Leverage Virtual Assistants to Buy Back Your Time and Scale Your Business

Chris Kiefer (00:01.366)

Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My wife is drinking water. Wasn't ready. Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris and I'm joined by my lovely wife, Natalie. Yes, it's been a while since I have been on here, but I've got some new stuff to say, so here we are. We have, in the last 18 months, hired a number of virtual assistants or overseas employees.

And Natalie has been the genius behind almost every single one of these hires. And we have talked to so many of our friends and families, colleagues, entrepreneur acquaintances about just the value and basically the strategy that we've used to hire virtual assistants. So today we're going to get into kind of some more philosophical stuff on VAs and then dive into specifically, I'm going to interview Natalie on

how have you thought and created this process that we've used to hire six amazing virtual assistants. So that's the topic for today. Hopefully this serves all of you listening and I would love to hear feedback when you listen to this of like, hey, I've never thought about this before but I really liked what you said about XYZ. It's just great getting feedback. And then the last thing we would ask is if this is valuable in any way.

share this with somebody else that you think might value or benefit from this as well, because we took a lot of time. Well, first of all, Natalie has a lot of experience, blood, sweat, and tears in the arena, so to speak, of building this process out. And then we took a lot of time to prepare to make this content as valuable as possible. So the best way you could share the love would be to pass it on to someone else that might benefit. Yeah, awesome. So let's get into...

When and why did we decide to hire a VA? Our first VA. So when I was thinking through this, I believe it was with our friend Tyler, who is a home inspector. And it's really, really common in that industry that there are a lot of agencies and people that are really evangelizing for the use of VAs. And so I think that was where we first really heard about it or met someone in person who was actively using it and leveraging it well.

Chris Kiefer (02:24.554)

And then we've also talked to a number of people that were using it in real estate. So that was a couple of years ago that we were, or a year and a half ago, that we were kind of introduced to the idea and we just thought, okay, well we could just hire a generalist, someone that's going to help with a bunch of the random tasks that we need to kind of offload off our plates. And in that process...

I think we both became really, really excited about the potential. And then with other milestones like reading Dan Martel's Buy Back Your Time, there were a number of pivotal moments where we were like, okay, we really need to leverage this in a different way or a more amplified way in our business to buy back our time. Yeah. And then I would say the next piece that was, we kind of had heard, I feel like this is exactly like...

the like having real estate rentals. You have like the uncle or the family relative or the friend that had a bad experience and they're like, oh, you're gonna go into hiring virtual assistants? Ah, it didn't work for me. Oh yeah, and then so you hear all these bad horror stories. And I also feel like if you're honest with yourself, a lot of them, there's probably not a lot of substance to them, but there's just fear around, I don't know if that's gonna work for me or there's just like hesitation on not knowing how to get into that game. And so.

That's actually the, what we're hoping this provides is like a little bit of a roadmap. So, you know, you're never gonna see the saying like all the steps of the staircase, but maybe we can illuminate, you know, two or three more steps for you to get going on the process. Yeah, one bit of feedback that we probably both thought, and we definitely have heard a lot of people say to us is, I don't know if I have that much stuff that someone could do virtually. And it is.

shocking when you start mapping out your time and maybe that's when the buyback your time exercises really started opening your eyes, but we recognized, holy cow, there is so much stuff that we are doing that could be done by a virtual employee and probably done substantially better than we're able to manage doing it right now. And so a lot of those objections, when someone starts really, I think, looking and becoming kind of self-aware with how they're spending their time and what they're doing as an entrepreneur.

Chris Kiefer (04:38.098)

it becomes pretty apparent that they're gonna benefit from it, which is why we talk about it all the time, which is why we decided to record this. And I would say that's a great place to start. Most common objections that we've heard is I don't have enough stuff for someone to do and I would say that there's no like I I've even gone as far to say like I feel like stay-at-home parents could use a BA. I was just thinking that just managing schedules and getting your calendar synced up and helping to organize your tasks.

and deadlines and all that kind of stuff. Meal planning. Meal planning, I mean, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, even like paying recurring bills. You can put some stuff on auto pay, but some stuff you can't, you know, or reconciling your budget. There's just like a lot of little things. Granted, this is like, hard to have a tax write-off if you're literally just a stay-at-home parent, but if you have a business, this is where it makes sense. So I would say that's the first thing I've heard. The other really common.

Excuse or objection I would say is the time zone concern And just like oh, I don't know if I could you know, how do you guys do it when they're you know? Ten hours ahead or behind you or whatever Another big one would be just the fact that it's a virtual person I feel like there's a lack of competent or confidence Lack of confidence in the like technology competence that would be needed to manage someone virtually Yeah, and I think the other component to that virtually is that a lot of people have had bad experiences with someone overseas

center. And just to put that in a perspective, a lot of the employees at call centers from to my knowledge are making like below minimum wage in many situations, and working very long hours and are not necessarily shown a lot of appreciation and respect and they just get hit with like these, you know, aggressive phone calls all day. So if you've had bad experiences with someone overseas,

they're probably not doing something that's just like the, the exciting part of their week or their day. And so keep that in perspective. Totally. Um, and yeah, so on the other building on top of that, I would say, I don't know about, um, you, but I feel like there is a fear or concern of like, it's like, like the less you know about something, the more scary it is, but just like, we're going to give these people, these people again in quotes,

Chris Kiefer (06:59.622)

Like who I don't know who we have cultural difference. Yeah, like I'm going to give them my password to this app that we use Or to my email or whatever and there's fear around that. But if you think about it like Most humans on earth are good people like 98 99 percent of people are good people and it's no different than like there's just as many crazy people In the same city that you live in that would be concerning to give your password to

But if you find a good employee, someone that wants to invest in your vision and help you, I have now come to realize like that's such a silly thing. And I think it genuinely comes from just not knowing. And it goes right back to that conversation you started with filling a rental and you'll hear a ton of horror stories, but we live in a day and an age where we can do a lot of background research and find out a lot about a person. And it comes down to a vetting process and how much you're gonna trust that person. And if you're not doing a lot of vetting,

you probably should be more weary of like what kind of access you're giving. But if you're doing your research and you feel confident in that relationship with a person, it's gonna be just like an in-person employee where they hopefully will align and you can trust them with as much as you would trust an employee that's in your office. Yeah, so getting into some of the surprising benefits before we get into the tactical stuff on how to hire.

One of the things that at first was an obstacle or like a challenge was time zones. So we hired our first virtual assistant and the task that we had, I mean, obviously depending on what you're hiring them for, this could like the importance of being working when you're working is gonna vary. If they're answering your phones, which Tyler, the friend that we mentioned, he literally has VAs that are his receptionist. So that's.

You have to wake up at the time, like 9 a.m. Pacific, and you work till five or whatever the situation is. We had a lot of tasks that didn't really matter when they got done. Like, and oftentimes, Natalie or I was doing these tasks at like 9 p.m. before we went to bed, and you realize like, oh, someone in a different country could just be doing this right now, and they could work through the night. And that's where I would say, this can turn into like rocket fuel for your business.

Chris Kiefer (09:13.61)

where what we in a particular role that I had, we hired a developer to assist with some of the automation stuff we were doing. And I would get an alert from a client that said, hey, something's not working quite right. And this would be at 4.30 on a Tuesday. Or 6.00 PM on a Friday, and it would blow up our whole weekend. And so now Chris is working from 6.00 PM through the night and I'm up because I'm stressing, I gotta get this fixed.

and you have a virtual employee that just woke up. That's the beginning of their work day. They can work for four or five hours, and then I go to bed or spend time with my family, come back the next day. The whole problem, there was an email at two in the morning from Rod who said, hey, got this figured out. The client is not even awake yet, and they wake up and this thing that they sent, leaving their office one day, they come back the next morning and it's done. So you can definitely leverage these time zones to your advantage depending on the task.

And then what we've done is we have quick check-in for 30 minutes at the end of my workday, beginning of theirs, and then the same thing in the morning. So there's kind of a handoff. And then you use communication tools like Slack to just drop in threads of different clients and whatnot. But that's something that I would say is a surprising benefit. Yeah. And I would say the time zone issue is actually only problematic for us because we actually have some virtual employees working on our time zone and some...

through their daytime. So it's actually not really hard for us to connect with them during their day or in the beginning or end of their day. But when we're trying to get the whole team together, we don't wanna be just messing with all of their schedules regularly and making them like flip around their hours. So it's actually more of the component that they're on different schedules within that same time zone. Yeah, and I would say something when you're thinking about time zones with hiring people, pretty much every person that we've hired, we've been more strict about

the time zone, like we tell them upfront, our goal, first of all, what would be your preference for times, hours of the day that you wanna work for you? And some people legitimately want to work the 2 a.m. to noon shift because that's what all of their friends do. Other people, one particular employee that we have, he has young kids and it was more important to him that he could be at home and be present with his kid. And so it was really valuable for him.

Chris Kiefer (11:40.366)

to not have to work in the graveyard shift. And I think it's important to realize, just like in America, if you work the graveyard shift, you expect to get paid a little bit more. Well, it's the same thing here, that if you're going to give someone fantastic working conditions and something that fits their schedule, you can generally get a little more talent for a little bit less, because you're providing something that money can't provide, which is their quality of life.

Yeah, jumping ahead, I know we also wanted to talk about work ethic. It's amazing. I don't even know where to go with this. And actually on the note of time zone, one of our first employees, she was trying to be really receptive and always available to us. And we didn't realize, cause we were just as we came up with tasks or had a message for her, we were sending it like anytime we thought of it, we realized she kept her notifications on and it was like pinging her awake, but she wanted to be available.

to us at any time and we actually had to set some of those boundaries to say like, no, it's really important to us that you're getting sleep and have regular hours. You don't need to just be at our beck and call all week for any hours. We want to make sure there are some boundaries around that work ethic. And if anything, that's what we found is that, and this is specifically for our employees in the Philippines, which I don't think we actually mentioned. We've talked about overseas, but all of our employees are in the Philippines.

culturally really, really strong work ethic. And I feel like when we give a challenging task or project, like you can just sense like they are very committed to making sure that they're meeting expectations or exceeding expectations. It's awesome. Yeah. And I tell this story every time we're talking about work ethic, but this is our buddy Tyler had this happen. And I'm going to start by saying

Can we all just acknowledge that Americans, we are all very entitled. We have very, we live in a wonderful country. Not all, but let's just assume. I mean, I feel I'm entitled and a lot of people, we just are like, we expect a lot and we want things our way. And we have this culture of comfort and everything, which has many benefits. But I think that a lot of people that are entrepreneurs or business owners can relate to the idea of like, I just can't find good workers, you know? And-

Chris Kiefer (14:01.766)

One of the story with Tyler, he said he had a, I don't remember the names. I'm just going to say Joanna. Joanna was one of his receptionists that they had hired and he gets a call because Joanna was the manager of another receptionist that they had hired. And Joanna calls Tyler and says, Hey, Tyler, I'm curious if I can take the second half of the day off today. Um, I already called Susan. Susan can, can cover for me. I'm just curious.

if that's okay. And Tyler was kind of confused and was like, I mean, I guess, thank you for covering your shift. Just out of curiosity, what's going on? And Joanna was like, well, my sister was in a car accident and she's at the hospital right now and I wanna go see her. And he's just like, what? Why are you even talking to me right now? Go now, are you serious? And I just think, if you think about what that means and what happened.

she gets a call that her sister was in a car accident, and then she's like, oh no, I better get my shift covered. And then she calls and gets it covered, and then is still not sure if it's okay to go. I feel like when I heard that, I was like, in America, you could just drop everything and go, and then tell your boss three days later, I'm so sorry, I had to go see my sister who was in a car accident. And most bosses would be like, oh, okay, I mean, yeah. But I mean, if it was happening all the time, that would be different. But that's just an example of like,

they take this so much more serious than most Americans in my opinion. And again, I just think that that's just an, I'm using that as a crazy story or example of people that want to impress and work hard and put in the time and grind, whatever you wanna call it. And then you mix that work, I think, with a loving and caring boss that actually cares about them getting a better quality of life. And you can get some really, really hardworking people overseas.

Yeah, and the hiring market and all of that probably makes a difference too. Um, to your point, you know, a lot of cities...

Chris Kiefer (16:05.506)

and so

Chris Kiefer (16:12.342)

And so maybe.

Chris Kiefer (16:16.178)

security and you're making sure that virtual employee knows that they're part of the team, they're going to rise to that occasion and impress you. At least that's what we've experienced because they're really valuing that role. So other unique things, let's talk about that, unique things that when we said some people say that they have unique tasks, like people are saying, oh, I don't know if there's enough work that I could give this person. What are some of the things that we've

come up with or that we've recognized, oh, wow, we could have someone else doing this for us. What are your favorites? Yeah. So one of my favorites is so as you know, my business, I do automation consulting specifically for painters. So by the way, plug, if you are a painting company between six and 10 million in revenue, call me because I can help you. But one of the things that in my day I have, you know, I on my meeting client meeting day, I'll have between four and six.

meetings that are generally 45 minutes to an hour long. And I would try to, you know, just imagine like client calls, you're reviewing what's happened in the last week, you're talking about the next objectives, creating to-dos, and then you need to take those to-dos and put them into project management software, send out a follow-up email, maybe if you're good. And I was doing all of this. So I would go from one meeting.

and the meeting would run long and then the next one would start and then I would be like, okay, I got to go back and remember like at lunchtime, I've had four meetings now and I got to remember, okay, what happened in the first meeting, you know, just the pile up of this busy work essentially. I come from a healthcare background and anyone in healthcare knows that waiting to the end of the day to do your documentation is a nightmare because you will not remember anything you did. Yeah. So I had this idea of I want to I want help with just taking meeting minutes.

and then sending a follow-up email to. So I wanted to create this process of like a standard operating procedure of when there's a meeting, I, you know, I got a virtual note taker and I, I had that in all of my meetings. So the note taker would just record the whole meeting. And then I came up with a system where a VA would come in, watch the recording. And again, this is like.

Chris Kiefer (18:34.954)

was kind of flexible because as long as the client got the email within like six to seven hours of the meeting, it still is like reasonably soon enough that I again was I didn't have to have that virtual assistant live. They could watch the meeting in, you know, after the fact, and occasionally there would even be like random like, hey, I'll look up to see if XYZ is possible. They look that up and they're able to solve that and write in the meeting minutes. This, hey, we did this. It's not we can't do this or we can do this.

but they could also write down all the to-dos that I had to do, all the to-dos that the client had to do with timestamps of when we're gonna get those done, and also timestamps in the meeting recording of when this was talked about, what was the context. And then the other major win was they can actually take those to-dos for my team and go put that into Asana or a Smart Suite or Airtable or whatever project management system you're using. And I tell you, I'm not kidding.

You can probably tell from your perspective the first week that we had this process dialed. Yeah, the mental load of worrying that you're dropping a ball and missing a task is so significant and hard to quantify that knowing that you have someone that's literally double checking everything that you said you were going to do. It's massive. It's so massive for a busy entrepreneur or business owner that's trying to just make sure that every box is being checked.

and you have someone that's not only writing it out for you, but then also making sure that you're following up on it. And I would say from the client perspective, like how many people have, how many times have you hired a consultant and then gotten this beautiful email of like, here's what we talked about, here are the to-dos, here's when the to-dos are due, and then telling each person, like it's incredible. It was absolutely, I was like, I literally felt like I got rid of 80% of my work, even though it was, you know.

percentage of the time, but it was something I was so draining and I felt like I was failing at that getting that off my plate like plus the boost of people being like oh wow this is so helpful it was it was fantastic. So now your meetings can go long just kidding. That's password aggressive. Okay one other unique task that we have recognized was just something you weren't considering hiring for and it's been great. There's a lot of untapped creative potential.

Chris Kiefer (21:00.147)

Okay, so I think we should also add why the Philippines and why is it so common there? Like what's the push where everyone's like, oh, I have a VA in the Philippines. And to my knowledge, here are some of the big factors. So first, they're, they're a

Chris Kiefer (21:26.706)

Okay, so why hire from the Philippines or why is it so common there? And you can add to this list if you think of others, but these are the things that I'm aware of that are big factors. First, they're a highly educated country, and so actually a lot of the people that we've had apply for our positions, they have, you know, bachelor's or beyond master's degrees in whatever we're hiring them for. So it's not like it's all just like on-the-job training and we're ex-

you know, expecting that we have to teach them everything. They're highly skilled in many, many ways. The second thing is that it's a country where English is one of the primary, it's one of the national languages. And so, you know, in the US it makes a ton of sense that we would be looking for employees virtually that are gonna be good communicators in our same language. It's also...

country, it's islands, and they don't have a lot of industry or exports from their own islands. And so from my research, a lot of people would actually leave the country to go work somewhere else to provide a good living for their family. And so in a new day and age where we can do so much virtually, it just makes a ton of sense that culturally, there's been a big push for people there to be like, hey, I can actually work from home.

and make some sacrifices like maybe hours or things like that, but be able to provide for my family and stay here. So those are some of the things that make it really a good setup with employees in the Philippines. With that being said, one of the unique tasks that I said we recognize was that there's a lot of untapped creative potential that they may actually have quite a bit of experience like with graphic design or things like that, even though they're...

their degree or other jobs that they've had is something extremely technical. And then we've been like, Hey, can you do this creative task? And they've just knocked it out of the park. And so I feel like every single person we've hired pretty much has had actually really, really good, um, creative eye and design, which has really blown me away and not something that I feel like I see here regularly.

Chris Kiefer (23:37.354)

And moving on to the cultural, uh, somewhat just, uh, this would be like a bullet pointed list of cultural considerations, just differences between their culture and ours. And again, like you said, we're talking about employees in the Philippines. Yeah. Um, what we've seen or what we've researched, what I've researched, um, regarding these employees. So, so obviously just time zone. Like there, that's a difference between like how, how is it going to be having someone

that is working the graveyard shift their time for your regular hours or vice versa. And consider that in the US we have multiple time zones. I don't think they do. I'm pretty sure they're all in one time zone, but that's something to consider as well. So you need to tell them which time zone or which part of the US that you're in. Yeah. And honestly, everyone that we've, they all have like, I feel like across the board, every virtual assistant we've worked with.

is 10 times more tech savvy than the average American that we talked to. They've got apps and chrome extensions and stuff on like... Yeah, I forgot to add that to my list. Very, very tech savvy country. And I recently saw a study about the hours of use of like a computer by country in social media. And the Philippines was like number three on the list. Like they're... Because they're doing all their social media for every other country. Yes, they're doing a lot online. Um, so...

One thing, just like internet connectivity, I would say that it is not, it's not like super common, but, and I would even say if there's a particular employee that is frequently having excuses of their internet going out, that's a red flag in my opinion, but it's not unusual that there could be a big storm and internet takes out, or the storm takes out internet in like a region or something. Yes, they are on islands, so there's like, there's storms. But again, I would say that's.

most of our employees, it'll be like an outage for, you know, a couple hours. It's four hours or something. And then they're back on top of it. But I would say that's, again, it's, their internet goes out far more than it does in America because our internet never goes out, or at least, you know, it's like very unusual that we lose internet. And over there, it might happen once a quarter, maybe, for like a solid employee. I guess potentially it also depends where they live. It does, and some of them will have, if they, you know, if they work.

Chris Kiefer (25:53.73)

virtually full-time, they will have backup systems or solutions to make sure that they're maintaining internet. So they may not be able to like upload a big file for you, but they're gonna be able to reach out to you and say, hey, I'm having spotty internet today. So this is what's going on. And that actually, this is a plug for when we talk about the interview process. I don't know if you would agree with this, but we've told like, we're pretty ruthless on like, if you're gonna miss an appointment, even if it's 30 minutes in advance of like, oh shoot, I lost my internet.

That's not that crazy. Like, okay, thanks for letting me know. Let's reschedule. If someone gets back to you four hours after the meeting happened and they're like, oh, sorry, I didn't have internet. In my opinion, it's like, I don't really buy it, especially on your first, like if it just so happened that there was a crazy storm right when they were applying for your job in their first interview.

That's just really unfortunate circumstances, but. And I recommend you could look and see are there big outages. Like there are a number of times I was like, Oh, I shouldn't do interviews today because it looks like there are a bunch of storms. So I was like, yeah we're going to have a lot of people missing these short interviews. But if they're responding to you two days later, five days later saying, Hey, can I reschedule that? Sorry. I'm like, well no, sorry. You weren't taking this very seriously. There are many different ways to reach out and get in touch. And on that note, moving quickly in the hiring process is important because a lot of

employees in the Philippines may have, they're applying for multiple jobs, they have multiple jobs and so if you're like, hey, this is going to be a month-long process to hire, that's probably going to be too slow for them to be able to consider your job. Yeah, in fact, the first VA that we ever hired, and you can tell that story of how we almost, we found out like months later that she had accepted a different job. Do you remember that?

Yeah, I basically it was like I'll get back to you and it was gonna and I said, you know I'll get back to you in like three days because I was finishing where I had let people reschedule interviews with me and she had Accepted another job and then we came in with a job offer. That was more appealing which was great Legitimately said I liked Natalie more than my other boss and so she took the job. So luckily Luckily Natalie has a magnetic personality because we almost lost this rock star who then

Chris Kiefer (28:11.046)

Inspired us to go back and hire, you know five more so that was because I thought hey I can move pretty slowly and really, you know, give all these other people an opportunity and it was like I just needed to And the thing that was crazy is that when Natalie says move slowly like you were like a week Yeah, like we tell people like if you're gonna hire a virtual assistant Yeah, be ready like literally it would be like you post the job say Friday You are starting interviews Monday Tuesday

you maybe have second interviews Wednesday, Thursday, and you should be making an offer Friday. And if you can move faster, like if you come across a rock star, like offer them a job Wednesday if you can, just because like if you think about it, there's just so many companies from all over the world that are like doing interviews constantly. And I would say that's actually probably another thing that is great to ask. It's like, are you looking at applying for other jobs? What type of jobs are you talking about? So when we talk about the portal or the- But you do have to move quickly because-

They just there's a lot of movement in jobs over there Last couple of things for cultural considerations that I'll just hit really quickly a lot of virtual employees they just make sure you're being human and you're treating them like humans because a lot of them have been ghosted or blown off by Employers in the US who just like stopped paying them and things like that. You hear a bunch of horror stories

And it makes sense why they may be like a little bit reserved in asking for time off or things like that because they Have in the past like been fired for no reason or not been fired Like I said, it just been ghosted And so just be upfront and communicate with them like you would an in-person employee because it's going to actually probably Be exceeding like an expectation that they've come across already Um, and then final thing. This is my take on this cultural consideration

from all the discussions I've had with people in the Philippines, I think discussing a pay rate is a little awkward. I think it is for everybody. But I've actually had people that have been like, I need to take a minute like in an interview because they weren't expecting me to say, so what would you like to be paid? Just like saying it really bluntly. And so be aware of that, that it's I think it's good to throw it out there. But then it's also good to be willing to kind of lead that discussion.

Chris Kiefer (30:29.118)

and say, you know, this is where we could start you. And in the course of 12 months, if this is working out, here are these milestones to where we can give you raises. So just kind of lay it out there instead of putting it on them to come with like a proposal for you. Yeah. Okay. All right, so now we're moving towards some other considerations, titles, talk about job titles. Okay, yeah, before even getting into job titles, you've heard us use different

terms for those employees. VAs, you know, stands for virtual assistant. Oftentimes, we're talking about the Philippines like we are in our team, but there are people that have VAs in other countries as well. I've also heard to the man that created this particular job board that we really like hiring through, he calls them OFSs, so online Filipino specialists. You'll also hear overseas employee or

What are some others? Executive assistants. So some of them worked our role specific. But then I would say or you can also just have like web developer, like actually give them a straight up job title like you would in your company. And it's just like it's a web developer that works overseas. The overseas part should become irrelevant. But again, that comes down to do you have a specific job title? Like, I guess one way I would I would frame it, don't know if you agree. What would you call this role if you hired them locally? Yeah. And

Maybe you know that might be what you would call it over there as well. However, if it's a more random collection of tasks It's kind of like va is the least sexy title, but it's also like, okay. I understand what you're saying. It's a it's a virtual assistant So if you're looking for a complete generalist that's going to be picking up a ton of tasks and kind of be a jack-of-all-trades I would say uh Hiring for the position of va makes sense then because colloquially that's exactly what it means to them is like, okay

They're looking for a VA. They're looking for someone that's going to be able to just jump in and do a bunch of different types of tasks. Beyond that, we've gotten much more specific and internally video editor, social media manager. We are calling them by their title. I do think, I've been told that culturally title does matter. So there have been different, I don't know, phases in the U S where people will be like, come up with your own job title and like, let's be wacky about it and all this kind of stuff. I don't think that that's the case in the Philippines. And so,

Chris Kiefer (32:56.33)

be intentional with what you're calling them, a director or a manager or a developer or whatever it is, so that they have a sense for what their role in the company is and where they kind of are in the hierarchy. Yeah. And then the other thing I would say is that this is probably my biggest, and I've had another conversation with some friends about this topic. I would say, keep in mind that

when you, you'll hear certain people like Natalie and I that are big, big fans of like, everybody needs a VA, hire a VA, it's gonna change your life. The thing to keep in mind though, is that this is not like a magic black box that you just like put some coins in and then your life is better. Like it's literally like hiring an employee in America, in your town across, virtually in America. Like it would be crazy for the, the way I would describe this is,

If you're an employer that has hired many employees, I would be willing to bet that you have hired some not so great employees. And it would be just as ludicrous if someone came to you and said like, oh, I tried hiring employees once. I had a really bad one and I, you know, it just doesn't work for me. It's just like, so now we're, yeah, we're lumping in every single employee that you could potentially hire is now bad because your first three experiences or whatever were not, didn't work out. I would say, honestly, generally that would point back to

What's the, what does the hiring process look like? Do you have a process? What does the employee situation look like? Are they, do they have a manager? Did you provide clear feedback when they failed to do what you wanted? What was your, like, how did you provide the feedback? Did you provide check-ins or did you ask them what they wanted to do? Like there's, I don't know if you have anything else to add on that, but that's huge. Yeah, just that if you have hired employees locally and you've had three bad hires, that's probably a bad hiring process.

And so it's the same exact thing where if you're striking out, I could look at any one of our employees that have left and I'm like, yeah, that was, there was something we could have done to make that. And we've done this work now to identify our values, our standards, our expectations and hire and fire towards those things. And so treat this in the exact same way that you're hiring and firing based on your values, standards and expectations. And if you don't have those set, that's a good thing to look at because it's going to be the thing that gets under your skin when you're like,

Chris Kiefer (35:18.262)

why is this person not a self-starter? And then you're like, oh, I didn't realize I value that a lot. I should probably ask about that in an interview. And I would say one of like, well, we're gonna dive into the how to hire, but after you select the person, I would say something that I learned from past jobs, one company in particular that I worked at, they had this process called, or they had the green book that they would provide a new hire and it laid out what are the 30, 60, 90 day goals for this position.

And to me, again, it's like, now that I've been in a role where that did exist, I could never imagine hiring someone without that because everybody gets into a job and they're like- We have done, by the way, we've hired without it and then we're like, well, shoot, this is our fault. Let's go back to the green book. But it's like, literally, everybody starts a job and they're like, I wanna impress my boss, I want to do well in this position. Like they wouldn't take a job if they didn't want to do that.

And the green book in my opinion, it just is a black and white like get everybody on the same page that hey Within the first week. I want you to do these tasks And by the end of month one, I want you to have done x y and z and by the end of month two I expect that you're documenting your processes and by the end of month three You're like fully up and running and you define what that means so both for you and the other and the employee one of the biggest things I would say is uh,

Generally again, this is just my experience the in that green book or the 30 60 90 day goals The 30 day goals are probably written by you But one of the 30 day goals could be that by the end of 30 days The employee and you have established what the 60 and 90 day goals are because they are starting to wrap their head around the process So I think that's another just great reminder that you don't have to have the entire thing figured out but you do need to have like what's the

what like literally in a month from now, ask yourself, if this person can't even, you know, tie their shoes or whatever the silly analogy you wanna use is, like that's a clear expectation that I would expect them to be able to perform, write that down. And then they know and you know that you can coach towards them achieving that. And then the longer 60 and 90 day goals have them come up with it and you'll be surprised what they can do. Yeah, and don't let not having that clarity deter you from

Chris Kiefer (37:41.402)

starting the process, you just need to have that general idea of what you want them to be accomplishing and like Chris said, have those first 30 days kind of figured out. And then the last thing I would add to that is make sure you do have a bit of a growth plan, even if they're actively participating in creating it. Say, you know, what do you want your hourly pay to be? Okay, how can we get you there? What kind of skills are you wanting to develop in this job? Okay, how can we get you there? And you're kind of outlining that.

to make sure that they feel that there is growth potential in your business and your business is gonna look a lot more attractive then compared to maybe another higher paying virtual position where there's absolutely no growth and no skills being developed. All right, so.

We are going to get to this process. So the thing why most of you probably are listening, like how specifically do I hire? This is sounding like one of those Facebook videos where they're like, and then we're gonna pop the balloon. But first we're gonna do this and then we're gonna pop the balloon and then you watch 20 minutes and then they never pop the balloon. We will pop the balloon though. So the last thing, we just feel like all of this was so important because we have so many opinions and we've probably had this exact conversation with a dozen people in the last month alone.

We're not like literally we're in a coaching group and Natalie was like I want to give my presentation on VAs and they're like well, it's not really what the purpose is But that's like that's literally the thing that we feel like is most valuable for the people that we've come in contact with So the last side note before we get to the hiring process Building a strong virtual culture. So this is something that you retain your people. Yeah, you can get someone but then when you have several VAs

I guess I'll kick this off to Natalie. What do you feel like, and this has not only been our thoughts, but things that we have heard from our employees that have said what do they like about how we're operating as opposed to other virtual jobs they've had? Yeah, so this came to us a bit organically because for the life of our business, the majority of the life of our business, you and I have been the only two stateside employees. And even if we've had others that have been involved, it's always been virtual, even in the US.

Chris Kiefer (39:51.774)

And so we organically were like, well, we want to make sure that we're building community and we're getting to know these employees and things like that. And then we got the feedback that was actually really great and not necessarily expected from a lot of our VAs. And so one of the things that we do is team meetings. And like I said, sometimes that can be tricky with scheduling, but so, so valuable to do it at least every couple of weeks, because in that time, that's where we make sure that everybody knows everyone's.

everyone's role in the company and who they need to be asking for what because they're likely not getting together and meeting in person either Um, so that's really valuable. The second component of that is we started implementing ice breakers um Chris can say he thought this was pretty dumb Like why are we wasting 20 minutes of our 60 minute meeting that we have every two weeks to talk about What you would do if you had to climb a giant mountain or something I was like i'm a big fan of being silly and playing but I

Vividly remember in the first couple meetings now that was like, all right if it was a zombie apocalypse What would you what would be your number one skill that you provide to the team? And I was just like, okay This is kind of funny But also I have got a lot of stuff to do and I don't know if this is the best use of this You know small amount of time that we're trying to get them up to speed on what's going on in the business But yeah, tell us tell everyone what we heard after the fact

Yeah, it turns out people like talking to people. So having that opportunity to get to know each other and loosen up and get to see each other's natural personalities was really valuable to us and also something that most of our employees hadn't experienced. And so as far as retention, they're like, hey, I feel like I'm much more involved. One thing that we've moved away from is really talking about anyone as a consultant or as.

a contractor or anything that implies that it's kind of transient. Like they are a part of our team, whether they're part-time or full-time. We want to make sure they know that they're part of the team. And so that was something that came out in these icebreaker conversations was like, Hey, we we're going to be around for a while together. So let's get to know each other. Yeah. And I would say if you've ever run a team of any kind, a team building specialist would tell you like how critical it is to have just like play and.

Chris Kiefer (42:08.71)

icebreakers and breaking down interview about the importance of play. Yeah. And it's like literally one of the things that I would guarantee has happened in this, obviously this whole topic is going to be most applicable to people that have multiple virtual assistants. Um, but they like the idea of the coolest feeling in the world is when we had several of our employees like identify an issue.

talk to each other, solve the issue, and then we didn't know about it for, yeah, we didn't know about it until the next meeting, and they're like, oh, this thing happened, and I was like, wait, did you talk to Natalie? And Natalie was like, did you talk to Chris? And they're like, no, we just figured this out. It's like, you're so much more like, this is again, just a silly thing that I'm willing to admit. You think like, it's like when you meet someone from any country on earth, like, oh, you're from Germany? I had a friend that's from Germany, do you know him? All Germans are exactly the same. It's like the exact same thing of like, oh, you went to, you know, like.

Florida State University, I had a friend that went to Florida State. Like that's absurd that there's 20,000 people, let alone millions of people. They don't know each other. Like the statistical likelihood of that is impossible. But I thought that because I have an employee in the Philippines that they're just going to like, you know, go meet at a coffee shop and like get lunch together and stuff like they could live 10 hours away. Yeah, it's incredible. And so this little like dialogue that we're facilitating is the only interaction that they're having with each other.

We might feel like we're really close with each individual employee, but it's important to remember that unless you're telling them, go schedule virtual coffees with each other or go play a game or whatever, like they're literally never talking to each other and you can't expect them to go from that to then like, Hey, I have a problem. Can you help me solve this? Yeah. And, uh, we also did a virtual escape room, which was amazing. And we need to schedule another one. And I think the value of that, which was,

completely unexpected for me is you can give employees or bosses, you can give them a disk assessment, the working genius assessment. There's all kinds of ways that you can find out how they operate and how they deal with stress and things like that. But doing an escape room was amazing in just illuminating everyone's personality traits and how they want to be involved in the process. It just happened totally organically because it was completely fun.

Chris Kiefer (44:29.758)

and playful and there wasn't any like work pressure associated with it. It was very, very cool as a way to develop a strong team culture, to put people in that situation. And I would say that even if maybe a couple of them were stressed and hated it, but I think they all would say we do it again. It was good. Yeah. And the last thing, if you hadn't, I don't know if you said this or not, but after you start doing a little bit of this, just asking for feedback in your biweekly meeting, hey, how are we doing? What do you guys like? What do you not like? What should we do more of? Is is going to be surprising with what they tell you.

All right. Now let's jump into the hiring process. So I am just going to ask Natalie, like we need to hire a new position. And I'm going to I'm trying to think of a random one. Let's say that we wanted to hire a video editor because I feel like we know one friend who's literally going. We'll make it a podcast editor. If I need to hire a podcast editor, what is the first thing that Natalie would do to try to find us a podcast editor? Yeah. So

There are a few different ways that you could hire, let's say, a VA in the Philippines. The first one would be through an agency. I heavily discourage that because there's this middleman and you're not directly the one that's paying that employee, that's getting feedback from that employee. It's very, very transactional in that situation. And a lot of the people that we've talked to that have had bad experiences come to find out they were working with an agency as a middleman.

So and I would say I'm something to build on that so I guess we're not getting into the process yet because this is the Agency or direct hire the question is yeah The process that Natalie is gonna dive into is a direct hire situation And I would say the allure of an agency is very tempting because everyone is thinking I'm so busy I don't have time. I just want to find someone who's gonna do all this vetting for me If you found an agency that did the placement of a VA, maybe that would work

I'm not aware of them. I'm sure. Maybe we'll get into that at some point because people have asked us if we could, but we're not doing that right now. But the idea or the temptation of it, I can totally understand is just like, I've got a lot going on. I just want someone to get a great person and put them in my business. What doesn't work with that? And I would say just fundamentally, if you are especially the ones that I would say stay very, very far away from, are the ones that are, you pay them.

Chris Kiefer (46:53.162)

and they pay the employees. So if you think about just like economically how that relationship needs to work out, the agency is incentivized to charge you more and pay the employee less, because that's their margin. That's literally how they make their money. So- And it's not a small margin. Like most of that we're talking about, they're taking 80%. The agency is taking 80% and the employee is getting 20% of what you're paying. It's not small.

And so again, they might find rockstar employees, but you're gonna pay very similar wages that you'd probably pay an American. So it's kind of defeating the whole purpose of this arbitrage and hiring overseas. But the other thing is that they are not like, it just is a really weird dynamic. Like it would be very strange even in America if you hired someone and then you didn't get to pay them directly and you didn't know what they were getting paid and you had to go through somebody else. So that's why I would say those types of agencies where they're like,

they're managing, they're paying, they're doing everything and you just pay them, I would just stay away from that. The other one that could work, again, if you guys are aware of agencies that work well for placing where they just charge you a placement fee, that might make sense, couple thousand bucks or who knows how they would charge that, but I would say the process that Natalie's gonna dive into, in my opinion, at least at this stage in the game.

It works really well. We've actually trained our employees to use the same process to hire more employees, which is great. So now we're taking the same process that Natalie is about to explain and then tell you how to go do this. And I would say literally, if you can carve out a week of total time, I don't know, the total hours in that week would probably be 20 hours. Like if you can spend 20 hours in the week to get your first hire dialed in and make sure you don't screw anything up, in my opinion, that's worth it.

So that's what we're gonna dive into. And the last, I just thought, pay. How do you pay people quickly? What's the most common process that we've heard of for paying people? Yes, we pay all of our employees through WISE, formerly known as TransferWISE, if you've heard of that. So it's the, to my knowledge, it's the most secure with the best exchange rates. So there are other methods out there where you could pay someone that's overseas.

Chris Kiefer (49:06.986)

but the employee might be taking home substantially less because of the exchange rate. And so now the process, and I think just to qualify, there are many ways to do lots of the things that Natalie's talking about just to make this straightforward and simple. We're not like affiliates or we don't benefit in any way from telling people to use online jobs. We pay for it like everybody else. There's nothing in this process that we're benefiting from.

other than helping our friends and being excited that we're sharing this great resource that we've had. So what I would, what I would say is let's just go through this as we're hiring through online jobs. We're going to do a direct hire and not jobs. Yeah. Online jobs dot ph. So it's specifically a job board for virtual employees in the Philippines. So ph Philippines. And so this is, and the website is online jobs. Yeah. Online jobs dot ph.

you pay a monthly subscription, or you can pay annually, I believe, you can have like a free account and you can just peruse it. So if you just wanna go look and see what kind of employees are on there, you can do that. If you're wanting to actually post jobs and have messaging conversations with people, you pay that monthly subscription. It's like 60 bucks, I think, and you don't, there's no contract, so you can stop. If you're gonna hire one person,

pay that $60 one time and hire them and then cancel it. And they advertise that. They're like, this is how our pricing works. And you are not paying the job board anything for that placement. Oh, 69 a month, yeah. So this is the, if you pay annually, you pay 300 bucks. And for those of you watching on Spotify or looking on YouTube, you'll see this, but I'm just on their website right now. Super reasonable. Do we use the pro version? I think we do, right? We use the pro version, yeah. Because it comes down to how many workers you're talking to in a month.

So if you're not contacting more than 75 employees in a month, then the pro is going to work for you. And yeah, again, especially if you're just getting into this, like just hire one person, see how that goes and decide if you want to go further. But we paid for the pro one. And then like you can see it on the home page here. You can say looking for someone and you could literally say web developer, podcast editor, editor. So I want now Natalie will say that we are looking for a podcast editor.

Chris Kiefer (51:26.734)

So you can see some of the people that are here right now. This would be so embarrassing if one of our employees was just on here trying to get a new job. Hey, Carl! No, so, okay, so that's like a search feature and this is where you could directly reach out to these employees. If you search for that job description or that title and then you can say these are people...

that are advertising that they are good at that thing, right? And so you can filter and look for a match and then reach out directly to them and say, hey, I'd like to talk to you about this job. That is not what we have typically done. What we have done is posted a job. So when you post a job, then you're waiting for people who are actually actively sending in applications. So what we found is if you're looking for something that's really, really specific in a skill set, then...

going on there and searching for them and then asking those people to have a conversation with you is worthwhile. If you're looking for a bit more of a generalist or a position where you know that it's just a skillset that more people are going to have, I would recommend posting a job and then you get on that pro level, you get up to 200 applications per job and that is plenty. So you're gonna get 200 people that are probably gonna respond in the first few days if it's a good job description.

So I think just because this would be fun, uh, we don't need a podcast editor right now, but let's, let's just walk through like literally what you would do. Cause I feel like this is the type of tactical. So again, if you're listening on a walk or something, you can pause this and go back when you're sitting in front of your computer. But Natalie, go ahead and take over the keyboard here. We and again, I mean, is there anything else you would do prior to posting the job of what you're looking for?

And again, I'm just to make it simple, I'm looking for a podcast editor. How would you help me find a podcast editor? Yeah. So we know there's nothing else that I would do before that. You're going to come up with a job title. And I think podcast editor is a very reasonable job title. This is where if you're saying VA, which you could say virtual assistant or VA, you're going to have a thousand people that are going to be matching with that with their filters and be like, oh yeah, I want to apply for it. So if you can be more specific, be more specific.

Chris Kiefer (53:41.418)

So you could even say like Spotify podcast editor or YouTube editor slash podcast editor or something like that. Type of employment gig is gonna be of course, if someone's just doing like a project for you, full-time or part-time. I typically leave it as any because it depends, if you know you have full-time work for that person, definitely put full-time. But we've had a number of employees that have started with us part-time and transitioned to full-time.

And that's just more for job security. Like they've been burned before, like I mentioned, and they don't want to just throw all their eggs in one basket and then have everything be full time with you. So keep that in mind. Job description, it would be hard for me to just write one out on the spot, but this is what I'm going to tell you. What I would tell you is- ChatGPP. So you want it to be something that is partially clever, right? You don't want it to be so generic that there's just like 50 jobs for podcast editors and nothing stands out.

So be clear like you're looking for a rock star podcast editor with experience with these particular softwares that is available up to full time hours or something like that. The other things that are really important in the job description, which Chris is just, are you screen sharing this right now? Okay. So I would say if you're not using ChatGPT, this is game changing. This is a good one.

But I'm hiring a virtual assistant in the Philippines that I want to edit my podcast. Can you please create a job description? So first of all, you could yeah, it doesn't matter. It'll figure that out You could go in and just do that, but I would say it's while it's writing that I'm gonna say What other questions do you have for me to provide a better? Job description. This is a huge hack if you ever used chat GPT What?

What am I not asking you that I need to ask you? And it's still generating, so I'm just going to stop that and ask this additional thing. So now to create a more tailored job description, it's going to ask you for specifics. So we'll pause this video. And our editor, who's going to edit this, can chop this out as we're typing it. But we'll go ahead and just type this in really quick. So Natalie, why don't you go ahead and answer all those questions, or as many of them as you want. OK, so focus our niche on the pod B.

Chris Kiefer (55:58.73)

You write out your answers and then go back and narrate what you did. So we're just going to tell Happy to edit this out. So you want me to actually just go through and answer all those questions? Yeah, really short.

Chris Kiefer (56:14.542)

And then shift enter so it doesn't. Is our owner a tech guru and curious business owner? Podcast host.

Chris Kiefer (56:31.254)

and then shift enter.

Chris Kiefer (56:39.091)

We want the style to look like... Who is that? Alex from OC videos or something? Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (56:50.822)

Uhhhhhh

Chris Kiefer (56:54.057)

We use Ritter.

Chris Kiefer (57:03.039)

and YouTube.

Chris Kiefer (57:11.518)

YouTube and Adobe.

Chris Kiefer (57:17.966)

You can just put one year, you don't have to write sentences.

Chris Kiefer (57:41.11)

This is a lot. We're running out of time. That's enough, right? Yeah. Okay, we'll cut back to, so now Happy is watching this. So we're just gonna narrate what we did so far. Go ahead. Okay, so in this job description. After asking for ChatGPT to give us more feedback, Natalie went through and answered a couple of these questions. We're gonna go ahead and submit this. And now we'll watch the...

Here's the new job title, Virtual Podcast Editor Assistant, Location Remote, Job Type Flexible. And so now you've literally got the rough outline. You could probably tighten this up a little bit. I'm gonna go ahead and just take the work schedule. Yeah, okay, so this is important, but we're missing one of the most important things that I do in job descriptions, right? What's the most important? Okay.

Thank you for asking. One of the things that I always include in my job descriptions is, and this, oh my gosh, I forgot to give a shout out to our business coach, Jonathan. He was actually also one of the first people that was like, you guys need a virtual assistant, you need VAs, and he gave me the original template for a job description that I posted. And one of the things that I loved about it is that within the text, there was a specific request for how they respond with their application.

So send me your resume with your application, and also tell me your favorite 90s movie, or what's the last book you read, or something really specific like that, and put that in your subject line. So you're telling them in the job description that when they reply, please put that answer to that question in the subject line. The reason why this is important is because people can be mass applying, and...

They're just, it would be a waste of your time. They already took a job four days ago, right? And they're just sending their application to everybody. So asking for that, not only is it going to eliminate the people that are mass applying, but it's also gonna make sure that they actually read about your job and they're ready to have a conversation with you. So a simple example of this, I had hired or I had posted a job for a content creator.

Chris Kiefer (59:57.626)

And we were actually thinking content creator, I can't remember what it was actually for, but it was not related to social media. We had no social media presence at the time. And I had so many people applying, telling me how great they were with social media. And I was like, you didn't read this job description because I actually don't want you for social media. And so you recognize, okay, a bunch of these people didn't actually read it. So that is one of the most critical things. And if this is where it's like, you kind of have to be ruthless. Like I'm seeing good applicants.

but they didn't follow that direction, they're off the list, sorry. And so filling out the rest of this, you'd say? Okay, wage and salary per month. This is a confusing thing because it's actually like free text. So be mindful about how you're writing this out. I always write it out in an hourly wage because you just see a bunch of random amounts and you don't know if they're saying this is what they want per week or what. So make this broad.

five to twenty dollars per hour or something depending on what the job is, make it really broad because if you're really specific and you're saying I'm going to pay x amount per hour, it's not going to be in people's filter if they're looking for jobs. Number of hours, I would say 40 if you think it's going to be up to a full-time position because if someone's looking for 10 hours on the side of another job, they're going to say hey this isn't the job for me. And then skills, this is where you're just going to look at what's your actual

job and this is actually where it searches. So yeah, it's like a keyword search. So you're saying you want them to be able to do a specific type of editing or have a specific type of experience and you can make sure that you're not getting someone that wants to make short films and do that type of video editing and you need two minute, you know, social reels. So

Go through that, find what's applicable, and then you can decide with notifications. I would say send applications immediately to your email address. If you're not gonna be by your computer, you wanna be able to check it on your phone and see those applicants, or make sure that you're following this closely after you post this job. And keep the time zone difference in mind. I would say definitely give it 24 hours if some people are working during their day and some people are working during their night. They may be on and applying for jobs at different times.

Chris Kiefer (01:02:11.134)

Is there anything else you think we should go through this or should I exit out of this? Nope, let's exit out of this. Okay. So then the next thing is you've now posted your job and again, just for the sake of time here we're saying this, you posted this on what day of the week? A Tuesday. So you posted this on Tuesday. Now you've got a couple of hours to set up the way that you want to schedule interviews. And tell us about that. Yeah. So I think it's important to...

allow the applicant to schedule with you. And so what I have done in the past is, so if I'm, if it's being posted on a Tuesday, I'm going to say Thursday, I'm doing the first round of interviews. So that gives people time to apply on Tuesday and Wednesday and for me to invite them to those interviews for Thursday, create a scheduling link like with Calendly or we use HubSpot. So we have meeting links. And what I would do is block out like six consecutive hours in my day and then make

time slots and this first interview is going to be or actually 15 minute time slots. I think I did. You're going to do 15 minute time slots and you're going to have them set that appointment for 10 minutes of those. So there's like a five minute buffer between your meetings and you are going to have a marathon of first round interviews just to get through the top like 20 plus people.

that sent you applications, followed directions, and look like they have the skillset that you need. Don't get too deep into it. Like this is where you're really just trying to do some basic first round screening. So you look at the applications that came in, see who followed directions, see who has an intriguing looking resume, and then if it looks good, you message them directly in that online jobs website and say, this looks great, here is my meeting link, please grab a time.

and you put it on them to go in and grab that time that's gonna work for them. And then they're responsible to show up to that time. And you said these are 10 minutes that they're booking. 10 minute meetings and make it like a 15 minute, give yourself five minute buffer. Cause otherwise you're literally not gonna have a drink of water or go to the bathroom. But that's literally, you might think this is absolutely insane, but again, round one, all you're trying to do is probably, what, interview 20 to 30 of like the promising ones and just find out.

Chris Kiefer (01:04:34.006)

the like the rubric, which we'll talk about in a second of like, you need to answer four questions about each person and score them cause you're not going to be able to remember. And it's just literally like a grading rubric of like who were my top five and you know, we'll get into that, but go ahead. So you schedule them all out. So you posted this job on Tuesday, Thursday and maybe Friday, you're doing first round interviews. And they're going to be fast. And what I have done is I've created a rubric.

and the things that I rate those employees on are gonna be their English. And so this is gonna be relative because if you're posting a job for a web developer who is hardly ever gonna talk to you and is never gonna talk to clients, then they just need to have good written English. If it's someone that's gonna be answering the phone for you, you wanna make sure that they're able to communicate effectively with your clients or customers, and so you're gonna be rating them more on their spoken English.

So I give a score one to five, five being the best. How reasonable is their English? And you'll be surprised that many of the people that apply have, I mean, they have really no accent and I would say it would be hard to know that they're even in another company or another country. And then I'm also going to, so grade them on written and spoken English. I'm also gonna grade them on personality or how I feel like they would connect with our team. Once again, one to five. And then the fourth thing I'm gonna grade them on is competence.

And that's specifically for that job role. So this is where I might make some notes of things that they say that they have experience with or from their resume if I have it pulled up. But really you're pretty ruthless because you're talking to a lot of people and you're just saying like, hey, I remembered this person, they had a great personality and connected with me. They get a five for that. They're written, spoken English, and then their competence based on the job description. What questions are you asking outside of like, So this is how I. You're kind of, if I'm not mistaken, the personality written, spoken and competence, you're kind of.

extracting that from the questions you ask. What are the questions you ask in the first interview? Yes, so the first interview you want to get some questions in there that are going to have them speak to you unscripted because I have been on a number of interviews where they clearly have, maybe they're not confident in their English so they'll have answers written up and they're just like reading answers to you on their screen because you're not meeting them in person, you're meeting them on a screen. So you want to actually get a sense for how they are when it's not scripted or prepared.

Chris Kiefer (01:06:59.062)

So I might ask them another random question, like, tell me about, this is actually one I always ask, tell me about the last time that you failed at something. We have a culture of, you want someone to be willing to be honest about if they've messed up or how they made amends or how they learned from it. And so asking that question is gonna give you a sense of like, okay, so this one time at this job, or I've had some people be like.

Yeah, I like blew off this deadline and I was like, oh, okay. But I think the most important thing is outside of what they say. It's just like you said, they respond and are they? Yeah. And I just I think it's really true that like if you can just get someone, I love asking like out of the out of the ordinary questions in an interview because your people prepare and they practice and they script for the things that they think you're going to ask. And you just ask something like, tell me when you failed. And they're like, oh,

Now I have to actually show you my personality because I don't have anything prepared for this. What is the most adventurous thing you've ever done? So it's like, I don't really care if they're an adventurous person or not. I just want to know how they respond, hear how they speak. I want to get a sense for on the spot, you know, how dynamic are they in conversation? So that's important. And then I'll say, tell me about a project that you're really proud of. And that's usually when they're going to give me more of a demonstration of their competence.

If they're like, I just learned how to start editing. And I'm like, oh, okay. So they don't have a ton of experience. So I ask questions that are not super targeted towards the job description. It's more like, tell me about a project, tell me about something that you've learned, tell me about a time you failed. And then like a person question, tell me about the last adventure you went on, things like that. Who's a really important person in your life? Asking those type of questions and it's boom, very fast.

No more than really four or five questions in that first interview. And then if it seems like it's pretty promising, that's typically when I will ask, how many hours are you looking for to work and do you have any other jobs? Then from that, you've graded all of them on those four, competence, spoken English,

Chris Kiefer (01:09:04.49)

written personality and written. Then you're looking for the top, how many for the second interview? So no more than five for that second interview. So if you have 20 to 25 people, you're whittling it down to five to do a follow-up interview with, because that's where then I'm gonna spend 25 to 30 minutes and I'm going to actually dive into the job description and get a sense for their skill set. And I would say that first round interview process that Natalie just described, that is

how you get good candidates and then you treat it like a regular interview. I feel like sometimes people are like overwhelmed and they don't have time to do 30, 30 minute interviews, which makes total sense. But if you cut this down, again, it's going to be, I remember every employee that Natalie has hired, she's exhausted at the end of the day, like, cause you just talked to 12 people and that's a lot of people to process, which is why you have to have some sort of rubric. But after that,

You have just had cast a very big net and now you're going to sit down with five people and I would even say in my situation, Natalie has done these preliminary ones and then I've come in and it's great to have someone come in for the second interview to like ask maybe you have a business partner or another manager that you want involved to sit down and actually do the deep dive of like.

the competence, like do they have what it takes for this particular job? Yeah, I like on that second round, bringing in whoever is gonna be the manager or director in that role, it's important. So sometimes that's been me and it's someone that's gonna be working directly with me. So I'm the only one on that second round of interviews, but oftentimes when it's a technical hire, I'm bringing Chris in because he's gonna really dive in more to their skillset with specific software and things like that. And that second round of interviews.

This is where you also get really clear on their expectations. Are they looking for a job for six months? Are they wanting to transition out of another job and do this full time? Are they always like they are set that they're always gonna have two different jobs because like I said, they don't wanna put all their eggs in one basket. You want to dive into that and be really direct in that second interview. And I would say we've made mistakes in that and it's.

Chris Kiefer (01:11:17.238)

than one of those situations where we look back and we're like, yep, that was just a poor hiring process that led to this miscommunication. Yeah. And I would just add that the one, I think this is only happened with one employee. One of the things that online jobs does have, I'm not exactly sure how it does it, but the, um, the thing that has their like ID proof or whatever. No, there's a number of things that I'd like to talk about with this actually. Okay. So that's all the stuff that's happening in interviews going back to,

just how you use the online jobs platform, you can pin, hey, this was a good applicant, I'm going to pin them, and then they're in this other folder where you can just do a bulk message to all those people to send them, these are the 20 people I wanna send interview requests to. When you click on their profile though, you can actually get a ton of information that they have submitted. Most of them, the vast majority of them will have a 99 ID proof.

Next to their name, which means they've submitted multiple forms of ID, you know that this is their bank account that they're associated with This is their federal ID And this they are representing themselves correctly their social media Everything is showing that this is the person that you think they are and I think every person that we've hired that has worked Well, how to 99 did anyone know? Yeah, and

Uh, no, we had one employee that didn't have I think they had like a 60 or a 70 and that just means they hadn't It was it doesn't mean that something is fraudulent looking. It just means that they had not elected to submit Multiple forms of id that were requested coincidentally the person that didn't have that was one that didn't work out And it was just kind of again I'm not saying that you can't find someone that doesn't have a 99 proof But I just think that in our experience, I don't if someone's serious about getting a real job

I don't know why they wouldn't go through those processes of identifying themselves. Yes, and then you can also oftentimes see if they've taken an IQ test, you can see a disc assessment, that's another really common one, their disc profile and see a bit about their personality. And then you can see how they rate themselves in their competence with a huge number of skills, which is pretty insightful. Like if they're like, yeah, I have a one star on...

Chris Kiefer (01:13:29.398)

website design, because I had someone ask me to do it one time, but I never want to do it again, right? But you can see what they're thinking their strengths are, and it usually links to their website, which could be their LinkedIn, or oftentimes they'll have a really cool like website resume or CV. So those are all, oh, and then the final thing, when you're looking at the online jobs portal. So once you're not looking at that individual person's profile, but you're looking at their application to your job,

they can designate a certain number of points of how excited they are basically about this particular job. So I think they get a hundred points in a day that they can apply with. And so if they're like, I'm applying for this one job because I'm super excited about it, they're gonna put all a hundred points into your job. If they are mass applying, they may put one point in your job where you're like, okay.

I can clearly see they gave me one point on this, they're applying to a ton of jobs. And online jobs actually now also will put a little star by a person if it says, it'll say something like, it looks like this person's applying to a lot of jobs today. So it will actually notify you if someone's just copying and pasting through a thousand jobs, right? So the point system is actually a pretty cool new thing to get a sense for how many jobs are applying for or how actively they're looking.

Anything else for that second interview to ultimately, so you do the second interview and then you identify at the end of that interview, at least this has been my experience. I tell everyone at the second interview, we'll let you know within the next three days if you're going to get the job. And hopefully you let them know the next day. Well, I would say the one that you go for, you let them know immediately, but generally you know. I'm just saying that you tell everybody, we'll let you know in the next three days and then you sit down.

make a decision on who your top pick is and you call that person or email them immediately to let them know and then you've got a little bit of wiggle room if they are like if they end up turning it down or whatever or they've accepted a different job you can then move to the second and third person. We've never I don't think that ever has happened to us but it's just something that I learned in my old job that it's nice to just make sure that you've got a little bit of breathing room there. And then I would say the other thing is.

Chris Kiefer (01:15:51.05)

when you make that offer, at least this is how we've treated it. We just explain like what a probationary period is, which is something that, at least in all my roles I've been familiar with. And it's like, Hey, we want to treat you like a full on employee. And we are like, we're going to not fire you on a whim and just like ghost you. But in order for us to get to the place where we both feel confident about that, there's going to be a 30 to 60 day period where we're both trying to

saying either time or... Well, it's like we're not, it doesn't mean that we're going to just be rude to you in this period of time, but just letting them know that there's kind of a milestone that we're gonna hit where you will know that this is like a long-term thing and we're both getting along and this is a good success. And we want them to have the same opportunity to do that as well. So just being deliberate about there's gonna be a trial period or a few test projects that we will pay you for. That's so important.

Clarifying that we are going to pay them. Clarify that. There are scammy people that will get someone overseas to do a project for them, not pay them for it, and then ghost them. People are very hesitant, so make sure you clarify. We're doing this trial period or this trial project, and this is exactly what we're going to pay you, either hourly and you're using toggle or something to track your hours, or here's a flat rate. We're going to pay you for this new website or whatever.

Um, and yeah, I'm trying to think is there anything else after that? There's obviously we can get in a totally separate conversation on Management, I think this is that is how we would recommend hiring a va a lot of information here Um, I would be curious and then you can have closing thoughts if any of you have other questions Um on this whole process again the thing that would mean the most to us the i've heard this recently the fee that to pay For this knowledge that we just shared

would be to share this with somebody else, post this podcast link onto your social media, give a shout out like we just want to spread this and the best way to do that is by you guys who are watching this share this. So that's what that's all that I would add. And if you have other tips, tricks, hacks, things that you've learned in the process, please send them our way because we love improving our systems as well. And I would love to know if you apply this process, how did it work for you? What went wrong?

Chris Kiefer (01:18:15.266)

What could be better because who knows, maybe in six months there'll be a version two of this. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for those closing thoughts. I would say my closing thought would be if you are hesitating because of any of the fears that we listed, just know that if you are following this process, you're not gonna get taken by someone. You're not gonna get scammed. It may not work out, but that's just like any employee.

And a lot of the fear or mystery around it is going to be managed by following this process, which is why we wanted to share it. And with that, I would say thank you for tuning in. And this is a side note for happy our editor. So we're going to do two closes here, one for the pursuit of purpose, which will be the podcast version on YouTube instead of posting this on to pursue the purpose.

please post this video onto the Boolean automation channel. And then we're gonna record two commercial breaks that you can just place in the middle of this for the Boolean review software. So Natalie will do one right now, I'll do one. And that's just going to be a quick like, hey, by the way, if you didn't know this, what we do for work in our business is the review software. So anyways, hopefully that makes sense happy. You can slice those in, just interrupt a nice breaking point.

30 minutes in or 20 minutes in and 45 minutes in to the actual episode. And so here goes the opening. Welcome back to another episode of The Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris and I am here with my lovely wife, Natalie. Thank you so much for coming on, Nat. Hey, thank you. I'm excited to talk about this. And we are here to tell you everything you need to know about virtual assistance, overseas employees, hiring people in the Philippines.

And we've got a lot of stuff here, super excited for this conversation today, and would love to hear how this has impacted you once you're done. All right, second intro for the automation channel. Are you a painting company that has a lot of tasks? Well, I can tell you right now, if you are a painting company, you do have a lot of tasks that could probably be done by someone overseas. And in this video, I brought the one and only Natalie Kiefer, the expert.

Chris Kiefer (01:20:30.918)

in everyone that I've ever talked to about virtual employees on how to hire virtual assistants. This is a deep dive into the topic. We go in the pros and cons, the things to think about, and then literally the exact step-by-step process that we use at Boolean for the six virtual employees that we have hired. And hopefully at the end of this video, you not only feel inspired to hire a virtual employee yourself, but also know exactly how to go about and do that. So stick around if that's what you're interested in, and that's what we'll be talking about.

and go ahead and do your ad and then you can head in. What's my ad? For the review software. I know, what do you want me to say? Just put me on the spot to come up with an ad. So it's just gonna be like in the middle of the thing, you're gonna say, I mean I'll do mine first and then you can put your own. Perfect.

Chris Kiefer (01:21:19.274)

Just want to take a quick minute to let you guys know they're listening. First of all, hope this has been a ton of value for you. But for those of you that don't know, Natalie and I have a software business and it's a reputation management software. And it is fantastic at converting your customers into Google reviews or Yelp or Facebook or whatever other platform you care about. But we start we I personally built this specifically to meet the needs of the painting industry and the home service industry.

but any industry that has a decent number of projects, sales, interactions with customers, and that is a B2C business, is going to get a ton of value out of this software. So if you're interested, please take a look in the link below, Boolean Review, and you can get a demo, look at a trial of the software, but that's what we do, that's our income. And if this video, regardless of what industry you're in for hiring a virtual assistant, because we think that this is applicable to everyone,

If you have a business that is customer facing and would benefit from Google reviews, click the link below. Now, back to the VA commerce.

Chris Kiefer (01:22:29.71)

I'm gonna bring a lot right here.

Hey, I just want to stop really quickly and tell you the business that we're talking about that we are hiring these awesome VAs for is for the Boolean Review software. And our plug here, Boolean Review is a software that helps painting businesses and other home service businesses get a huge number of Google reviews. It's the highest converting software on the market that we're aware of.

And we're helping painting businesses to crush their competitors in their market and show up number one on Google. And we're doing that just by making sure that their happy customers are getting that feedback out on Google. And we do it better than anyone that I'm aware of. So if this has brought value to you, or if you know of a business that has a lot of customers that could benefit from Google reviews, click the link below and check out the software and we can give you a demo.

All right, happy. So take those, put them where you need to put them. And the last thing that I just remembered is this would be for the Boolean automation video. So this is going to be that welcome back to the channel segment that you can edit in there. So this is probably overwhelming. Now you're looking at this. Yeah, you're good to go. So I'm going to record this. This is going to be for the Boolean automation YouTube video. Again, you're going to put this on the Pursuit of Purpose podcast, but you will not put the Pursuit of Purpose.

podcast video onto that channel, you're going to put the video onto the YouTube automation channel. Welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Chris. I am the owner of Boolean Review and Boolean Automation. And if you are, if you don't know, welcome back to the channel. My name is Chris. If you're new here, Boolean is an automation consulting and automation review software. So we work specifically in the painting industry to help painting businesses.

Chris Kiefer (01:24:20.882)

eliminate hours and hours, literally a hundred hours of manual data entry and reporting that painting businesses between seven and ten million are seeing. And we completely eliminate all that, increase their reporting metrics, the ways that they're able to make decisions. That's the automation consulting business. And then we also have the Boolean review software system, which is the best way to get Google reviews for your business.

Any B2C business that gets business from search results on Google or people looking you up online can benefit from this. So if you're interested or if that makes sense, you can click the links below to get a demo or get a trial of the software BooleanReview.com. Thanks so much for watching. Now let's get into this topic on VAs.

Chris Kiefer (01:25:08.17)

And I think that's everything that you would need. Happy to let me know if you have any other questions, but thank you so much and we'll see you around.