When it comes to outsourcing for workers, many affiliates are not sure how to find the most suitable candidates. In this lesson we take a look at Our Top Tips for Hiring.

The Perfect Worker

In an ideal world, whenever you needed someone to do article writing, link building, general SEO, etc, you’d be able to find a candidate that matched those skill requirements perfectly. Unfortunately it is very difficult to find the ‘perfect’ worker just like that, so here’s some tips for an alternative approach to finding your ideal employee:

English

English is important for just about every aspect of affiliate marketing (unless you are targeting a primarily non-English-speaking country, of course). Instead of trying to find the perfect affiliate marketing worker, look for the ones with excellent English. Most SEO can be taught fairly easily, even to a beginner, but fixing someone’s English can be very, very difficult.

Training

Once you’ve found a group of candidates who meets your English expectations, look for the worker (or workers) with at least some experience in one or two of the skills you need and evaluate them on their motivation, trustworthiness and how quickly they’re likely to learn. Your ideal candidate is one who is trustworthy, motivated and a reasonably quick learner, even if they don’t have any SEO experience at all, so try to keep this in mind.

Beginning Salary

One advantage to hiring a complete beginner is that you can also start them on a lower salary than, say, a “fully trained” worker. That’s not to say you should keep their salary low in the long-term, but it does mean you can evaluate how good the worker is, at a cheaper rate than an already trained worker.

Technical Candidates

Obviously the criteria changes slightly if you need to employ someone who has skills you don’t have (e.g. a programmer or graphic designer). In this case, you can take the more traditional route and evaluate based on their existing skills; you also don’t need to evaluate specialist candidates’ English quite so closely, as their job doesn’t tend to require perfect English.

Other Tips

Go Direct

Don’t make the workers come to you - go to them! This might sound counterintuitive, but you can find more suitable candidates for your job if you actively do your own searching, rather than being limited to selecting from those who've applied for your job postings.

Many job hiring sites will allow you to view CVs and relevant skills, and you can use this to filter out suitable candidates you’d like to hire.

Use your current staff

Sometimes the best way to find your ideal candidates is by asking those you already employ! Your workers have friends who probably have similar skills and intelligence, and it’s worth finding out if they know anyone with the skills you need.

The advantage here is that your workers will only refer someone who they really think is suitable – because they know if they refer someone terrible, it’ll reflect badly on them.

Negotiate

Don’t be afraid to negotiate with potential workers; if you find a great candidate with a part-time job already, and you’re willing to offer them fulltime work, propose this to them and see what they say; they may well be willing to leave their part-time job(s) to come work fulltime for you!

Also don’t be afraid to negotiate pay; no matter how great a developer may be, and no matter how much you want to hire him/her, why should you pay him/her $900/month when you know you could employ two average developers at $450 each? Remember that, just as much as you are keen to hire, your candidate is also keen for a job and you can use that as a bargaining chip to get your worker to agree to a lower initial salary.

Hire Fulltime

You’re far more productive if you dedicate your attention to the task at hand for long stretches than you are if you have to split your attention between multiple tasks in shorter stretches.

The same applies to your workers – if you hire them part-time to work for you, and they’re also employed part-time elsewhere, they will be considerably less productive than if you hire them full-time!

Of course, it’s not always possible for you to hire a worker fulltime, however much you’d like to; in this case there are a couple of things you can do to help keep your worker productive:

• Hire for full days, a few days of the week: for example, try to hire your person three days out of the week for a full eight hours at a time rather than six days out of the week for four hours at a time. Although you’ll have them less often, they can work on your tasks for longer stretches and you’ll get more productivity out of them
• “Share” with an affiliate friend – if you know another affiliate who is also looking to employ, but also doesn’t want to/can’t hire fulltime, look to see if you can both “share” the employee. This way the employee is working on moderately similar tasks, and the training he/she from you and your friend is beneficial to both of you. However, we still recommend using the above tip and “sharing” this employee by the day, rather than by the hour.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson we took a look at our top tips for employing an outsourced worker. We looked at

• Finding the perfect worker
  • Assessing their English
  • Looking into training them
  • Starting them on a lower salary
  • What to do about more technical jobs
• Other recommendations
  • Looking directly for suitable candidates
  • Negotiating hours and pay
  • Hiring fulltime