as you possibly can in there. Shove as much as you can about the project, let them know a little bit about the company. Let them know about the opportunity for the role. Sometimes you'll get people who were like, okay, that's not usually what I would ask for and for on an hourly basis, but if you tell them in three weeks, this could be full time or something like that. They're more likely to imply and actually you may get better people by something by doing something like that. The other thing to do is to do something a little sneaky, and I learned this from Chad Rubin actually it's Skubana, where he actually taught me this years ago. So and it was great. And it works every time is you'll actually write out your long job description. And in one of those paragraphs, shove in a sentence that doesn't fit there, and take a word, a really random word. And basically, in that sentence, say, use this word in your proposal. So what I've done now is I'll actually go and open up all the proposals, and I'll just Ctrl F, and type in that word, and if you didn't use that word, I take you out. And the reason is that if you're not willing to follow the detail there, I can't trust you enough to follow the detail after and once I've hired you and brought you on. And then in Upwork, they allow you up to five qualification questions, I asked all five and I always ask for a cover letter I want them to put work into the job description. I know it's probably really annoying to do, especially if you're applying for the job, but I need to know that you're willing to put in the work and usually I find that Only a handful of people actually put in the work to actually answer the questions the way that I'd like to read them, and the way that I would like to see the proposal made. So I always suggest doing that password. I always asked for past work, I'll do my own research to see if I can find past work that they didn't give me because they're always going to put their best foot forward for that request, for example, that maybe they didn't put on their profile just to kind of use that process. Of course, I'll ask for a prior reference. I don't always reach out to them. A lot of times, I'll even just ask for a reference and see if that references, in fact, a real person, and in which case, I'll trust them. I just don't like calling up references is my own personal thing. But unless I'm hiring an executive or someone higher up, I don't need to follow up on a reference for a freelancer but if they're willing to go that extra mile, I always appreciate that.

04:48

And then to make sure that the work that they're showing you surpasses your expectations if you know that, okay, I'm hiring this Freelancer to help build our website and then continue to design on it. If they send you stuff you're like, oh, Hey, I think that I could get them to probably make what I want my website to look like. What you really need to do is have an idea of what you want your website to look like in the first place or your design or whatever it is you're doing. And then make sure that they actually can achieve this, make sure that you see something from them that you actually like even more than the website you had in mind, then scaling it. So this is my personal process for when I'm hiring a freelancer is I will map out the entire project of what I think I'm doing. And then I will basically break it down into small chunks, and I will have them to one once I've hired them, I will have them do one small aspect of that project. And then I will have them completely stop and send it to me and I will review it or send it to whoever's managing them and they review it. Then I have to do another one. completely stop reviewed, another one completely stopped reviewed, then about probably two or three times larger. sighs of those first three chunks, I'll have them do until I'm comfortable for them to just run and go, then what will happen is I will keep giving them more work until I get them to 40 hours or more, however, we end up doing that. And once I have them completely capped out, I will then look at either a bringing on another Freelancer to be underneath them, and then teach them how to bring on that new Freelancer at a lower cost. And I'll basically say SAP the easy stuff and give it to them. Because I want you to be more high level Well, I need to bring that into in house as well. So what will happen is once I have that full time Freelancer and maybe that second part time one, there's one I'll start looking for someone full time in house, because if I have that much work for that part time freelance or that full time freelancer, I know I can benefit from bringing someone in very at a higher rate or at a higher caliber in the in house, and then have them oversee that same Freelancer who's been doing it for a while, so it's kind of Like a funnel process of you start with a freelancer, you bring it in house. And then you just continue to grow that way so that you're not bringing in all these extra employee costs to your own in house business and all everything else is focused freelancer. I know it kind of ran about that. But that's my process. That is the way that we go. That was everything I wanted to touch on today. So rate review, subscribe, and I will see you all tomorrow.