Hiring Remote Employees For Startups and Small Businesses

Running a startup, hiring remote employees and growing your revolutionary idea into a successful venture is probably one of the toughest goals to meet. 

Adding to that, building a team when you lack those much-needed recruitment skills is a nightmare.

It takes a lot of time, effort and money to find the right people with whom you could share your workplace for a long period. But, investing too much time into building a team when you are a small team of passionate innovators is another great roadblock.

You spend hours, weeks and even months searching for the perfect people for the job.

By the time you meet the perfect candidate for your startup, it’s too late. You’ve already lost a considerable amount of money and time. Not to mention the workload that’s been accumulating over time.

What would you do in such a situation?

You hire the right people at the right time. 

And, I am going to share with the secret formula that we use to hire the most talented people from across the globe.

It takes only a few hours.

Let’s start!

Let your managers/team leaders do the hiring if you don’t have a proper HR team

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The most common pattern with an unsuccessful startup is – The founders try to do everything on their own

This eventually leads to a lot of confusion and friction in the work environment. 

People who manage your workforce are more than qualified to recruit suitable candidates for the job. Let them handle the recruitment process so you can focus on promoting, growing and establishing your startup.

Hire a mix of on-site and remote employees for maximum productivity.

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Most of our clients entrust us with a few repetitive tasks such as customer support, after-sales and office administration

Hiring talented people from different geographical locations ensures continuous operation. Especially, if you are in the tech industry, you’d want to keep business completely operational 7 days a week.

For group meetings and conferences, you can rely on your on-site employees, and for booking meetings, managing your servers, assigning projects and outreaching, you could simply hire a remote employee.

Considering how easy it is to hire a virtual employee, you can hire and replace VAs in a few minutes in case of urgency.

Hiring freelancers VS hiring remote employees, what’s the difference?

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Virtual assistants are your remote employees while a freelancer works on an hourly or project to project basis. 

You can integrate a virtual employee into your on-site team and increase the overall productivity of your entire workforce. 

So, it all comes down to one simple question? Whom should you hire as an employee?

Well, it depends on what you want them to do.

If it is cold calling, booking appointments and managing your calendar, I’d advise in favor of hiring a full-time VA with at least 2 years of experience in your respective field. 

But,

If you want someone to help you out with developing an app or a brand identity for your client within a few weeks, you should hire a freelancer.

Screening and testing before finalizing

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Office culture is changing at a dramatic pace. Now, most of us don’t even need to visit the office to get the job done.

Now, kids with 3 months of working experience can launch a business within a few days and make millions of dollars with just a social media profile. 

So, it’s not just about the past work history and documented experience.

If you are a multimillion-dollar company that generates stable income every month, you can afford to hire people without strict screening. 

Startups don’t have such an option. Most of the startups and small businesses struggle for the first two years. So, hiring the wrong employee could not only cost you money but also cost you a lot of your precious time. Time, that your team could have spent on doing something of more importance.

But, how exactly do you screen an employee?

Well, interviewing or screening someone in today’s digital age is stupid simple.

You need to have a Skype account, a mic, and a decent internet connection. 

Most prospects will have a script ready to shoot at you as soon as you start asking questions about their work experience and expectations.

So, avoid asking those questions.

Here’s a list of questions you could ask your VA/Employee:

  1. What do you think about our Startup? How can we improve our services/products?
  2. What’s the most interesting project(s) you’ve worked on?
  3. Have you worked with similar teams on similar projects?
  4. We ran into X problem the other day, what would you do in such a situation?
  5. We use [X] CRM/Tool to manage our workflow, do you know how to use them?

These questions are a bit different than your generic interview questions but these will give you a good idea of the prospect and their capabilities.  

Moreover, it’s pretty rare to find someone who’s prepared for these questions. You will get some candid answers which will help you in making an informed decision when finalizing your future team member.

Top countries to hire remote employees from

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At the time of writing this article, WoodBows hires full-time and remote employees from:

  1. The United States of America [Cold calling, sales, and product awareness]
  2. Canada [Cold calling, sales, and product awareness]
  3. Philippines [General office admin taks]
  4.  India [Tech, IT, Software, Programming & Team Management]
  5. Australia [Sales and team management]
  6. United Kingdom [After sales support & on-site jobs]

Developing countries offer promising talents at a very reasonable hourly rate which enables businesses and startups across the globe to close deals, get fundings and build great products without spending a fortune on building an initial product prototype.

All the countries listed above teach English as a second language. So, it becomes easy to communicate with them and get daily progress reports.

Having a probation period for your new employee

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1 week of our paid trial will help you in figuring out if the shortlisted employee is a good fit for your team or not. At WoodBows, we recommend using our 10hours/week plan to any client who isn’t 100% confident about hiring a remote employee. 

Since we also don’t have any contract or minimum commitment period, prospects can hire a VA for a few weeks and evaluate their performance at the end of the week using our End of Day(EoD) report.

What information should you share with your new employees?

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You can share pretty much any piece of information including passwords, roadmaps and research materials with our VAs without thinking twice as we have very strict data protection policies and make sure that all the communication between the client and the VA happens through our email servers. 

Additionally, if you want to take security and password sharing to a new level, you could use any of the below listed one-time information sharing tools to destroy any data after single use:

  1. 1ty.me
  2. Privnote.com
  3. Safenote.co

Now that all the vitals questions are answered, let’s talk about the elephant in the room – When should you hire a VA/Remote Employee? Or Is it the right time to hire a VA/Remote Employee?

The short answer is; YES!

If you are running any type of business, you must have a team working for you. Postponing hiring talented people might be costing you a lot of money in revenue.

If you are a one-person company, hiring even a single employee will reduce your workload by 50%.

Imagine this:

“You call 100 people to spread the word about your awesome new startup and have 1 hour left to every other important task”

After hiring just one employee, you can ask them to take care of the cold calling responsibility. Now, you have at least 8 hours to drive the business forward.

That being said if you are not making any money, hiring any more employees might not be the best decision. In such a scenario, only hire people if you have sufficient funds to keep the business afloat while your entire team focuses on growing the startup and transforming your revolutionary idea into a money-making machine.

Conclusion

Our clients who weren’t confident in the beginning now have more than 6 virtual employees working for them. Everything is monitored and screened. So, you can have the much-needed peace of mind when sharing confidential data and information.

Even though this article is targetted toward startups, businesses of all sizes can make use of these tips and grow their team while keeping the cost of operation comparatively low.

Send us a message if you think you are ready to try your hands at hiring your very first virtual assistant or if you have feedback to share with us. 

You will get a demo account with all the bells and whistles. 

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