This is a quick but valuable post.
For many small business owners, the prospect of outsourcing sensitive tasks to people overseas is a daunting and intimidating prospect. If an employee does something wrong in your own country you can report them to the police. How would this work if your employee was in a completely different country?
In the early days of hiring people, it can feel much more comfortable to hire people locally, however it’s also way more expensive and carries with it the burden of “red tape” associated with employing someone.
So I’m going to give you 2 quick tips that you can put into action today in order to start the process of hiring people no matter how small your business is.
Hire through hiremymum.com.au
This is an Australian website for stay at home mums to get work with flexible conditions. You can typically find someone competent to help you with a range of simple yet time consuming business tasks in the $20 – $30/hour range.
Although I hire lots of people overseas, I currently employ 3 women who I hired through hiremymum.com.au here in Australia. There are certain tasks (such as bookkeeping and client account management) that I think are better performed by people in Australia.
Even for tasks that I will eventually be comfortable outsourcing to people overseas, it can be an excellent “stepping stone” to start with someone local and in your timezone who you can easily chat with on the phone.
Some tips for hiring successfully on hiremymum.com.au:
- Get the premium listing: it doesn’t cost much, it keeps you on the homepage for longer and it supports the site
- Hire remotely and put your job in the “work from home” category: you will get way more applicants of a higher calibre at a lower hourly rate if you allow people to work from anywhere and set their own hours. Also, by hiring from anywhere you don’t restrict yourself to only candidates within a specific area; you can get the best person Australia wide to work with you.
- Put “work from anywhere, hourly pay, set your own hours” in the headline: a tremendous amount of jobs on hiremymum.com.au (particularly in the work from home category) are things like commission only sales or network/multi-level marketing “opportunities” masquerading as jobs. You help differentiate yourself from these shitty advertisers by stating up front that you’re paying a fixed hourly rate.
Their first job is to hire themselves
This was quite an epiphany.
When I was going to hire someone in Australia (after outsourcing through oDesk for quite a while) I was faced with the prospect of filling out forms for the ATO, figuring out PAYG, super and work cover. Yech. I hate that stuff. It was enough to dissuade from me from actually taking action UNTIL …
I realised that I could hire someone and make it their first task to figure all that stuff out. After all, it’s all there on the ATO website, and if you have any questions you can just call the ATO. All the information is freely available I just didn’t have the time to deal with it all.
So that’s what I did: I hired someone as an executive assistant and made it their first task to figure out the details of their own employment.
Red tape: ZERO.
Happy hiring!
