Outsourcing Strategy – Take 3

Continuing my outsourcing strategy project . . .

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I signed up at onlinejobs.ph taking the one month subscription for $49.

I then spent 45 minutes looking through the most recently added resumes and emailed 5 likely looking candidates.

The next day I got up early and rushed to my computer expecting to deal with the problem of “which one will I choose”? Instead, of which there was a deafly email silence and, in fact none of these 5 people ever responded.

Trying to shake off my disappointment I returned to the site where I discovered that as well as contacting candidates directly, you can also place an ad. So that’s what I did. Within a couple of hours I had 2 responses, neither of which were of a high enough quality for what I was looking for.

When I got up the next day there were 5 more applications in my inbox and things were looking up. I started to go through each one and write down their standard of English, whether or not they’d followed the very specific instructions I’d given with regard to “How to Apply”, and what wordpress/techie experience they had.

By the end of the fourth application I was beginning to panic that I might have set the bar too high as there was no-one that jumped out at me particularly. Then I read the fifth one and I was sold. His level of english was excellent and he’d made a real effort to impress me and show willing without grovelling. The wage he was asking for was lower than I’d anticipated and he was willing to be trained. So we sent a few emails back and forth and, long story short, he started working for me, for a trail period this morning.

Very exciting!

And a whole ‘nother level of learning has begun.

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A Few Tips – Assuming you’ve written a job and person spec, so you know what you’re looking for:

1. Consider going straight for the ad rather than wasting time looking through people’s resumes who may or may not reply to your email.
2. Ask applicants to reply in a very specific way so you can get an idea of their attention to detail. For example, I asked them to make the subject of the email “Web Assistant Application – Your Name” and asked them to rate some things and send in an attached word document.
3. If language skills are important to you ask them to write a couple of paragraphs about themselves so this will give you extra information to assess them with.

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