4 Questions That Must Be Answered Before Remote Hiring

In today’s episode, you’re going to discover the four questions that help you make your next hire a better hire, saving you time and help you avoid what could be potentially a very costly mistake of hiring the wrong person. Welcome to the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast, a practical guide to growing as a leader in fueling your future. I am so excited to be bringing you these four questions. Now, before I get into those, I just want to start out by saying I can’t guarantee what the sounds you’re going to hear may be in the background of this episode, maybe none. I am going to run this through Adobe podcast, uh, and avid, uh, use the AI to clear out the background noise. But I am sitting in a camper right now. A trailer actually in a Euro Camp campground just outside of Rome, Italy. The campground has got tourists and, uh, people from all over Europe as well as the United States. We’ve been meeting people from all over the world. Uh, we we rode into town yesterday on the bus with a family from Australia. We’ve met people from the United States. We’re meeting people from England, from Bulgaria, Romania, uh, Czechia, I mean, just there. Uh, Istanbul. Like, we’re just having a great time, but this is a small trailer, and my kids may be coming in and out. Um, they’re at the pool right now, but they could come back at any point. Uh, my mother in law was with us, and she’s not a pool bug. And so she’s here in the trailer with me. And so I’m just going to start by saying if there’s any background noise. A golf cart just drove by. Don’t know if you heard that or not, but, uh, I want to record this. I want to get this out there because a lot of people are hiring, and I want to get this out there to help you make your next hire better, even if you’re not in a place where you’re hiring right now. Uh. Take this. Listen to it, file it away, and make sure you have it accessible to you when you do go to hire. So what is going to be happening in today’s episodes or in today’s episode? Three things. First, the four questions that must be answered before hiring your next remote team member. And these really are very specifically, um, designed to help with the remote team side of stuff. We’re also going to look at today’s leadership axiom. Uh, I end every episode with a leadership nugget tip, axiom, proverb, whatever you want to call it. And then for those of you that do listen because you’re also trying to live a location independent lifestyle, be a digital nomad. And the travel side of what we do is appealing to you. Make sure you listen through to the end, because I’ve got a travel update from you, especially a really cool trick that we learned in Rome that all of us are enjoying. So make sure you pay. Stay to the end if the travel thing is of interest to you. All right, so what are the four questions? These four questions aren’t really in any particular order, but they really need to be answered. And now some of them, you know, one, two, three of them may seem obvious to you. These may seem, um, not obvious at all. Maybe you’ve never thought about these, but I really think these four questions are crucial. And it’s not about how much you’re going to pay or where you’re going to hire or anything like that. Um, and so let’s let’s go ahead and unpack these one at a time. Number one, what outcome is the role responsible for? Now notice the word there is outcome not what task is this role responsible for. Um but what is the outcome they’re going to do? Not just tasks. Um, if you hire based upon the idea of what tasks do I want this person to do, you’re not going to be able to grow that person into other things, into other areas. You’re going to hire very narrow, um, uh, skill sets, and you’re going to find yourself frustrated because here’s the thing. Your needs are going to change and evolve and grow as your business does. And the idea is you want to hire a team that can grow with you. Now, yeah, you may start out if you’ve never hired before and you’re just trying to get a couple of things off your plate, you may be looking to hire some freelancers. Well, the outcome isn’t a task list. The outcome is to free you up, to take your business to the next level, so you can start to hire full time team members if that’s your your goal. And so the question you really have to wrestle with here is what is the right outcome? What is the outcome this role is responsible for really. And sometimes we shy away from answering this because we can feel a little selfish when we say it like, well, the outcome is really to give me ten more hours a week, so I’m not working 60 hour weeks. Okay, well, if that’s the outcome, label it. I’m not saying you’re going to put this in the job description. You need to very clearly understand the outcome of the role and responsibility for this position. This is going to really help you clarify focus, and it’s going to help you prevent really vague expectations. Or the other side of that is, if you think about, you’re going to start trying to think of every little task and eventually what happens, inevitably you’re going to hire somebody and this is what you’re going to hear. At some point, you’re going to hear them say, oh, that’s not my job. Because, see, you’re going to miss an important task. And if you hire somebody to complete tasks the moment you realize, oh, wait, I also need you to do this. This is where they’re either going to say to you, that’s not my job, or they’re going to quietly quit on you. They’re going to start looking for a new role because they’re going to be sitting there going, that’s not what I was hired for. I was hired to complete a task. And now you’re adding this task. And so clearly define the outcome of the role. Number two, how are you going to measure success. One of the things that Dave Ramsey says all the time that I really, really admire and agree with is he says to be unclear is to be unkind. And you need to make sure that when you’re hiring, you are setting very clear expectations at the at the forefront. Um, people are are surprised sometimes to hear that, you know, we’ve got some tech support people, um, and different parts of the world. And I expect them to be checking support tickets throughout the hours of 9 to 5 East Coast time because the vast majority of our clients are East Coast time of the United States of America, that is the official time of the company. Even where I am right now, I’m I’m like seven hours ahead of East Coast time. But our official company time is still 9 to 5 East coast United States of America time. Well, when I’m hiring for when my team now is hiring for tech support and we’re able to say, hey, the outcome we’re looking for is for our clients to not have, uh, support requests sitting in an inbox, not hearing from us. The outcome that we’re looking for is that we acknowledge, and I don’t I don’t like using automated replies for this. I don’t like using I, I want a team member to To acknowledge we’ve received it, we understand it. We’ll get it done by this time. Or hey, we received it. We’ve got some questions. All right. And so I want clearly one of our core values is to, uh, to provide a first class experience and to communicate on a cadence. And that cadence is I want clients to hear from us very quickly when they submit a support ticket. Well, people are shocked to find out that I’ve got people working through the middle of the night, you know, and they’re like, how do you how do you get people to do that? Very simple. When we’re hiring and we’re interviewing, even in the job description, it just says, here’s the expectation. Nobody if you apply for the job and you’re like, well, but I really don’t want to work, you know, through the middle of the night. Well, then you’re a moron for applying for the job, because it’s really clear that this is a job that requires you to work 9 to 5 USA Time. So you have to figure out very clearly the details of your expectations and how to communicate those. How are you going to measure success? And you need some very clear metrics. These have to be measurable. They have to be measurable because what gets measured gets managed. And if you don’t have something to measure you have nothing to manage. Um and worse and even worse is you don’t have something to delegate to manage. You can’t delegate, um, feeling you can’t delegate. You know something that’s subjective. It’s got to be objective. It’s got to be very clear. And you kind of decide these metrics can be weekly. They can be monthly. They can be quarterly. Um, there has to be some type of very specific deliverable, some type of very specific metric. You need to use feedback loops. You really we really need to think this through? One of the things that we use, for example, is we use a weekly report that everybody on our team, everybody on the team submits it every Friday, and it asks them a couple questions about their week. Um, that gives us as leadership team a pulse of how our team is doing. And, and so you have to have some very clear feedback loops, um, and understand exactly what you’re looking for your people to do. If you don’t have this figured out, you know, if you don’t have turnaround times figured out, if you don’t have very specific deliverables figured out, you’re you’re going to be in a lot of trouble because your people are going to be confused. They want to do a good job for you, but you’re not setting them up with clarity so they know what a good job looks like. All right. Question number three. What kind of person is going to thrive in this kind of work? Now, this is tricky. You want to think beyond skills here. You’ve got to consider character, their motivation, their independence or dependence level. And honestly, we have found that the best tool and resource for this is the six types of working genius. We really like this assessment we use in the hiring process. And when we create a job description we assign a job description. Hey, is this person going to be a galvanizer. Are they going to be a person of tenacity? You know, are they going to be a wanderer? Um, you know, we take the six working geniuses and we try to figure out what, what kind of person is going to thrive with this because I want my team, even though most of my team are remote and work from their their own homes. Um, I want them to, uh, the proverbial. I want them to proverbially. That is a weird. That is a hard word. I can’t say I shouldn’t have tried to just wing that, but I want them to. I want them to have the sense of skipping to work in the morning. I want them excited to go to their desk. I want them excited to log in to maybe not excited, not not the right word, but I want them to at least looking forward to it. I don’t want there to be any dread. I want there to be the absence of dread. You know, I hate email, and there are times normally, normally when I go to check email, I just have this little sense of this little feeling of dread, right? And I don’t want my team to have that in their job. Now, there may be some things where it’s unavoidable. Like I can’t avoid that. I’m, you know, I’m always at some point going to have email. And so I should probably probably going to. Um, so I may not be able to eliminate that, but I’ve reduced those things to the point where, um, it’s I don’t have an overwhelming sense of dread, and that’s what I want for my team. There’s going to be a few things that are just not going to like, but on the whole, are they excited? Are they motivated when they go to open their what’s their morale like? That’s one of the questions we ask everybody. What was your morale like this week? Um, because we want to know is everybody’s morale high? Do you have a high morale? And I can’t judge this by walking around the office. You can’t remote teams. You you know, you you can walk around, you know, manage by walking around m w m m. But you can’t do that when you have a remote team. So you got to have a way that you’re checking in with people. And one of the best ways to ensure somebody has a high morale. Somebody is excited. Somebody is enjoying their work is to make sure that when you hire someone, you’re asking yourself, what kind of person is going to thrive in this kind of work? So when I think about the objective objectives for the job, and I think about the metrics that are going to be measured. Is it going to be requiring somebody that loves details? Is this going to be somebody that eats, breathes, sleeps? Do they really love details or do they prefer. Is this somebody that’s going to really be powered up and very energized by organizing people? You know, is this going to be a people organizer, somebody that likes to bring people together around a cause that’s a galvanizer? You know what? What kind of person is really going to like this? What kind of character traits do they need? What’s going to motivate them. Um, and then hire for that. Too many people jump to what do I need them to be able to do? You know, they think about their their skill set, and that’s not where you start. That’s not where you start. If that’s where you’re starting, you’re thinking like a manager, not a leader. And leaders grow things, managers manage them. A good manager never changes anything. A manager keeps everything running and will eventually run a business into a business organization, into the ground. Because they’ve never changed. They’ve never iterated, they’ve never adjusted. They manage. They take the, the the standard operating procedures. They take the goal, they take what needs to be accomplished. And they manage all the resources to make that happen and make that happen again and again and again. And when managers hire, they think about that. What do I need to get this to happen. Leaders think different leaders go. Where are we going? Is the vehicle we’re using to get there the right vehicle? What kind of people are going to be satisfied and still want to be here five years, ten years, 15 years from now? What’s going to have to be different in our company in five years than compared to what we’re doing right now? So we’re still relevant. So leaders just think a little bit different than managers. And that’s fine. You need both. You really do. But for hiring as a leader you got to step back and think, man, what kind of person is going to really just thrive in this? And now the fourth question before I get to the fourth question, I want to take a second. And I’m going to pause right here in the flow of this. And I want to encourage you, if you or someone that the idea of hiring makes you a little bit nervous, a little bit uncomfortable. You have a lot of questions. Or if you’re thinking, I don’t have job descriptions, I don’t have policies. Uh, you know, I don’t I don’t know what we’re going to talk about. And meeting agendas. I don’t know what, um, metrics to have if you’re just like, or if you have some of these things, not all of them, or maybe you’ve hired in the past and it didn’t work, and you’re like, I tried it. I hired a couple VA’s and, you know, it just wasn’t a great experience. You’ve, you’ve you’re feeling like, oh, I spent some money. I spent some time there. And so you’re a little, you know, you’ve lost some momentum, you’ve lost some resources, you’ve lost some confidence. Or maybe you just don’t because you’ve never done it before. Um, I want to invite you to my next 90 day accelerator. It’s called the Team Engine. And see, I love hiring, but I’ve hired hundreds of people. I have done this. I used to run a summer camp, and every summer we’d have to hire staff. And so I did. I did. I’ve done thousands of interviews. I figured this out the other day. You know, they say that, you know, you have to spend 10,000 hours doing something before you master it. I have spent way more than 10,000 hours interviewing, hiring and onboarding team, not counting the hours in leadership, just in just in hiring and onboarding well over 10,000 hours. And in that time, I’ve learned what works. I’ve learned what doesn’t. I’ve made all the mistakes, and I just I love hiring. I think it’s so rewarding to, like, every once in a while I’ll be walking, you know, with my wife, we’ll be talking and we’ll be, you know, just appreciating what we have. And we’ll talk about our team. We’ll talk about our full time team and the fact that we have these two guys right now that started with us. They were single at the time. Now they’re both married. They both have babies. Two of our other staff. Um, one was married when she came to us, but she’s on maternity leave. We’re waiting for a text message literally any day. The baby should have been here yesterday. We’re still waiting for the text message. Any day we’re going to get a text message that her baby is born. Another one of our staff members. She got married after joining the team. Uh, her and, uh, she’s on maternity leave. They’ve got a six week old. And so it’s so rewarding to know that we’re providing for these families. Yes, we’re providing for our kids and our kids future, and we’re having a great time living our life right now. But we’re we’re helping other people. And that’s so rewarding. I absolutely love the fact that I get to be able to do that. And so I want to take the experience that I’ve have and the success that we now have time and time again hiring people. And I’ve broken it down into, uh, 12 trainings. And so over 90 days, over 90 days each week you’re going to get a pre-recorded video. You can watch the video, you’re going to get a homework assignment, and then you can come to a Q&A and ask your questions. And then the next after the Q&A, you’ll get next week’s video, you’ll watch the video, you’ll have the homework assignment, you’ll come to the the Q&A. So you need 2 to 4 hours per week. But at the end of those 90 days, you’re going to be ready to hire, you’re going to be ready, and I’m going to show you how I hire offshore, how I hire remote, how I hire very qualified, extremely successful people. Uh, Between, you know, four to, you know, ten, maybe $15 an hour, some more depending, you know, $25 an hour. Um, but the majority in the 5 to $9 an hour range. And, um, I’m going to show you how I hire them, how I vet them, how I prepare for them, how this is my favorite. When a new team member starts at our company, nobody has to take a week off to train them for a week. We have a self-guided on demand training and onboarding process. Absolutely. Love it. Um, you know, and so team members train themselves and they’re, they’re they’re up and ready to go in a matter of a couple days and they can hit the ground running. And so you’re going to get you’re going to get job description templates. You’re going to get um, our onboarding, um, self-guided, uh, staff onboarding resources. You’re going to get, um, interview questions. You’re going to get, um, the weekly one on ones. You’re going to get templates for metrics and KPIs and all. You’re going to get everything you need to hire that you can customize and alter for yourself. And then, um, um, well, I can’t give you the bonus because I’m recording this. We’re not going to have enough time for, for for the bonus. But, um, the, the for those that, that do get signed up, um, in time for our, our, our bonus, um, which I’ll go ahead and share what it is because maybe you’ll listen to this in the future and you’ll reach out and get on a wait list for this. I’m going to run this 90 day accelerator once every quarter. So four times a year. Um, so you may want to jump on the waitlist if you sign up early. I will actually co-lead one of your very next interviews, and I’ve done hundreds of thousands of interviews. I’ll sit there with you. Co-lead it, help you vet the next person. And I’m so confident that the team engine is going to work for you. That if the very first hire you make after team engine, if you use everything in it that I show you, if the first hire doesn’t work, I’ll refund you what you paid to your registration fee for Team Engine. I’m going to. I’ll just refund you the no questions. Hey, sorry it didn’t work out. Here it is. Here. Here’s your refund. Keep all the resources. Keep all the templates. Keep all the training. Um, and and and here’s your money back. I absolutely know that it’s going to work for you. That’s why I’m, um, willing to offer that. The alternative is to hire on your own. And maybe it works out. Maybe it doesn’t. Normally, you’re going to. Even if you hire offshore, you’re going to you’re going to invest anywhere from three to get this get this ready $1,000. Let’s say you’re paying somebody three $4,000 a month, and it takes three, four months for you to realize, like, this just isn’t working out. You have spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars lost momentum. You’re frustrated. Who knows what opportunities you’ve missed out on. Your confidence is shaken for the next hire. You could have had brand reputation harm. Like there’s a there. It is expensive to hire the wrong team member for a fraction of that. You can have a system in place and know that you’re going to hire the next person. The be the right person. So reach out and let me know. Send me an email, Eric at podcast.com. I’m still working on getting my new email for the rebrand of the show. Um, but send me an email, Eric, at podcast.com and I will get you information on Team Engine or the wait list. And if you’re listening to this in the future and Podcast.com isn’t working anymore, email me at Eric at because I’m getting that domain. I have that domain. I’m just getting it reset up right now. So Eric at Eric Dingler. Com. All right. So question number four. Question number one what outcome is the role responsible for. Question number two how will success be measured. Question number three what kind of person thrives in this. Question number four what will this hire free me or someone else up to. Do you see every hire that you make needs to make it so somebody else has more time to do something else. I love the whole concept of buy back your time. It’s a great book. It’s it’s full of a lot of of of great stuff. Um, but not every single hire is going to be that way for that. So that works to hire a very specific type of person for somebody at a very specific level in their company. But every time you hire when I. When I hired my first team member for my web design agency, it was to help with support tickets. Um, and because remember, I dreaded seeing those emails every day. So, you know, I hired him. Our next hire then freed up that person so he could do help me with more website development stuff. Um, by taking on support tickets, we’ve now hired a support person again that helps with, you know, support tickets. So now I’ve got the the second person able to do more development. So the first person that I hired five years ago is able to help with leadership now of web services. So and but I knew what I was hiring for um, I led my team. Well, I’ve developed them well, um, empowered them, equipped them. And I know that when I hire someone, I have to know what will this hire free me or someone else up to do? Because I don’t want to just hire somebody and then find people sitting around going, well, I don’t I don’t really have anything to do because they’re not doing it. No, no, no, no, no. We’re going to be ready for you to have something to do. And you get you got to be careful with this. It’s got to be strategic because if not, people will fill their time with wasted things. And you don’t want that. All right. So thank you for listening through those four. I hope that was helpful to you. I do have this week’s leadership tip of the week and a travel update. But before I do that, if that was helpful to you, if you got anything out of that, please review and subscribe. And if you’re on Spotify, leave a comment. Would love to read those. Um, reviewing and subscribing is gold. Honestly, um, it just helps so much. And I would really, really, really appreciate that. Okay. So leadership tip of the week leadership axiom of the week I need to come up with a better name for this. Um, if you have an idea let me know. Let me know if it should be leadership tip. Leadership axiom. Leadership proverb. I don’t know, leadership nugget, whatever, whatever idea you have. But this is this is so important for your leadership. And the lesson is this the leadership tip. Is this what you allow? You approve? If you allow somebody on your team to get away with doing something that isn’t the way you want it done isn’t to the standard of your core values is even maybe inappropriate. You by allowing it because you’re afraid to say something, you don’t want to deal with the conflict. What if they quit? You have just approved it. And when it gets your stamp of approval. It becomes repeatable. It becomes repeatable by others. So what you allow. You approve. So don’t shy back from stepping in and saying, hey, listen, let’s course correct here a little bit. Let’s let’s bring this back to center. This is what we want. Recently somebody on my team, they did something and they said um, they changed a process and they said, um, you know, we have this thing that if you own the ball on a project, you have to give a daily update. And this person said, um, since I’m waiting for the client, um, I’m not going to make a daily update because I’m just waiting for them. And so there’s no new update? No, I mean, I understand where they’re coming from, but no, no, no, no, I can’t allow that because I can’t approve that. Because that’s not what the system, that’s not the purpose. And so I just was like, hey, I understand where you’re coming from. But no, that’s not we. If you own the ball in a project, you give a daily update. Even if you copy and paste the one the day before that. And you may think that that’s a waste of time. But here’s this is the process. This is the system. So what you allow you approve. So you got to be careful with that. All right. So finally for the travel update, for those of you that love traveling, let me just tell you this. Rome. Oh my goodness. You can’t spend too much time in Rome. We have had an amazing time in seeing the Sistine Chapel. We have had an amazing time. The the Colosseum, the forum, the pantheon. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. It’s so, so amazing. Um, but here’s the tip. Here’s the thing I want to share with you before I wrap the show up. All around Rome, they have free water. They they have these, um, free fountains everywhere. They’re like almost 3000 of them. And there’s free little water fountains. They just look like little noses coming up there. And no nose or something like that just means nose and Italian. And it’s clean, fresh water. It’s tested, you know, unbelievable amounts of times. I mean, I forget what the quotes, what the statistics say. It’s tested like, you know, 250,000 tests, you know, quality samples a year. Like it’s ridiculous. Um, so great drinking water. Now they also have Casa de Aguas, which are these bigger water fountain areas outside of most metros. And you can fill your water bottle and you can get still water or you get sparkling water. Well, we get these little squeeze water flavors. I like the grape. Um, we get these little squeeze water flavors, um, and we carry those around, and we like to go up to the sparkling machines or go up to the aqua Agua Casa de Agua. House of water. And fill our water with the sparkling one. There’s no line. There’s. There’s a big. There’ll be a big line for the still water. The flat water. And there’ll be hardly anybody in line for sparkling. I don’t like sparkling water by itself, but I’ll refill my water jug, my water bottle, with sparkling water, and then I squeeze in some of that water flavor. And it’s just like having, um. It’s like having pop. Like having a grape pop grape soda, but without the sugar. Um, with the with that, without all the stuff that actually, you know, makes it worse for you, dehydrate you. I’m hydrated. I’ve got plenty of water. It’s absolutely amazing. I love it. So there’s your travel tip for today. All right. Well, with that, I look forward to reading your review or comment. Um, and want to say thank you so much for being here, being a part of the podcast. Until next time, chase the big dream. Lead with courage. And safe travels.