Hiring Like Sales
How to approach hiring like a sales process by using customer discovery techniques, asking the right questions, and filtering for high-agency talent that drives real results.
The very first time I hired someone was off a platform called OnlineJobs.ph.
This was when I was doing ecommerce dropshipping. It was about the time I needed to outsource basic product fulfillment and customer service because I was doing everything on my own.
There's this great African proverb I heard in my mid-20s and it's never left me since: "If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go with others."
And it's definitely true when you're working with a team of other people who can actually do things.
Money as Information
One thing that's made a massive impression on me is how Elon Musk views money.
Money to him is an information system for human labor allocation.
And it's really true. If you look at it from a broader level, all you're paying someone to do is produce value. Value offers someone else something of value. Which then becomes an infinite cycle of using this information to produce more value.
My First Hire
Back to my initial hiring thing.
I went on OnlineJobs.ph. I heard it was a good platform. I was also looking at other traditional places like Upwork, but I heard some good things and that this is a good place for the ecommerce world. So that's where I went.
Put out a job post. From there I got some inbound. Read a few profiles. Didn't even look through all the applicants.
In a matter of one to two days, I hired someone on the call.
The First Mistake
The first mistake I made here is I hired someone on the spot. This was with a pool of limited people I interviewed.
Sure, I did kind of scout and have an idea in mind. When I'm looking to pay, what kind of experience does this person have. Can I trust this person. Does this person have the capability to do what I need them to do.
Based off some simple questions that they answered, I hired them on the spot.
One thing I learned down the line is anytime you're doing an interview, or anytime you are getting someone to answer your questions, especially in person, what you will often hear is people providing you answers that you want to hear. Or that they think you want to hear.
At the end of the day, I found this all bullshit.
Hiring as Sales
I found the real key here is how you want to view hiring as a sales process and a sort of customer discovery.
It's a combination of using the Mom Test, which is something you can leverage for yourself to discover what the market actually wants you to create. And also selling, where you're trying to validate or actually prove to yourself wrong that this person is the wrong candidate.
On one hand, depending on how you approach it, if you're looking for A+ talent and they're coming to you, of course you want them to sell themselves to you. It creates a psychological effect to make them actually want the position.
But if it's just some random person, or statistically likely someone who may just be an average performer that you're finding online on the internet, they're going to try to do everything to sell themselves to you and just provide you anything you want here.
I think it matters about the frame.
Do you have someone extremely high agency, top S-tier level, where you want this sort of psychological influence to be in benefit of you getting them on your team?
Or is the frame this is a person I'm getting off a job platform, likely with a large pointer towards an average makeup of people pulling in for your job, and you're just going to hear what they want you to hear?
The 30-Day Disaster
I hired the first person on the spot.
Within 30 days, and quite honestly it was way too long, I found that this person was highly incompetent, very slow, needed a lot of babying.
For some reason I just thought if I hired them, they would just do the job. I don't have to really tell them much to do because they already have experience with customer service, right?
Well, that was totally wrong.
I didn't monitor or look at their responses or things for pretty much the whole entire month other than the first few days just to make sure they're using my templates, doing it right, and that's it.
I have a lot of pride for customer service. If I'm talking to someone I just want to make sure I'm giving you the best answer, the best resolution to why you're reaching out to us. Just to have a good impression. Who doesn't want that?
But because of my mistake there of just set it and forget it, turns out I realized a lot of emails were getting slipped. The answers were very templated and not actually human sounding. It just sounded like a fixed bot was sending a script without editing it or modifying it.
Don't get me wrong, back then, this was early 2017-2018 era. There was no AI or the sort of personalization of a script to who it is that we're talking to.
I still had scripts and templates though. Some sort of standard operating procedures to ensure that things come out in a very predictable way. Or with slight modification to make it sound personable and not like we're just reading off a script.
I made that very clear to hires that I don't want you to sound like a robot, but like an actual human.
But it turns out the first VA that I had was exactly that. A templated bot just copying and pasting with very little edits or changes to the original script.
When I found this out, of course I got furious because that's not what I wanted. My customers were angry. This is all my fault because I was ignoring it.
I immediately fired the person because it was hurting my brand and store a lot more versus me keeping them there. I'd rather do the service myself at that point versus keep this person there.
What I Learned
I learned some stuff here. Which then I took to my next process of hiring a bigger team.
After that I kind of knew the criteria I was looking for.
Strong questions. I want to assess their thinking. I want to see if they can actually complete a project. Maybe out of say 100 people, like especially nowadays because customer service is becoming more and more commoditized, especially now you can automate it with AI, the question is how do you find the right applicant, especially if you want it to be manual, to stand out and then hire them.
What I learned is you want questions which you can dig out how they think about things.
You want to provide questions where you see how they approach a problem. What they're likely to do. How they think through something. What kind of thinking do they apply. How do they solve the problem.
What I found with a lot of these offshore VAs is a lot of them think very mechanically versus fluidly. Not actually like you're trying to solve a problem in a unique way versus something being binary or fixed.
Which is a problem in itself.
Finding High Agency
If you find a high agency hire, you best believe you better keep this person.
Because if you find someone high agency, you're either finding a super expensive person, whether it's somewhere in your current country or offshore, and they know their value. So of course they're going to charge a premium for their service.
Otherwise, you have to filter through what I call finding the diamonds in the rough.
Maybe they either don't know they have this amazing talent and skill. Or they have the aptitude for a specific talent or skill or position but they just don't know yet how good they'd be. Or they perhaps just may be undervaluing their own service and work ethic and not realize what the true worth of it is.
Which is why if you see this aptitude for being a high quality teammate, you want this person at all costs. It's like getting a hundred dollar bill for ten dollars.
But that also requires a lot of failure in past bad burners hiring the wrong people. You eventually notice what a good candidate is versus what a bad one is. The more you have experience with working with different people, you realize what a great one is versus a top 1% of a great pool of people.
It's not to say that I know all the levels to this. But this is based off my own experience and what I've learned through my own personal research.
The Mini Task Filter
One high signal thing you can do is provide a mini task.
Out of say 100 people who apply for a role, let's just say customer service. If you give them some questions or you provide some criteria which you're looking for, sure it's going to narrow it down, but not enough.
Out of a regular post like this, you may get 50 to 100 people inbound on a platform like OnlineJobs.ph.
But then let's just say you try to be more specific with what you're looking for and if these people actually meet the criteria of who you want to work with.
For me, I love high agency people. I love people who can think for themselves. I love people who need very little babysitting. Who can just come up with solutions, implement, and then tell me how they solved the problem without even me having to answer how to do something or how to do it specifically.
They just trust their gut, do it. And then next thing you know, they come back to me with what they did, how they approached it, and was this the best way to go about it.
That, I love.
Adding Friction
If you sprinkle a small mini task, something where it doesn't scare too many people away but it adds some friction.
If you give something extremely big, like let's say for customer service and you gave them immediately off the bat 50 emails and they just answer for your brand or whatever it is that you do, they're probably not going to do that.
One, it takes a lot of time. Two, they're not getting paid for it. So they just think it's a rip off and they're getting used.
But for instance, if you did a mini task where it's like: here are 5-10 different customer inquiries we've had in the past. Based on our brand, how you understand it, based on our values, whatever, how would you approach solving these? Provide me the completed responses.
From here it gives you a small sample size. It's like a little trial of how they approach the problem and if they solve it correctly.
Especially nowadays in the world of AI tools. If they're not AI enabled, there's a significant added disadvantage.
Also too, you want to see them seeing how they're approaching different tools. Do they have the capability to find tools that they need to improve their efficiency? Do they have protocols where before they even come back to you with a question or a problem that they first search through AI Search, Google, YouTube, whatever, before you become the last resource they can contact?
A mini task like this gives you that sort of assessment.
Out of say 100 people, maybe 10 to 15 people will respond. Now it's a smaller pool, but it's a more high signal pool.
The Interview Process
Of this pool, you want to interview every single person that you flagged or starred and believe they have the potential of being a great hire.
That might be one person. That might be zero. That might be all of them. Or that just might be ten. Who knows.
Interview every single person.
The way I carry out interviews is, as I mentioned earlier, I tend to have somewhere between 8 and 12 questions.
These aren't questions where it's a yes or no. It's more so open-ended to gauge how they approach a problem or how they think through something.
I'm more curious about their thinking and their approach to problem solving and whether or not this person has the capability to be high agency. Versus someone who just knows how to answer something and provide me a response that I'd like to hear.
Because anyone who needs a job, of course they're gonna want to give you a response that tries to get them hired.
I'm more so interested in a person who is a problem solver and how they approach the thinking.
Do they think efficiently? How have they approached something where they provided an outcome for a business owner? Was there something that they innovated on and how did they approach it? What was something orthodox everyone was doing, but they did differently to improve a response rate in say cold outreaches?
You want to find something that is out of the norm.
In my opinion, when you find something like this, they have the potential to do other things that are out of the norm. Which can surprise you. In a way, as if it's a sort of black box, but with good surprises.
Sort of like an AI where you can sometimes just make it do things that you wouldn't expect. It's sometimes how I think about finding the right person.
Do they have the capability to produce unsuspected surprises that benefit everyone in the long term, whether on a customer-facing side or internal?
Recording and Batching
With the questions, you of course want to use some sort of recording tool. You want to be able to assess the feedback. You want to be able to record a conversation.
I preferably like to batch these conversations into a single day where maybe I have a few, or during a certain week that I'm looking for a hire.
So it's all there and next week I can just hire someone.
Making the Assessment
Once I have all the conversation with the data, with the responses, now I can simply make an assessment.
When I'm hiring someone, I know what I'm looking for, as I said. On top of that, I already kind of made some notes of who stands out and who clearly is a poor fit.
The more sample pool you have of people to potentially work with and engage with and responses that provide you, the more likely you are to find the right person.
It gives you a reference data point of this is what a poor candidate looks like and this is what a great one looks like.
Then it increases the baseline for who you're looking for to the next call, to the next call, and then to the next call.
The more great candidates you speak to, this data point only serves as a great reference of who is the most likely to perform the job the best.
Using AI to Decide
Once you have your candidates, then it's time to pick one.
One hack I've done in the past is with all the conversation log history, I just copy the transcript, prompt an AI with the post, what I'm looking for, my questions asked, and basically prompt everything into a single massive file.
See what the AI says.
It's not just to say that I want to blindly accept that this is the person it suggests, but to explain to me why it chose a certain person and why.
And not just blindly trusting one AI. Cross-posting the massive message I sent to one AI provider, to others, and see what they also say.
It's more so trying to see if there's something I did not see. Or some insight that is clear but maybe I'm not seeing. Which helps me better make a decision.
Because at the end of the day, I just want to make the best decision.
From there, you'll get 1-3 people that stand out the most.
Trial or Commit
From here is totally optional.
If you need someone right away, you can either just hire them on and see where it goes. In the beginning, I think this is just the best way to go about it because then you have experience hiring someone, you can just start working, and boom, you go from there. Once you agree on signing a contract, the conditions, etc.
Otherwise, if you're more careful and you don't want to expose yourself to too much risk of working with someone, you can also continue on the conversation with a trial that's not a guaranteed position. It's a trial nonetheless. You still have other people on the sidelines waiting for their turn. Then you'll make the best decision.
It totally depends what stage you are and what you need right now.
But some of my best hires was literally with this, with the AI part. Where you allow the AI to assess whether or not this works.
I actually built a tool which leveraged my methodology, although it's no longer active because unfortunately I found people not needing an AI co-pilot for hiring. It was called VA Radar (deprecated).
We can basically do it for free this way, which is why I'm sharing it here, so who cares?
Beyond Hiring
Now this is on the whole hiring side, but I just also want to make it clear that this doesn't apply just to hiring.
I realized that when I've worked in cross dimensions of many things, wearing many hats as a founder, that hiring is pretty intertwined with sales, with discovery for customers, and a lot of these areas where they sort of converge.
You can apply this into almost anything.
Such as finding the right friends, the right friend groups. Because everyone's different. Do you want to hang out with all people?
Co-Founders
Especially for co-founders.
Do you want a C co-founder, a B+ co-founder, or an A++ co-founder?
The only way you know who's who is by talking to a lot of people.
I'd rather talk to 100 potential people just to find the one person who I'll work with for 10 years. Versus talking to the first 10 people in hot engine, then just picking the right person from there.
It doesn't mean you have to stop at 100. You can go far beyond that depending on how precise and what exactly you're looking for.
Dating
The same thing also applies to dating.
I got this from a controversial figure, but let's just say the idea here is that the only way you'll know what a good apple tastes like is if you try many apples.
Doesn't mean you have to go absolutely crazy and fall for your inner lust with many women you potentially date, or whatever you're into.
But what you do want is you want to be able to talk to many different kinds of women. Maybe trial a few little light casual dates and see whether or not this person has any sort of chemistry with you.
Because the more women you date or you talk to, the more you're likely to find the right one who fits you like a glove.
It's not to say that there's this perfect person out there.
But at least the philosophy I'm adopting here and how I look at it is that if you can date more women, you will know what's a great woman versus what's an average or a poor fit for you.
And you only do that from dating and talking to more women versus just picking the first person that you fall in love with.
But at some point you have to choose regardless. Just like a co-founder. Just like choosing your friend group. Just like hiring someone.