7-Figure Agency Hiring Playbook ($2.4M Earned)

what's going on everybody in this video I'm going to give you the endtoend playbook for how I hire at my seven figure agency this is a system that I developed over the course of about 2 years we are a writing company and so we had very high throughput and managing our throughput was costing us 10 20 maybe even 25% of our total revenue so building the system essentially enabled us to claw all of that back and in this video I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like so that sounds like something you're interested in stay tuned

okay so first things first the entire way that the system works is everything begins with indeed. com we use indeed for hiring uh preferentially over other platforms because we found that upwork which most other agencies of our size used to hire uh usually ends up costing us 30 to 40% indeed is simple and it also allows us to build our own infrastructure and our own system to manage these applicant which makes things really simple so what we'll do like if I were to show you the actual Playbook is we have a job post set up uh we just call a Content writer and we'll set it up in various locations we'll usually set one up in Canada we'll the United States uh at times we'll set one up in like Australia or South Africa or anywhere where there's going to be a high concentration of people that are good at English they know English they can you know write English comfortably and then uh this is our job application that we will post we will say this job is 100% remote you can work wherever you want whenever you want we're extremely flexible to submit your application use the form at the bottom of this description you'll choose your hourly rate so we actually allow people to choose their hourly rate you'll add your portfolio Etc and then we'll contact you via email best of luck so the rest of this is just like a classic uh job post you guys can probably get chat GPT now to whip this up for you in like 30 seconds but the thing that matters down here is we have a type form so 1 second copy. typeform. com and then that type form includes a source so we can track where the leads are coming from or where the hiring I guess uh applicants are coming from uh and then we can track their location as well which is important because we use that to determine currencies and kind of do conversions and that sort of deal so when you click through that if you are applying for our job this is the screen you're going to get application content writer answer all questions truthfully into the best of your ability best of luck and thanks for replying what happens is you'll click this you'll type your full name so let me just put my coffee cup somewhere where I don't spill all over my Priceless MacBook I'm just going to use myself as an example uh LinkedIn URL anybody wants to connect with me Now's the Time and then a portfolio or website I mean since we are a writing company it's very important for us to see uh the stuff that people are writing about now ideally if you're applying for a position and maybe you're just like a Content writer that's watching this and you're curious about how um agencies like ourselves like actually do the hiring determination um if you are you should create a website for yourself or a portfolio so this would be a place where somebody puts that right like maybe it's just your personal website maybe it's a Blog maybe it's whatever we have made some allowances for new writers um where if you don't have a portfolio then you can create a Google doc just go to docs. new and so we just literally give people a button that they can click to create a Google doc and then we tell them to write a few paragraphs describing the work history now um the reason why I allow people with that portfolios to apply is because sometimes that's how I get the best quality talent for the least price these people are usually new to the industry they're new to writing in general but they really want to make it work and they're more just attracted to like the remote work aspect than anything else so sometimes you just have people fresh at that are just really good writers I wanted to allow them the uh capability to do so without necessarily just forcing you to have a website or a portfolio the uh C uh the catches a lot of people that send these Google Drive links um are locked because they just don't know how Google Drive works so I had to put a little snippet here to remind them um sometimes people want to upload like a Microsoft docx or I don't know just like some PDF file with their portfolio so I allow them to do it here but to be frank I don't really look at these and then I ask where you're located now I mean as you see it's already location Canada wide but we just like to have people reconfirm that so let's pretend I'm in Canada and this is really the kicker and this is like the secret sauce that I think makes our application process so scalable uh we will ask people for their desired hourly rate and then we're sort of sneaky about it we say our current average pay is and then we give them an anchor and so if you think about this from the perspective of like our value propositions we are offering a very flexible remote uh you know do work on your own time sort of freelance opportunity which is very attractive to people that like autonomy and freedom and so what we've decided to do to make that even stronger of a proposition is we allow people to pick their own hourly rates and then the quality of their work is usually how they justify whatever hourly rate that they want this also allows us to show our job on indeed to literally everybody since we don't have to lock in an hourly rate and all we do is we anchor them to a desired hourly rate by saying our current average pay is in this case 2150 USD per hour which is actually really good pay for Content writing on an hourly basis so it defaults your local currency if you selected United States in the previous page it'll be in US yada the cool part about this is we usually get a lot of people oh yeah $2,150 an hour that's funny oh I just realized that uh we can't actually do decimals that's interesting just found that out now um the really cool thing about this is like 80% of people will pitch us below the desired hourly rate of 2150 so we actually get the same quality talent for less money than we'd otherwise get if we just posted a normal job app got to use your heads people um what's your typing speed this is important to us uh because we just want people that can write quickly obviously if you're like pecking at the page and we're paying you per hour it's just going to cost us more uh we also offer a little typing test for people can find out and then we ask people if they use tools so I've used chat GPT word tune grammarly all that sort of thing uh then we ask when you can begin the work so maybe we can start February the 17th 2024 and then if we click um oh yeah we also ask how many hours can you work per week and then uh you know if we click submit here then it'll actually go through and like forward my application to the system I'm not going to do that cuz this is just for demonstrative purposes but as you can see um the real benefit of setting up your own hiring system and using indeed is that you can funnel people through a pipeline that you create rather than having to be forced to constantly check inde deed or whatever and the way that we've set up our own hiring system is we've set it up in clickup so let's say I fill out this application um everything's good what happens there is we have a bunch of automations that will then collect the

request from the uh writer okay I don't know it's somewhere around here but anyway when you're when you when you're done filling out the typ form what will happen is we will then um push that over to this big pipeline which is appropriately called the hiring Pipeline and we'll basically just uh you know iterate through all those fields and then just add them as columns and then we have like basically like a pipeline the same way that we have like a work pipeline or like a CRM it's just like a hiring applicant Pipeline and we found this to be extremely important because this allows just like a virtual assistant or somebody else in our team to quickly thumb through these applications in a format that like works for them um and then rate them and then do like one or two passes uh and I'll show you what that looks like in a second so we just had a bunch of people fill this out as you can see we have 174 applicants um when you are using indeed with like a high throughput system like we are where you post this to like 15 different you know Indeed job applications and 15 different locations um you usually get like you know anywhere between like 20 to 50 applicants a day so this is pretty high throughput because we're like a pretty churn and burn sort of company right we want writers that are remote uh very flexible but the downside of that is a lot of will just like show up for a few weeks and then leave so we need to constantly be churning here um and we do have some Raiders that have been with us for like well over a year and a half now but they are far few and far in between so what do we see now we see the rate we see the minimum hours we see the source so we weren't just using indeed for job applications we're actually using um a couple of other places like handshake and zip recruiter uh again the benefit to having a type form is it just allows you to post that link anywhere you want and then still have the leads funnel into the system so very flexible uh we have a rating we have some comments here right some people are like oh you know this person sent me a link or you know some somebody referred me that sort of thing we have a role words per minute hourly rate trial article there's an email field so I don't want to go too far and you know leak a bunch of people's emails okay I think that's it um and then there's like a currency column here where we can actually see the currency that they have so anyway we will pump that type form submission into here and then what we'll do is we'll have like an HR person assigned to this just go through all of their applications basically from start to finish so they'll go through their portfolio they'll give it a click I don't know who this person is but hey lovely application Brooke fantastic work um and then we will like give them a rating maybe like four out of five out of five three out of five whatever the second that we give them a rating what happens is they go to the next stage of the pipeline which is number one reviewed now these are people where um usually we'll have like a virtual assistant or something do the first pass but this is uh like a higher priority stage and so this is where we will get like our content manager to then thumb through all of the applicants that have been reviewed basically they have like a minimum level of quality and this way we allow our hiring manager to save a lot of her time like she doesn't have to spend you know thumb through 174 applications day she only needs to thumb through five or six and so this is a way that we like convert a process that otherwise might actually cost a company like an agency at our size like 30 or 40 bucks a day and we turn it into one that might cost us $5 a day because reading through five or six apps is as simple as clicking the portfolio being like Oh yeah this person is pretty good and then checking them to the next step of the process okay great so what happens after this stage let's say I really like Claire's work she's fstar rated I've you know checked her thing and I'm the hiring manager what I do at this point is I change her status from number one reviewed to number two request trial not going to do that again because these systems are up and running and I don't want to send cla a trial request without clearing it with my team first but um what that does is we also then have a second form which is a trial request form where we'll actually ask the applicant to write an article for us

uh and then we'll actually pay them so a lot of people are afraid to do this but we will actually pay people um to write like a test article and this is what it looks like we'll say thanks for your interest in our content writer position this is a brief set of instructions to help you write your first paid trial article um we'll ask people to track their time because we pay people per hour so it's very important for us to do that um some people will try and skirt this and they'll say that they worked more hours or less but that doesn't really matter to us because the marginal cost of getting an applicant is uh is so low already and then what we do is we have them write 500 Words um 500 Words is ideal for us because it means that we don't really have to pay them too much usually it's pretty short but it's still long enough to demonstrate some level of expertise or Acumen I mean like the entire point of this is you want to ride that sweet spot between like okay I know enough about the applicant to actually make an informed decision but you also don't want to invest too much in somebody that just you're not actually working with that might just like flake and disappear on you remember these people aren't still invested or leveraged in our company at all they're just random people that we sending over a request then the form will walk them through what the title of the article is the brief um we want a certain tone of voice so we'll send them an article from wired to read through we'll give them some simple instruction instuctions this is just stuff that they' like probably get in the course of working with us when a client um sends them over a brief we do formatting and all that stuff and then what we'll do is we'll ask for the final word count of the Google Doc we'll ask for their full name um just a sort of like a double up their email address how much time did they take to log and we have like a specific format because our automation needs to pay them uh and then we have like a Google Drive Link where uh we will again just give them some simple instructions to teach them how to like you know add a share link the purpose of this isn't that like we actually need all this by the way the purpose is just hey can you follow simple instructions if anybody up at any point in this process we just eliminate them and we don't really work with them because this is sort of like lowest hanging fruit right if you're not detail oriented to like add a Google Drive Link probably not going to be detail oriented enough to write like an article that's going to make it into a magazine anyway what we'll do is when we move that person to stage two request article we'll actually send them a an email and the email will basically uh request a bunch of information it'll say hi thanks for application we've reviewed your pfolio are interested in moving forward with a trial article assuming you're sld in the market here's the info you submitted through our form we'll just reiterate what their hourly rate was and stuff like that just for clarity purposes and then we'll talk about our trials and then we'll send them the link so you know they'll fill out the trial form and then you know we'll kind of take it from there so assuming that they filled out the trial form what we'll do next is we will automatically pay them and so we have an automation setup that will just like send somebody a certain amount uh in Wise um and then you know we have somebody that just checks our wise every day cues the payment ensures that it's not something unreasonable like 500 hours were logged for writing a trial article

article and then after that when they're done uh they automatically move to the review trial stage we'll use an automation that'll check that form submission obviously link up the email address to the email address in this clickup uh database and then assuming that works uh then our hiring manager now has literally like a portfolio with a trial article column somewhere around here that I'm not going to go too far uh over to the right to get but we'll basically just have all of that information available in the body of the task yeah there it is so we we'll actually see like a Google Drive link with our automation uh having filled that out and then yeah at that point you know we see their trial article we can make a hiring or a firing decision and then what we'll do is we have an onboarding step so if we move this over to onboarding um then our new team member because that's basically what they are now uh we'll receive an invitation to our slack is where our whole team communicates and so we'll invite them as a guest and then we'll just send them a couple templated messages basically being like hey how's it going you know we loved your trial article thanks so much we'd love to have you as part of the team why don't you get on board for like a 3-week um uh what do we call it it's not like a probationary period we make it sound a little nicer than that but like why don't you get on for like a 3E trial period where we'll pay you like we pay every other writer we'll just see if this is like a culture fit it is extremely important when you're working or starting a remote company to ensure that everybody is a culture fit it's actually not that hard to make sure people are culture fits in remote businesses uh simply because if you're in a remote business you usually like want to meet people and you want to make friends you don't really have a way to do so otherwise and so you're usually sort of on your best behavior you're social and you chip in on slack coms and that sort of uh but it is still important to make sure that like you know the rest of your team knows who this person is can communicate with them um the way that we do this is we ceue up three or four messages to be sent basically every 5 or 10 minutes from different people in our team basically saying hey welcome aboard thanks so much for joining uh it's great to have you here you know like Nick told me so much about you uh you know like I I'd love to see your work that sort of thing and so this in a way just like front-loads the person with like good feelings excitement emot culture and it makes them feel like they're a fit in our team before we even like really made that decision over the course of the next 3 weeks we will then just treat them like anybody else in our team so our manager will then assign them to articles and you know add them to pieces in our pipeline uh she will then be relatively harsh on editing over the course the first couple of weeks just to make sure this person understands comments and understands that like you know this is nothing personal it's just like how the business operates you're going to need to like accept revisions and do things like that and at the end of that 3-we period we will go through and we'll back calculate the profitability on each article which we can do automatically which is quite nice and then if the profitability is below our Target margin like if it's way below then we'll just let them go if it's sort of around the same area then we'll have a conversation with them and say Hey listen we really like your work just to be transparent here's where we're at with the profitability here's where we need to be what can we do to help you achieve that goal because we want to keep you around and then if the person is well above their profitability threshold then we invite them to the team and we have like all 20 or 25 members be like hey thanks so much like welcome we're super happy to have you and all that so they receive you know these very positive emotions that all steps through the process which is important um and uh yeah it's how we ensure that people are both culture fits um they're also very profitable for us and that uh we can do this whole thing just in a very short period of time like the average hiring time uh and hiring cycle in agencies is anywhere from like two weeks to like four weeks we get a productive staff member from literally like day three approximately they're actually contributing they're doing pieces even if they're a little bit over our profitability Target that's okay it doesn't really matter we're still at least getting work done so yeah that is my hiring system from start to finish I hope you guys enjoyed that video uh if you're not at this stage in your agency yet and you've just been sort of watching this out of curiosity totally cool if you have any questions about how this process works specifically let me know I know that I barely touched on like the make automations and the actual systems in this video that was because uh there are like 17 of them and I didn't want to get too deep into it but I think as long as you understand the logic flow from a bird's eye view uh you kind of understand you know where I'm coming from and the Playbook that seven figure agencies like mine use to hire while also maintaining like 50% plus margins okay great please like comment subscribe leave your thoughts down below and I'll catch you in the next video thanks so much