5 Steps to an Amazing Hiring Process for Agencies
Key Takeaways
- Start with the outcomes you want. Picture the monthly one to one and the scorecard metrics you'll judge them by, then work back to outputs, skills, and finally the role.
- Most agency owners start hiring at 100 or 120% capacity. Noel wants you asking what you'll need in six and 12 months instead.
- Put a short video of yourself at the top of the job post, add testimonials from your team, and spell out every stage: application, screening, test, interview.
- The test matters more than the interview. Noel recommends a custom one to two hour task built from the actual work.
- Most of the value of references comes from telling the candidate you'll call their current manager, then asking what that manager would say.
- Every new JobRack hire gets 15 to 20 minutes with each team member. Ask your existing team what they wish they'd been told and turn the answers into your onboarding doc.
Noel Andrews is the owner and founder of JobRack, which helps online business owners, especially agency owners, hire remote team members from Eastern Europe. He bought the business in 2018 after 15 years leading large corporate teams and had a team of 15 at the time of recording. Gray MacKenzie hosted and walked him through the hiring process start to finish.
Start with outcomes, and start six months early
Gray asked how the best employers decide whether they’re even hiring for the right role. Noel’s answer: don’t start with the role.
What’s much better is to start with, what are the outcomes and the outputs that you want to produce, ideally outcomes. If you think forward a few months, when you’re sitting in their monthly one to one and you’ve got their employee scorecard with you… what are the metrics that you’re going to judge them by? What’s their success criteria?
Outcomes point to outputs, outputs point to skills and experience, and the role takes shape last. The second half of his answer was about timing.
Typically agency owners are going to start thinking about hiring when they’re about 100% capacity, maybe 120%… Whereas what you want to think about, really ideally, should be, what do you need in six months and in 12 months? And that then ensures you get someone that isn’t just outpaced on day one.
Hiring from a lower-cost region, he added, is what makes it realistic to start looking at 60 or 70% capacity.
Spec the role from a task list, and automate before you delegate
Gray offered his own case: 44 emails in an inbox he normally keeps at zero, and a hunch that he needed an executive assistant. Noel restated the job to be done (as little time in email as possible, without losing the relationships in it) and described how his own EA runs his inbox.
We have a couple of folders, and one of them is attention required. So when something needs my attention, it gets put in that. So I almost don’t look at my inbox anymore. I look at the attention required folder, and there are some things that she can suggest responses to, in which case she does. There are some things that she just responds to on my behalf.
From there he builds a task list, then the skills, experience, and attitude it implies. For an EA that means someone inquisitive enough to go find the Gmail filter rules that keep meeting acceptances out of his inbox, who automates before delegating, and who asks every day what else they can take off your plate.
Put yourself in the job post and tell applicants every stage
Gray skipped sourcing and asked what a healthy process looks like from the applicant’s side. Noel’s first rule is to inject yourself into the process even if you won’t be in it: “put a video of you in the job post, right up front.” Thirty seconds of the hiring manager on camera makes a candidate think “he sounds like a nice guy” and stick with a long application. JobRack also pastes testimonials from its own team into every job post. The other half is telling people what’s coming.
In the job post, we set a lot of expectations. We’re going to tell them how to apply, we’re going to tell them what’s going to involve… Then there’s going to be a screening call or a screening video. Then it’s going to be a test. Then we’re going to get on an interview and see if we’re a really good fit.
The test beats the interview, and references work before you make them
There are some people out there that are amazing interviews. That does not mean they’re amazing at doing the job you want to do. And so the test is the one opportunity you’ve got… We recommend 1 to 2 hours of task, mini project, mini scenarios.
JobRack writes a custom test for every role from what the person will actually do. Gray asked whether reference checks are always part of it. Yes, with two caveats: nobody gives a reference who’ll say bad things, and the client should make the call, since a recruiter gets different answers than a prospective employer. Noel puts 99% of the value in telling the candidate you’ll take references, then using that in the interview.
In the interview you can be saying, hey, so what’s your current manager called?… So when I speak to him, what’s he going to say is the best thing about you working for him? And then you can say, okay, well, and what would he want more from you? What would his biggest frustration be?
From signed offer to the first week
Gray had a candidate accept an offer the night before recording and asked how to make the weeks before her start a good experience. Noel’s list: tell them what to expect, offer early access to email, Slack, and a team meeting, have systems ready, and plan the first weeks around meeting people.
Whenever we want anyone to start in my business, they get 15 minutes, 15, 20 minutes with every member of the team. Now there’s 15 of us, that’s just about still doable.
Remote, you have to be intentional about that. For agencies with no written onboarding process, he offered a shortcut.
Go to your existing team and say, hey, when you started, what do you wish we told you? What do you wish we’d done? Get them to just chuck their ideas and do a Google doc, that becomes your onboarding process.
The full episode also covers Noel’s two-hour minimum for time zone overlap, the mix of roles JobRack fills, why he uses Workable, and two books: Who and Die With Zero.