If you’re looking to scale your agency, you need to hire talent. You can’t do it all by yourself. Trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve been there where I was doing everything myself. I was burnt out and I was working 12 hour days. It’s awful. But now I’ve been able to scale my efforts, spend more time working on my business rather than in my business, and completing great website designs for clients. Keep reading to learn everything on how to build a team for your business!
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Here’s what we’re covering in this post:
- What team member roles does my business need?
- Points to help your hire a team member
- The benefits of an offshore team
- How to conduct a job interview in 15 minutes
Before you start hiring, you need to decide which roles you need to fulfill. So here’s a breakdown. If you need help with the day-to-day, project delegation, and email correspondence, then you need a project manager or virtual assistant. If you’re just starting out and want to hit the ground running, you can bootstrap and start by doing a lot of those yourself. If you need content like graphics, PDF designs, wireframing, social media artwork, then you’re definitely going to need a UI/UX designer or a graphic designer. If you need custom development integrations, site-wide edits, you’re definitely going to want to go with a website designer/developer.
So spend some time thinking about who’s needed right now in your agency. If you already have some of these skills and you feel that you can scale your efforts and you can create procedures around your business where you jump start on things and then delegate, then you should take that route. But ultimately this gives you kind of an idea of the main things you’ll be needing in your web agency.
Standard Operating Procedures
Take the time to build your process first via Standard Operating Procedures. SOPs basically are a step-by-step breakdown on how to get your regular tasks completed. Once you train your team on SOPs and you see them knocking out work and going through your process, it’s going to save you tons of time. All SOPs need these elements: a video training, what documents are needed, a checklist, and the step-by-step directions to complete the task. You can get a step-by-step tutorial on how to write standard operating procedures in this article.
Time Zone Adjustment
If you’re hiring overseas (aka offshore, more on this later), you’ll want to consider the time difference. If you’re considering a candidate in the Philippines for example, they might be almost 11 hours ahead or behind so you’ll want to see how that will work out for your processes. Do you prefer to have staff working at the same time as you? Are you flexible with having staff working overnight when you’re asleep? Both options work really well. BelaMarca Studio has team members here in the US as well as offshore and so we’re able to get work done in the ways that we need. It’s really cool to wake up and see a lot of tasks done and completed by the time we get started in the morning.
Create Clearly Defined Job Requirements
These job descriptions need to be able to provide job details/requirements, weed out spammers, test candidate knowledge, and be easy to follow and concise. You’ll need a clear title, a description of the project, list of required skills, and great questions. In order to track the best developers, you’ll need to write a job that speaks to professionalism. Here is an example from the Web Design Studio Accelerator course of the type of jobs we post:
We made sure to add a title and we suggest to always ask a bot question because sometimes people submit their application without reading it and that question can vet out people that haven’t actually looked at the content. The project description is a quick and easy review of the project details. So you can be as brief or as detailed as you like. And then you’ll include a list of required skills as well. Once that’s complete, you can upload this to a job site.
Leveraging The Best Job Sites
Choose a job site platform. Ultimately Fiverr.com is the best and that’s where we have found much success. We have received 60+ 5-star reviews on Fiverr to prove that our team members have loved our onboarding process, our clearly defined SOPs, and we are so proud of how long we’ve been able to retain certain the best individuals. Upwork.com is also a good option for talent.
On Fiverr, you can find the right service at every price point. It offers project-based pricing, which we prefer because it helps to reduce scope-creep. And paying upfront also helps to reduce surprises. We like that payment on Fiverr is only released when we have approved the work.
Whichever platform you use to find a team member, you can usually work with them for a few projects to feel them out. If they’re doing really well, you can move them to another platform called DEEL where you can pay them out directly and they get a bigger lion’s share of that cash. As far as competitive compensation is concerned, be willing to pay a little bit more to get more. Pay a little bit above the average to really attract talent. If you’re strapped for cash, consider offshoring.
Offshoring your workload is not the same as outsourcing. The difference is you’re giving a team member overseas a definitive process and you’re assigning work based on your criteria. The benefits are: it’s low cost, that individual is an expert in their field and they can work full-time remotely. Drawbacks are it requires detailed vetting of that individual. Do they speak English well or is there a language barrier? Do they type well? Do they respond quickly? And as far as market perception, many people feel as though offshoring is not great, it’s low quality work, but that is absolutely not true. There are millions of talented people across the globe that are really talented, it’s just that the cost of living is less so you’re able to charge less for some really great content. You can train them on how to go through your processes and they can then use them to improve their skills over time.
To save money you’ll need to spend time. Ultimately you’ll need to build a process which we’ve done for you to scale and delegate tasks to your team. So communicate effectively and provide a detailed process. For the cost of one senior employee in the US, you could have 3-4 high performing offshore workers.
Our 15 minute interview process helps us vet individuals quickly and efficiently. You’ll want to:
1. Collect that candidate’s info
Here’s an example of the template we use in Google Sheets. It has their name, their email, a link to their portfolio, their price point, and then any notes we might have. We then like to highlight them based on how great they were so we can vet them quickly.
2. Vet their profile
Once you’ve organized your candidates, thoroughly review their profiles and remove candidates who fall into the following criteria:
- Replying with automated responses
- Lack experience
- Not in line with your requests
- Take too long to respond (24+ hours)
3. Schedule a 15 minute interview using Acuity Scheduling and conduct it via Zoom
Once you have a few candidates scheduled, you can send them a response message saying:
“Thanks for choosing a time! We’re excited to talk to you about the position. Please prepare the following for our discussion:
Please prepare 2 examples of how you leveraged your _______ skills.
Please provide examples of your work and links to your latest projects.
P.S. We’re excited and willing to teach! If you don’t know something, we offer training. We look for excellent people we can train in the digital space. Experience is great, but we look for great character!
When our scheduled date and time approaches, please log into Zoom 5 mins beforehand.
See you then!”
4. Take notes.
We’ve created a list of templated interview questions to streamline the process and keep the interview to just 15 minutes long. We suggest you get access to this document below so that all your interviews can run smoothly, on time, and convert stellar talent onto the team.
Our agency cheat sheet of candidate interview questions to streamline the process and keep the interview to just 15 minutes long. This’ll help your interviews run smoothly, on time, and convert stellar talent onto the team.
5. Choose your candidate.
Once you’ve reviewed your list of candidates, choose three candidates that you really like. Sometimes we may choose to conduct a follow-up interview sharing our internal process with candidates and ask them to do a brief assignment. And that’s it! Once you’ve chosen your new ideal candidate, it’s time to onboard your new team member.
Related Article: How To Onboard New Team Members To Your Design Agency
The great thing about the steps we’ve shared above is they are already templated and done for you. How insane would it be if you were given all the job applications and all the docs you need to be able to find great prospects for your team? Imagine if you could get instant access to 100+ SOP docs and 40+ hours of step-by-step video training to help you launch a PROFITABLE web design studio, delegate your work, and travel the world while your business runs itself? If this is a must for you than you’ve got to dive in to the Web Design Studio Accelerator Course!
what's included
Video Lessons
You get access to the EXACT training videos and lessons we use to train staff, delegate tasks and free up time to focus on the big picture. It's the blueprint, from prospecting all the way to closing recurring revenue.
Source Files
The entire FOLDER of all source files including branding guidelines, logo templates, website design files, social media collateral, and so much more organized & prepped in Figma for you to use.
Docs / SOPs
Everything you would ever need is ready to go. You get the video trainings, step-by-step directions, the itemized lists and the Google Sheets we use to deliver award-winning website designs to clients.
Ready to grow your
web design studio?
Our agency cheat sheet of candidate interview questions to streamline the process and keep the interview to just 15 minutes long. This’ll help your interviews run smoothly, on time, and convert stellar talent onto the team.
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