A.J. Lawrence:
There’s been a big burst with different companies offering outsourcing, global talent, virtual assistants, blah blah, blah, blah, somewhere being bought for or I guess it was Sherpa. Now it’s somewhere for 50 million plus. And just the frustration I see when you kind of understand the impact in global talent, the processes to go through hiring. As you kind of write in your bestselling book, it’s not that hard and yet it’s treated as this amazing magic trick. With my Insight labs, we’ve been really finding the value of embedding marketing talent early into a company’s growth phase to help facilitate their ability just to do basic stuff has let them grow so much further along. So I kind of reached out to you because I wanted to one, let’s make fun of some of these people who are overcharging entrepreneurs for their service. But then two, let’s talk about what are some of the models out there, how is this evolving what entrepreneur do and what’s the things that maybe an entrepreneur can take advantage of from looking at global talent?

Kevin Ashcroft:
I think maybe, maybe initially touching on outsourcing and what it is because a lot of people still think about outsourcing as something that’s for large corporations or banks and those types of organizations. And they think about it as shipping thousands of jobs away from the USA or the UK. Particularly and predominantly back in the day, it was more around customer service and call centers and those types of things. So often they still think of it that way, that it’s this huge beast and it’s for huge organizations and it’s for hundreds and thousands of people. And really that may have been the case 15, 20, 30 years ago when that was beginning to take hold and these organizations were outsourcing to the likes of India and the Philippines. But it’s very different now. It’s available to someone that may only need a single task. That may be a logo, it may be some copywriting, maybe some financial work. It may be they need someone regularly for a couple hours a week. But it also goes all the way up to being able to build a team and scale a team and have that flexibility in a team where you can scale up and scale down depending on your business demands. So really, it’s a thing that anyone can use now as a service that anyone can tap into, not even businesses, but in your normal personal life. Whether that be getting a CV written, whether it be taking an idea for a book that you may have. There’s literally almost anything that you can dream of and think of that can be done remotely. Then it can be outsourced and you can be looking at anything from a few dollars an hour to hundreds and actually thousands of dollars an hour, depending on the specialism that you’re looking for. So there’s a real kind of wide range in outsourcing now that anyone can tap into, which makes it certainly for businesses, it makes it a necessity to look at.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think a big frustration, though, I hear is the process of doing so. Because from a task base, you can look at Fiverr, you can look at other job sources, Upwork, etc. Especially Upwork, they’re trying to monetize themselves left, right and center. So the experience of using Upwork, you can get great talent but you get flooded with crap responses. I mean, that’s a technical term, crap responses. I like Fiverr much better for specific tasks but it still also gets very crowded when you’re trying to get things or differentiate the value of one response from the other. And then, as you say, building your team and having someone join the team versus doing a task for you. Let’s talk about how some of the people are presenting services for doing this, like helping people find talent they need. Because yes, before we get too much into the Upworks and the online philippines.com or whatever that is, there’s a bunch of people who are saying, we’ll cut out this difficulty, we’ll find you the perfect person, we’ll train them, we’ll do all this stuff. But what a lot of times they don’t mention is they’re keeping two thirds of the price while paying a good local salary. A lot of times to the people they’re hiring for you, they’re capturing most of the margin for little extra added value other than that initial process. But what they make very, very hard is their pricing fees. If you look around, remember you and I had to like search around to find it, they really don’t walk you through their hiring costs. Now what they do, they’re basically marking up what was it, 35%, 40%?

Kevin Ashcroft:
Yeah. I mean it’s basically a traditional recruitment model that they have but it’s all done online. And the pricing we found it was something along the lines of if you take on a new member of the team at $1200 or $1500 a month, then their fee was about four and a half grand. If you take on someone around two and a half thousand dollars a month, their fee was around about eight and a half thousand. It seems to be a very traditional model just delivered digitally.

A.J. Lawrence:
Digitally and with a little more. Because even recruiters don’t charge 30 plus percent. I guess maybe if you’re hiring for AI talent. We were looking at that. Then there’s stuff like magic, I think is called Magic Assistant where they are charging you 3,000 a month for someone who is about a thousand bucks in cost. What was the one we were looking at then? Oh, Zirtual.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Zirtual, yeah. So they’re fairly straightforward. It’s effectively a bank of hours that they are selling. So for just over 500 bucks you’ll get 12 hours a month. For 24 hours a month, it’s almost $900. 36 hours a month you’re almost $1300. And 50 hours a month you’re 1700 bucks. So about 12 hours a week of time. Then you’re paying almost $1700 a month, which is about 50 hours a week depending on how people work. It’s a normal working week for some or maybe an extra 10 or 12 hours than someone does.

A.J. Lawrence:
So actually if you look at the team play, that 17 is only the equivalent of just over one week a month. So that talent is four times.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Yep, exactly. So you’re 1700 bucks for slightly over a week of work. A normal kind of hourly week, generally 38 to 40, 42, so it ends up a fairly chunky number. You’re ending up probably about five and a half grand a month if you took that on as a person. But I guess their model is slightly different. Their target market is not so much someone who needs a full time member of a team. They need someone that they can kind of dip into and get the odd tasks done, get maybe some regular things done that they maybe don’t even need a part time person for. And that’s where you’ve got these 12 and 24 hour a month plans benefits in there. Is that trained or should be trained? They should be at a much higher level and you should be able to hit the ground running within the first few hours. I’m sure there’ll be some caveats on the site that may take 10 or 20 or 30 hours before you are virtual assistant is really ready to help you and understand what you need fully. You’re looking at, I think, when you look at the 12 hours, you’re looking at $45 to $50 an hour, which is a big number for a virtual assistant. But again, it comes back to how much time do you have to go and source one yourself to do all the interviews to run through that process? Will you get someone that will commit to 12 or 20 hours a month for you? Or if they get a chance at a full time job would they go away and leave you having to start the process again? So there are pros and cons to these type of sites. The con being the price, the premium price. I guess the pro is in a box service that should just work for you.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. And I think as you said, looking at where you are as an entrepreneur and what you’re trying is a straight up virtual assistant who’s just handling some basic structure for you that’s probably very useful because you don’t have to put the time and structure into doing something more. But as they position themselves a lot of these companies, you probably want to be a little more considerate as you’re building out your team or your capabilities or you’re sort of moving. Because I know like a big thing here in the us big conversation. And I do want to kind of like get to someone who I think is hitting this a lot of the talk sort of in acquisition entrepreneurship. Since I spend so much time trying to find a company to buy. The joke used to be, oh, you go find a company that’s still using a fax machine to send their invoices out. Now it’s like, oh, find a company that still has a bookkeeper or an accountant on staff because you can outsource it for a fifth of the price. And that’s where I think great, an assistant is good. That’s the beginning point. We’re having someone just to make you as entrepreneur, slightly more effective. That’s that first step. Where would you say the next step from an assistant? What’s kind of the next step?

Kevin Ashcroft:
Yeah, so it really depends on your business. Maybe if I use one of my businesses as an example, WP Support specialists, that business is built on global talent. When I sold my IT company in 2011, I decided from that point, any business that I built would be location independent. It wouldn’t have traditional office space. We would use and benefit from global talent and we would bring benefits to global talent as well. And that’s the way that business is run. So if I look at maybe where I started global talent in that business, that probably started with an assistant, a general assistant, just to help me with some of the tasks that were taking my focus away from what I needed to do or that maybe were taking me too long and that someone who was better at some admin type tasks and other organizational tasks. They would do better, faster, so it was all upside. I probably started with an assistant and then from that tasks and we’ve built a team who specialize in all things WordPress. So we have designers, we have developers, we have writers, we have copywriters. Even touching on one of your examples, bookkeeping and accounts, that’s outsourced. Legal tasks, we’ve outsourced almost anything you can think of that’s going to help you run your business. That’s all been outsourced for us. So we’ve been able to tap into hundreds of different types of professionals, specialists. And again, for me, that’s one of the benefits that I think people miss, or some of the benefits people miss. They’re quite blinkered in thinking that it’s all about cost, it’s all about saving money. That’s true in some instances but it’s not always the case. So sometimes it’s going to cost you more money but you’re going to get a specialist who knows their service inside out. You’re going to get someone who’s going to fix a thing in an hour instead of maybe a generalist who may fix it in 5 hours or who may actually break it halfway through. And then you need to go and employ someone. So you’ve got cost saving money, not always in an hourly rate or a fixed rate, but maybe you save money over time. You get a better service. You get a service at a time that suits you. Maybe in your time zone you need something fixed in the evening or during the night, and then you can always find someone across the globe in a different time zone to help do that.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s interesting in kind of like looking at that and what I’ve seen also in sort of that expansion of capability is sort of the ability to take on tasks that previously were just too expensive or were relatively cost ineffective in a local talent pool. Looking at utilizing global talent plus some other tech to facilitate that, like one of the landscaping companies we have in Insight Labs was just the ability to bring on both a Central American and a Philippine based support person. So basically the ability to kind of 24/7 have someone around. Now they’re not just there to answer the phone or answer leads, but they’re doing other things, other tasks, you know, generating content, following up with past ones, double checking, billing, scheduling and all that. By having these people, they went from a 24-hour response time for any inbound to within 20 minutes is being their target. And they went up by about 40% their success ratio or their success on inbound just by being able to respond quickly. And it was funny because I was talking to him when we first started and it was like before I even knew you guys existed, I just moved into a new house. I was looking and half the people I responded to didn’t get back to me within a week. I had someone come back two and a half weeks after I had filled out a form asking hey, I want to get a quote for landscaping my backyard. And it was like two and a half weeks later I was like, what?

Kevin Ashcroft:
Yeah, it’s amazing how often that’s just a general service that you get from people. Incredible.

A.J. Lawrence:
When we were able to walk them through just like what it would cost and it also left more time for the people who were frontline instead of having to respond to leads. A little more specialization happened into that environment. As you talked about like all right, you were building your company started with the virtual assistant and then sort of as you expanded out you brought in talent. It’s kind of looking at one, what are you trying to do. What can be, what can’t. Obviously, you need local talent for X. This could be local, global, could be a mix, can be stuff. I have a friend, we helped them find restaurant, we helped them move 80% of their bookkeeping. They were using a service in New York City which to them they didn’t think was that expensive until they started seeing the global. And then there are some things because they do have cash, they do want to have that double check. But by moving all their online, their credit card in the past they were able to like significantly decrease the cost of that and then just have a specialist be that last check. Let’s talk about some of the people who are working towards that. Let’s listen to Jon Matzner, who was also a guest before he started Sagan on the show as he runs Sagan Passport.

Jon Matzner:
I’m Jon Matzner, Founder of Sagan. A.J. asked me to talk a little bit about my experience in hiring globally and some of the pitfalls and the challenges, some of the opportunities. So real quick, my background is I was a diplomat. I was in the foreign service, so lived and worked abroad for most of my professional career. And after being very successful in buying some businesses and using global talent to help run them better, I decided to help other companies do the same and have had a lot of success in doing that. There tends to be two ways that people hire globally and I didn’t love either one of them. One of them was what I call a staffing markup model where they don’t tell you how much they pay the employee, they just charge you a flat fee and they wrap it up in, frankly, in my opinion, a lot of baloney and try to get you to pay kind of a marked up rate forever. For example, there’s a very popular company called Athena that charges Americans $3,000 a month and they tend to pay their Filipino employees about $800 a month. I never really liked that so I never did that. The second way is head hunting. They let you hire directly. They take usually a percentage of the first year salary, 35% is what most people charge, and then they kind of have you figured out on your own. I don’t really like that either because I think there’s so much more to global talent than just figure it out on your own. There’s a whole method to it and it’s a method that I’m very excited about. What we started doing at Sagan, which was we do this hire direct thing, but we do it from the basis of a membership model. And so I think that like the Costco for global talent, where we establish a flat annual fee and then within that we do a certain number of hires on what your specific hiring needs are. And we’ve seen it’s a great way to put more money directly in the hands of the people that are working for you. You can hire higher quality people. I get to make great revenue in the form of membership and I get to know you and can help you with all sorts of things beyond just here’s how to find somebody. Actually, here’s how to use them, here’s some other ideas, here’s some training and some education, some templates and some SOPs. And so we’re trying to turn the model on its head a little bit. We’ve had a lot of success. I always get very passionate about this topic because I see people frankly taking advantage of ignorance in their business and I think their time is coming and I’m doing everything I can. So happy to kind of give this over to A.J. And I write a newsletter called Lazy Leverage, it’s on Beehive. I write a lot on Twitter as well that a lot of people can learn from. I’d love if you give it a look, but if not, I’m always happy to help as well. Thanks for letting me rant and rave a little bit and of course, look forward to helping out.

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay. Of course, as someone from the State Department, well, very articulate and very organized in his thoughts. I like that process and I do think for the right type of company, you’re there. There’s a bunch of people who I know are enjoying that. And I think you have to look at where you are, especially in the idea of understanding of how to manage the talent, how to grow the talent that you are hiring, where to find them, all that. And then maybe also the networking capability. But you can parse each of those pieces out. His whole point is to take the margin of some of the larger players out there. Like we were joking somewhere earlier, Magic and he was talking Athena. But I think you can actually parse out what he’s doing and also hit some of the margin. But I do think that’s a cool service if you’re in that point where you’re trying to figure out how to go about doing this. Where I think the next step is sort of more towards your book. You and I, like I did have the Outsource School folks on the show a while ago, almost over two years ago. And I love their SOP based process of how to hire, what to pay, when do you hire new people. But it’s purely focused on VAs. I mean, they kind of talk about these people being able to do tasks beyond what traditionally people would say VA. But it’s weird in that even now they are so focused just on VAs. When you walk me through your book, because you and I have been talking about this for a while and we did talk even before the book came out, you approached it in a manner that was like building the capability. Yes, looking at the reasons, the whys, and kind of doing it, but you built up and a whole process to do this consistently for your team. And I liked it because I built an ad hoc system. I do have someone who sort of manages all of our hiring and all of our sort of sourcing of talent and then we now do this for a lot of our clients. But it’s a little looser. I was very impressed about the way you go about evaluating and choosing the different platforms and the process you go about doing. Let’s kind of talk about building that system for type of company who’s now like, you know what we want to hire consistently. Sagan Passport, six people, six hires plus an open list. They’re 24-25k a year. Within that right type of customer segment I think is a really cool value, especially with all the value adds. That Costco model, like we’re going to keep throwing stuff in to make it more worthwhile. But if you’re going further, I believe you can build a system for less than 25. But you know, it’s the time trade off value. So let’s kind of start talking. You’re probably looking at if you’re hiring five plus people a year or consistently hiring people and specifically non-generic types of talent I think is where building your own system really comes in. If you have a very specific need or if you’re looking for a type of time zone or a type of need that just isn’t generic, I think this is where you start looking at building your own structure. You took years to kind of trial and error this, but then the book gets a little bit cleaner.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Hope so.

A.J. Lawrence:
So let’s talk about building a system around hiring. What do you have now?

Kevin Ashcroft:
Yes, so in real terms it’s pretty straightforward. I guess that’s easy to say because I’ve been doing it for 15 plus years. So it’s like anything, the more you practice, the better you get. And really we go through a process which starts with what type of role or what type of person do we need to hire. And even before we get into making a decision about definitely hiring someone, we go through a process of, do we really need them? What are they going to do? Why do we need that? What is the goal? Can any of the existing team do that? Is it going to make a difference to our business? So there’s that evaluation period that would be the first step in the process. What do we need? Why do we need it? Do we definitely need it? And if so it’s kind of like a flowchart, I guess. If yes, then start the next part of the process. We look at that if we definitely need someone and so on. And then we look at scoping out that role. So what is the person going to do? What are their deliverables? Who they’re going to report to? What skills do they need importantly for any business? Will they have the right cultural fit for us? And that’s nothing to do with what country they’re from or what the religion is or anything. It’s just, do they share your values? Do they think in a similar way? Are the key things that are important to you, your team and your business and your clients, will they share those? Because if they don’t, it’s really unlikely they’re going to be a fit in your business. Long term skills you can train for, the cultural piece that’s generally just there and it’s part of the person. So it’s difficult to change that and I wouldn’t advise trying to. So you’re looking at that scoping out the role and then from there you’re deciding, well, which marketplace should I go to? So should it be Upwork, should it be freelancer, should it be Toptal, should it be Fiverr? There’s loads and more and more appear each year and more and more vanish each year also. Or even the Outsource School guys you mentioned. Their agency they started was FreeUp. They sold that to a company called the Hoth, who specialize in SEO, content writing and services around that. They sold that I think about six years ago, something like that. They sold that for somewhere around $24 million. And it was interesting. The reason that the FreeUp guys started that is because they had a I think their big business at that point was an Amazon affiliate. That was their thing. And they hired VAs from the Philippines to help them build that business. And then from that they ended up building the freelance marketplace called FreeUp. And eventually they sold that for 24 million to the Hoth guys. And then they’ve come out the other side of that and started Outsource School and whatever else. I think as you mentioned AJ.., the focus on VAs although it’s a little bit deeper than that. And so much as they talk about Sales VAS or customer service VAs or Teams AdWords, and those types of things. So they use VA quite widely across a number of different use cases.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right, I want to get kind of a little bit more into the structure of building process. But first let’s talk about two things. One, the description of, I always use just the term global talent, especially with technology over the past 10, 15, 20. It used to be somewhat difficult, but we had Skype 15 plus years ago and we could still chat and did a video conference calls. As they’ve gotten better have made it a lot easier. And then workflow, things like Slack. You use Monday, I have ClickUp. But like, I do find it difficult to kind of just paint any sort of outsourced talent as virtual assistants. I believe there shouldn’t be a distinction in your talent. Even global talent may be the wrong way putting it. If you’re defining between local and global. The idea is talent is talent. If someone can do the job, they should be able to do the job. You shouldn’t be defining them differently. Outsource School, and I’m not trying to pick on them because I do like them, they’re two really great guys. They really do focus on the Philippine talent. And I find it really interesting hearing these debates about Philippine talent or Indian talent. It’s become this weird thing where people are like, well, you can only hire good salespeople out of this or the best is this or that. I’m like, I don’t believe you see this unified talent. It’s not like you’re not going to find the best SDRs just in Latin America. I think you can find individuals who are great, but it’s like just telling people, oh, you got to look at this place, you got to look at this place. I think that’s a marketing piece. Identifying talent just based upon where they’re from I think weakens the concept of looking at global talent.

Kevin Ashcroft:
It does completely. Because what it also does, it’s saying internally to yourself that no one travels the world. It’s saying that everyone from Costa Rica stays in Costa Rica. Everyone in the Philippines stays in the Philippines. Everyone in Washington state stays in Washington state. Everyone in Scotland stays in Scotland. Well, they don’t.

A.J. Lawrence:
People leave Scotland. Why?

Kevin Ashcroft:
Well, crazy. I think too much whiskey and they’re going to look for more whiskey. You know, people travel. So if you’re looking on, for instance, marketplaces like Upwork, and you’re doing a search and you decide only to search in Costa Rica or Mexico or Brazil, you’re seeing the talent that’s there at that point. If you’re saying, I can’t go to the Philippines because there’s no good salespeople there, you’re forgetting that there’s a whole load of people who are traveling the world as digital nomads or who have relocated in the Philippines or Thailand or Vietnam or whatever it may be. And all of a sudden you’re missing out on finding those talented people as well as the natives that can actually do the job. So you’re right. There’s no rule that says only good salespeople are sitting in or only good salespeople at a lower rate than in the USA are sitting in Central America or only good VAs are in the Philippines. It’s not as simple as that. There may be a propensity to have more of a certain type of talent in a place because maybe historically there’s been more training for that or there’s been more development for that or there’s been more outsourcing for that. But it’s a very blank of view just to say that’s the only place we’ll get this type of person.

A.J. Lawrence:
Now that we agree, talent should be talent. It took me ad hocly building this couple years to kind of build a process to consistently hire talent as we needed to. When I read your book I was kind of like, oh, that would have cut off 18 months of the couple of years of effort. We copied some things and this would be a great discussion of sort of the public SOPs or company. There are tons of companies. I know you do ClickMinded.

Kevin Ashcroft:
I think the reason I looked at them at one point was just to understand how they put their systems together and to find out if there were any goods. Get quite a breadth of SOPs that cover a whole load of admin related stuff through to social media, through to ads and so on. Get quite a breadth to what they offer.

A.J. Lawrence:
And I like them in the sense that as long as you’re realizing that it’s only going to take you about 60% of the way, some of them may be really good. But the reality is absolutely every time. And what it took me a while was we copied some and built our processes based upon it and then we’re like, hmm, this doesn’t really work for us. And over time we created something. Now we’re having to adapt because AI has flooded us with a lot of our little tricks and stuff to see if someone’s paying attention and all that. It’s now changing because AI and that’s only going to get crazier and crazier. But let’s talk about how would you now go about like, what would be the first step? If let’s say I came to you and I’m like, hey Kev, I’m going to be hiring five plus roles over the next six months. Disparate, not unified. Maybe you couple in maybe two developers, a designer, whatever it may be. But not a single specialized thing. Let’s walk through the steps.

Kevin Ashcroft:
So we kind of started on that earlier. So you know the decision of do you definitely need that person or those skills, what are they going to do? So let’s say we’ve gone through that process and for you that comes out as you need two developers, one designer and one project manager for this project or business or whatever it may be. So decided we need them and that’s who we need. And then we look at scoping out the job so that we understand those individual roles and skill sets. Because as you know there’s different types of developers, junior developer, senior developer, different types of systems that their developers in are the WordPress developers, PHP developers, Java developers, whatever they are. So fleshing out those roles to understand what you need, what the goals are and then from there deciding on for me and my process that’s been and what we touch on in the book, what marketplace are you going to look at? What marketplace and what budget? An example of that may be, let’s say your budget is around $30 an hour or $40 an hour for your developers. That may lead you to somewhere like Upwork or Freelancer or even FreeUp. Fiverr is not going to be generally an option for you because it’s gig based and it’s not going to give you that full time team that you’re after. So you may look at those three. You probably wouldn’t look at something like Toptal because the rate on Toptal is going to be significantly higher than it’s going to be in any of those three platforms. For me personally, if I look at something like freelancer.net literally within 60 seconds of your job post going live, you’ll probably have 10 applications. So the challenge you’ve got and the marketplaces at the moment, not all of them, but the likes of an Upwork and Freelancer is people are hooking in via APIs. They’re getting notifications on when a job has gone live based on their search criteria. It’s going to filter that job to them. It’s either going to just tell them the job’s live, it’s going to give them an opportunity to reply with a templated answer or it’s going to give them an opportunity to reply with an AI answer which gives them the benefit of a template but also it pulls out some of the information from your job post and effectively answers it to make it look more personal. But what you’re really getting is people who in the majority of cases can be applying to jobs and often are applying to jobs that they aren’t a fit for, that they could never do, that they wouldn’t be able to help with. That can be a frustration. The likes of a FreeUp marketplace in theory should be better because it’s not possible to hook into the jobs that way. And that’s because when you post a job on their system, it’s looked at by a human being and they go into the FreeUp system and they find three or you can ask for more, could be six individuals that they think match your job. That can be a bit of an issue. But you pick your marketplace, let’s say it’s Upwork and on there you post your job. So part of the process again is you think about the job post. You write a good job post, don’t make it vague, you don’t put an I’m looking for a website developer, for instance, because straight away, if that’s the post that you make, most really good developers won’t answer it because they’ll think that you’re a lazy client. And if you’re lazy with the job post, you’re not going to be very good to work with.

A.J. Lawrence:
No, that does bring up a good thing because same thing as just hiring traditionally, in talent, too often companies have the most generic job posts that are bore to do. And you’re like, ugh, if this is how the company’s trying to recruit talent, imagine what it’s like to work in. Playing with the concept and trying to add a little excitement and a little bit of it, you do get a little bit more from it but you have to be careful with this AI and automation of the response because too generic or too basic, you’re not going to get the talent you need. But you now have to weigh off how AI is impacting this, which should be another discussion for the future for us.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Just touching on the AI part of it because I’ve been a client on Upwork for a long time. They asked me when they were looking at adding AI to their marketplace for freelancers to use, they asked me to evaluat one of however many people to evaluate it. And then you know, have a kind of debrief call as to what I thought about it. And one of the questions they asked me is would it be a benefit for you as a freelancer, would you use it? And I said, well, no, it wouldn’t for me because my English is good. I know how to formulate sentences, I know how to put a good proposal together. So the things that AI and their particular system was helping with wouldn’t have been an advantage to me. An advantage to non-English natives when they’re putting a proposal together or when they’re writing their profile, definitely an advantage for them. But the challenge that then gives me as a client or you as a client is much more or many more of the proposals we get now. The proposals are really sharp, they’re really good, they’re well-written. If you know enough about AI, you can generally tell they’ve been written by AI because you’ll always see certain words like topnotch or elevate, those type of keywords. You always see certain words that AI puts into its copywriting. But the challenge that gives you as a client is if you get 100 responses to your job ad, it takes you longer to filter through them because they look good. And even, as I say, their profiles are written really well because they’ve used AI. And the only time you really get under that is when you start to interview the person. And you can, whether that’s a text chat that you’re doing, a live text chat, or whether that’s a call, you can tell almost immediately if they are nowhere close to the person they’re pretending to be in the proposal or their cover letter or their profile.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s funny when you say that because we can get into some horror stories, even though I’m promoting the value of hiring global talent. But a good friend of mine who has a SaaS was just walking me through a case where they realized that at first some of their chat people were using AI to respond. But worse when they switched to video and I heard they realized they were getting targeted by he believes, a Russian criminal syndication, whatever. He had two different companies, same person was on two different searches with two different name or two different video calls, SaaS and then another sort of secondary company that’s related to that services for the SaaS. And it was the same person. Once they hired, they thought this one guy, sorry this was just such a crazy story, almost immediately, the person who was responding couldn’t come on to chat. Video chats was always busy for that. But oh, yeah, here I can answer any questions you want, all this stuff. So either a second job for this but was asking all sorts of like corporate information stuff. He was like, yeah, this may not work. Hey, you know, call us back when your camera works and we’ll figure this out. And there’s ways of working it but it was just so funny. I’m almost positive this guy because the guy like freaked out when he saw me answer the second call two weeks later on a different thing. And he was like, I gotta go.

Kevin Ashcroft:
But it’s amazing the number of broken webcams there are in the world.

A.J. Lawrence:
But let’s kind of get back then because there is benefit but there are things you have to worry about and holes. It really seems like, and you going back from the book, it all starts with the why. Why are you hiring this person? What are you looking for them? How are you going to define that? Based upon that, you can define the type of job boards because as you break out significantly in your book, each of the boards have the different trade offs of the type of talent and then having a system. Let’s talk about this way of now moving people through then through the process.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Yeah, you pick a job board or you may pick multiple ones, there’s no reason why you can’t select a few. The only downside there really is it’s going to take you more time to shortlist people to go through the applications and so on. But there’s no right or wrong to that. You can put the job on one board or five boards entirely up to yourself. So you write a good job post, not a one liner. You tell them what the job’s about, the expected hours, who they would report to, what the expectations of them are, a bit about the culture and so on. Some people get a bit frustrated with that because they think, I don’t want to write a really long job post, it’s going to take even more time. But the basis of that job post, you can use probably 60 to 90% of that or even more for any other job you’re posting. So for instance, with you and this fictitious requirement, you may need a WordPress developer, you may need a Java developer, and you may need, let’s say a Shopify developer. And that initial developer post that you write, a huge proportion of that you’ll be able to use for all three development posts. You’re going to swap out the technical part of the requirement for them but you’re still going to have the same cultural fit, still going to have the same company information, probably the same hours and times and reporting and so on. So when you write this and you take a bit of time to do it, you’ve got it forevermore. Again, if you’re then going to hire a designer or a project manager, you’re still able to use a chunk of that job post so it’s useful. And a good chunk of that job post you’re going to get from the second stage we spoke about earlier, which is scoping out the job, what kind of person do you need and why? So all the things that you do as you move through the process, there’s something you’ve already done that’s going to be useful to help you on the next stage. So you’ve got it on your job boards, you get your applications back and then you work through your shortlisting process. And again, in the book we talk about a lot of tricks and tips in there that will help you work through that stage as quickly as possible. So you do that part and then you’re down to who’s your shortlist and what are you going to do next? That’s going to depend on are there 10 people in your shortlist or are there two people? You may then go through another round of shortlisting, funneling them through your process to find out if they are the right fit. That may be questions you ask them on the platform, on the marketplace, it may be an initial, quick 5 or 10 minute interview. So there’s various ways that you can work through that. Until then, you decide on your real short list of one, two or three people. And that for me, I always like to do a video interview. Touching on the Outsource School guys, they would probably advise you to do more of a text chat and Skype. And part of that comes from their general route to market is the Filipino market, the Filipino talent base. And that many Filipinos don’t necessarily like being on video. They’re shy. This is coming from the Outsource School guys, they’re a bit quieter, they’re a bit shyer. They don’t necessarily like to go on video. So if you’re going to force that issue, they’ll probably withdraw from the job. But you asked a question and you can either do a text chat or do a video chat. I like the video chat that it lets you, as much as possible ensure the person you think you’re talking to is that person. It lets you see how well they respond to questions. It lets you see how good again their English is, even if you’re hiring from the USA or the UK, Canada. And it lets you see if there’s a kind of connection that you’ve got there. Probably helps you work through the cultural side of it a bit quicker and it just moves the process on a lot quicker. And then you’re moving on to do you feel you’ve got one or more people that you would like to hire? Sometimes the answer to that is no. And you have to jump back into the marketplace. You may have to reapply the job post. It may be you need to look at some of the other people that didn’t make it to final selection. So you may have to go through the process again. But if you have a few that you’re interested in, your option then is make a hire or get those people to do some test tasks for you. So pay them to do a selection of test tasks, whether it be one, two or three tasks and see how they perform. I like to use that process because it gives me a real feel for them without a big commitment in my side and without a big commitment on their side. They still get paid for it but you get to see much quicker if you think they’re going to be a fit before you offer the full time job. And in my experience, 95% plus of people are more than happy to do that.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think as you build this out, this kind of process, you can turn this into an SOP. And I know like under your guidance we’ve built the same thing. Now we have an SOP, we have broken it up. We have someone who sort of drives a process and then individuals on the team do different aspects. And I realized I remove myself everything except for after I give the criteria. But I don’t do the hiring. I just do the kind of, the final selling and kind of the rah rah, why we love you at the end part. Because I realized long ago I geek out if I like someone. So it doesn’t matter their skill if I like, if I think, oh, they’re weird like I am.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A.J. Lawrence:
I’m like, oh, let’s. And I’m like, okay, no, I can’t.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Come and be part of my family.

A.J. Lawrence:
Come, let us go do cool things. But don’t worry about the work. I realized I had to take myself out of that process. But it is interesting in being a part to build it, I can still make sure we have that talent capability to handle the different things and then just bring, you know. My thing is just hey everyone, let’s go charge that hill. For some reason I have that crazy skill, not the rest of it. We should come back and kind of talk about how to integrate and sort of build the culture around a global team at a future episode. Just because I think that is very important to kind of pair with this process. We’ve gone on and on and on. You know, in the show notes, everyone, we’ll break down sort of the process Kevin does. You can always buy his book Outsourcing for Success. And obviously, we’ll put a link to reach out to Kev either through his specific wordpressing or for his help in building out this capabilities within companies so you can do this. I’m always here if you want to talk about how this specifically works in your case and where you are in your own business model to look at. Maybe you are just at the beginning of some of those services we talked about, maybe that you’re in that sweet spot for them or you’re ready to build a system to build your company longer term around your own capability of bringing in the right type of talent. In which case what Kev’s doing is really, really probably the right direction to start looking at. So, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kevin Ashcroft:
Been a pleasure, A.J. As always.

A.J. Lawrence:
Thank you very much. I can’t wait to talk to you again. Bye-bye.