4 Questions to Answer Before You Hire a Remote Employee

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 helping you avoid what could be a very costly mistake of hiring the wrong person. Welcome to the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast, a practical guide to growing as a leader and 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 by saying I can’t guarantee what sounds you’re going to hear in the background of this episode, maybe none. I’m going to run this through Adobe Podcast and use the AI to clear out the background noise. But I am sitting in a camper right now, a trailer, in a Euro Camp campground just outside of Rome, Italy. The campground has tourists and people from all over Europe as well as the United States. We’ve been meeting people from all over the world. We rode into town yesterday on the bus with a family from Australia. We’ve met people from the United States, from England, from Bulgaria, Romania, Czechia, Istanbul. We’re just having a great time, but this is a small trailer, and my kids may be coming in and out. They’re at the pool right now, but they could come back at any point. My mother-in-law was with us, and she’s not a pool bug, so she’s here in the trailer with me. So I’m just going to start by saying if there’s any background noise, well, a golf cart just drove by. Don’t know if you heard that or not, but I want to record this. I want to get this out there because a lot of people are hiring, and I want to help you make your next hire better, even if you’re not in a place where you’re hiring right now. 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’s going to be happening in today’s episode? Three things. First, the four questions that must be answered before hiring your next remote team member, and these are very specifically designed to help with the remote team side of stuff. We’re also going to look at today’s leadership axiom. I end every episode with a leadership nugget, tip, axiom, proverb, whatever you want to call it. And then for those of you who also listen because you’re 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 for you, especially a really cool trick that we learned in Rome that all of us are enjoying. So 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. Now, some of them may seem obvious to you. These may seem 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. So 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. What is the outcome they’re going to produce? Not just tasks. 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 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 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 and responsibility of this position. This is going to really help you clarify focus, and it’s going to help you prevent vague expectations.

Or the other side of that is, if you try to think of every little task, 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. So clearly define the outcome of the role.

Number two: How are you going to measure success? One of the things Dave Ramsey says all the time that I 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 forefront. People are surprised sometimes to hear that we’ve got tech support people in 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, United States of America. That is the official time of the company. Even where I am right now, I’m 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, when my team is hiring for tech support, we’re able to say, hey, the outcome we’re looking for is for our clients to not have support requests sitting in an inbox, not hearing from us. The outcome we’re looking for is that we acknowledge, and I don’t like using automated replies for this, I want a team member 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. One of our core values is 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. They’re like, how do you get people to do that? Very simple. When we’re hiring and 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, I really don’t want to work through the middle of the night, well, then you’re a moron for applying for the job, because it’s really clear that this job 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? You need some very clear metrics. 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. And even worse, you don’t have something to delegate. You can’t delegate a feeling. You can’t delegate something that’s subjective. It’s got to be objective. It’s got to be very clear. And these metrics can be weekly, monthly, quarterly. There has to be some type of very specific deliverable, some type of very specific metric. You need feedback loops. We really need to think this through.

One of the things we use, for example, is a weekly report that everybody on our team submits every Friday, and it asks them a couple questions about their week. That gives us, as a leadership team, a pulse of how our team is doing. So you have to have very clear feedback loops and understand exactly what you’re looking for your people to do. If you don’t have turnaround times figured out, if you don’t have very specific deliverables figured out, 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.

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, and we use it in the hiring process. When we create a job description, we ask, hey, is this person going to be a galvanizer? Are they going to be a person of tenacity? Are they going to be a wanderer? We take the six working geniuses and we try to figure out what kind of person is going to thrive with this, because I want my team, even though most of my team is remote and works from their own homes, I want them to have the sense of skipping to work in the morning. I want them excited to log in, or at least looking forward to it. I don’t want there to be any dread.

I hate email, and normally when I go to check email, I just have 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 that are unavoidable, I’m always going to have email at some point, so I may not be able to eliminate that, but I’ve reduced those things to the point where 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 you’re just not going to like, but on the whole, are they excited? Are they motivated when they go to their desk? What’s their morale like? That’s one of the questions we ask everybody: what was your morale like this week? Because we want to know, is everybody’s morale high? And I can’t judge this by walking around the office, managing by walking around. You can’t do that when you have a remote team. So you’ve got to have a way that you’re checking in with people. And one of the best ways to ensure somebody has 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 objectives for the job, and the metrics that are going to be measured, is it going to require somebody who loves details? Is this somebody who eats, breathes, sleeps detail, or do they prefer big picture? Is this going to be somebody who’s really energized by organizing people, a people organizer, somebody who likes to bring people together around a cause, a galvanizer? What kind of person is really going to like this? What kind of character traits do they need? What’s going to motivate them? And then hire for that. Too many people jump to, what do I need them to be able to do? They think about the skill set, and that’s not where you start. If that’s where you’re starting, you’re thinking like a manager, not a leader.

Leaders grow things. Managers manage them. A good manager never changes anything. A manager keeps everything running and will eventually run a business into the ground, because they’ve never changed, never iterated, never adjusted. They manage. They take the standard operating procedures, they take the goal, what needs to be accomplished, and they manage all the resources to 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, fifteen years from now? What’s going to have to be different in our company in five years 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. But for hiring, as a leader, you’ve got to step back and think, what kind of person is going to really thrive in this?

Now, before I get to the fourth question, I want to pause here in the flow of this. And I want to encourage you, if the idea of hiring makes you a little nervous, a little uncomfortable, if you have a lot of questions, or if you’re thinking, I don’t have job descriptions, I don’t have policies, I don’t know what we’re going to talk about in meeting agendas, I don’t know what metrics to have, if you’re missing 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 VAs and it just wasn’t a great experience, and you spent some money, you spent some time, you lost some momentum, you lost some resources, you lost some confidence, or maybe you just don’t know because you’ve never done it before, I want to invite you to my next 90 day accelerator. It’s called Team Engine.

I love hiring. I’ve hired hundreds of people. I used to run a summer camp, and every summer we’d have to hire staff. I’ve done thousands of interviews. I figured this out the other day, they say 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 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 love hiring. I think it’s so rewarding. Every once in a while I’ll be walking with my wife, and we’ll be talking, appreciating what we have, and we’ll talk about our team, our full time team, the fact that we have two guys who started with us single, and now they’re both married, both have babies. Two of our other staff, one was married when she came to us, but she’s on maternity leave, we’re waiting for a text message literally any day. Another one of our staff members got married after joining the team, and she’s on maternity leave too, they’ve got a six week old. 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 helping other people, and that’s so rewarding.

So I want to take the experience that I have and the success that we now have time and time again hiring people, and I’ve broken it down into 12 trainings. Over 90 days, each week you’re going to get a pre-recorded video, a homework assignment, and then a live Q&A to ask your questions. You need 2 to 4 hours per week. But at the end of those 90 days, you’re going to be ready to hire. I’m going to show you how I hire offshore, how I hire remote, how I hire very qualified, extremely successful people, between four to ten, maybe fifteen, twenty five dollars an hour, but the majority in the five to nine dollar an hour range. I’m going to show you how I vet them, how I prepare for them, and this is my favorite: when a new team member starts at our company, nobody has to take a week off to train them. We have a self-guided, on demand training and onboarding process. Team members train themselves and they’re up and ready to go in a matter of a couple days, and they can hit the ground running.

You’re going to get job description templates, our onboarding self-guided staff onboarding resources, interview questions, weekly one on ones, templates for metrics and KPIs, everything you need to hire that you can customize and alter for yourself. I can’t give you the bonus because I’m recording this, we’re not going to have enough time, but for those who do get signed up in time for our bonus, which I’ll go ahead and share, maybe you’ll listen to this in the future and reach out to get on a waitlist. I’m going to run this 90 day accelerator once every quarter, four times a year, 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. 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 Team Engine is going to work for you that if the very first hire you make after Team Engine doesn’t work, if you use everything in it that I show you, I’ll refund you your registration fee. No questions. Hey, sorry it didn’t work out, here’s your refund, keep all the resources, keep all the templates, keep all the training, and here’s your money back. I absolutely know it’s going to work for you, that’s why I’m willing to offer that.

The alternative is to hire on your own. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t. Normally, even if you hire offshore, you’re going to invest anywhere from, let’s say you’re paying somebody three or four thousand dollars a month, and it takes three, four months for you to realize this just isn’t working out. You have spent 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. 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 right person. So reach out and let me know. Send me an email, Eric at podcast dot com. I’m still working on getting my new email set up for the rebrand of the show. But send me an email, and if you’re listening to this in the future and that address isn’t working anymore, email me at Eric at Eric Dingler dot com. I have that domain, I’m just getting it reset up right now.

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. Number four: What will this hire free me or someone else up to do? 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, full of a lot of great stuff. But not every single hire is going to work that way for that, that works to hire a very specific type of person for somebody at a very specific level in their company.

Every time you hire, when I hired my first team member for my web design agency, it was to help with support tickets, because remember, I dreaded seeing those emails every day. So I hired him, and our next hire then freed up that person so he could help me with more website development. By taking on support tickets, we’ve now hired a support person again who helps with support tickets, so now I’ve got the second person able to do more development, and the first person I hired five years ago is able to help with leadership now of web services. So I knew what I was hiring for, I led my team well, I’ve developed them well, 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 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’ve 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.

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, please review and subscribe, and if you’re on Spotify, leave a comment, would love to read those. Reviewing and subscribing is gold, honestly, it just helps so much, and I would really, really appreciate that.

Okay, so leadership axiom of the week, I need to come up with a better name for this, if you have an idea let me know, whether it should be leadership tip, leadership axiom, leadership proverb, leadership nugget, whatever idea you have. But this is so important for your leadership, and the lesson 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, and you allow 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, let’s course correct here a little bit, let’s bring this back to center, this is what we want.

Recently, somebody on my team did something. They changed a process and said, since I’m waiting for the client, I’m not going to make a daily update because I’m just waiting for them, so there’s no new update. And I understand where they’re coming from, but no, no, no, no, I can’t allow that, because I can’t approve that. That’s not what the system, that’s not the purpose. So I just said, hey, I understand where you’re coming from, but no, if you own the ball on a project, you give a daily update, even if you copy and paste the one from the day before. And you may think that’s a waste of time, but this is the process, this is the system. So what you allow, you approve. You’ve got to be careful with that.

All right, so finally, for the travel update, for those of you who 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 seeing the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the forum, the Pantheon, the list goes on and on. It’s so amazing. But here’s the tip I want to share with you before I wrap the show up. All around Rome, they have free water fountains everywhere, almost 3,000 of them, called nasoni, which just means “big noses” in Italian, because they look like little noses coming up out of the ground. And it’s clean, fresh water, tested unbelievable amounts of times, something like 250,000 quality samples a year, it’s ridiculous. Great drinking water.

Now, they also have Casa dell’Acqua, these bigger water fountain areas outside of most metro stops, and you can fill your water bottle with still water or sparkling water. We get these little squeeze water flavors, I like the grape, and we carry those around, and we go up to the sparkling machines. There’s no line for sparkling, there’s a big line for the still, flat water, and hardly anybody in line for sparkling. I don’t like sparkling water by itself, but I’ll refill my water bottle with sparkling water and then squeeze in some of that water flavor, and it’s just like having a grape soda, but without the sugar, without all the stuff that actually dehydrates 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. 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.

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