Hiring the right team members can make or break your business, but what if you’re just one hire away from unlocking the freedom you need? In this episode of Babies and Business, Avram and Rachel share their game-changing hiring process that transformed their team-building experience. From past hiring struggles to discovering a method that actually works, they break down how they found talented employees who stick around. If hiring has felt like a nightmare for you, this episode will give you the clarity and confidence to make your next hire successful.

 

Show Notes

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• Why most small business hires don’t work out—and how to fix it

• The common hiring mistakes that lead to turnover and frustration

• How to decide what role you should hire for first

• Why knowing the job inside out before hiring is critical

• How a mindset shift can make you a better leader

• Why you should focus on one key skill when hiring

• How Avram and Rachel’s simplified hiring process saved them time and stress

• The interview process that eliminates unqualified candidates

• Why hiring internationally helped them find top-tier talent

Mentions & Resources

OnlineJobs.ph – A leading job platform specializing in connecting businesses with skilled remote professionals from the Philippines.

 Clockwork Accelerator – A transformative program designed to help business owners shift their mindset and approach hiring with greater clarity and efficiency.

The One VA Away Challenge – A structured hiring challenge that provides a proven framework for identifying and onboarding the right team members effectively.

CliftonStrengths Finder – A personality assessment tool that helps businesses understand team members’ strengths, improve communication, and build a more cohesive team.

Who Should Be The First Person You Hire in Your Business – A blog about identifying the right first hire for your business and making a strategic decision for growth.

Episode Transcription

Avram: Hey, hey, what if you’re just one hire away? We, uh, recently have had great success in hiring some new team members and we thought it would be a great time to share with you just what changed from our previous method to now. To give you some context, previous to what we’re about to share with you, the last six team members we hired only two stuck.

Rachel: And it was pretty brutal.

Avram: Yeah.

Rachel: brutal because it ended, some of them ended badly. Some of them didn’t work out really well and we were just trying to make it work. You know, that kind of stuff.

Avram: Yeah. And we found ourselves about a year and a half ago, one of our key team members stepped away. She got a great offer for another company that we simply couldn’t match, and we found ourselves picking up the roles that she had had.

So we learned a lot about what needed to go into those roles, but we realized how much PTSD we had from the previous times we’d hired.

Rachel: Well there, there are so many things that go into hiring somebody. You have to have a way to manage what they’re doing. Timelines, deadlines, all sorts of things. And the project management, With that team member was kind of a mess, you know, so our maybe it was our systems that weren’t dialed in But also just some other things that went along with it.

So that was a really big

Avram: yeah,

Rachel: There were a lot of things that we knew we need to build to support a new team member

Yeah

Avram: and so the, the idea of, uh, doing this again was overwhelming. So we’d put it off a little bit too long, but you know, the purpose of this podcast is all about freedom and having the time to raise your family while building a business. There is no way. To do that in a sustainable fashion without the help of talented team members.

Rachel: Absolutely. Well, and we’re going to get into this topic a little bit more, but, you know, when you think about giving work to somebody else and the thoughts that come up in your head are like, you know, how could they do it as good as me? Or how could they even match this? And how could they get the quality?

You know, there are so many things that come up around that thing. And so we’re going to talk a little bit more about that later on. But, That was one of those factors that was like, oh, how can we make this work? There’s gonna be some resources that we’ve used that have helped us have the confidence, the know how, and the systems behind what we’re doing in order to support and alleviate those stresses.

Avram: Yeah. So this episode is for you if you’ve hired before and it didn’t seem to work out. That’s a given. This episode is also for you if you’re feeling the pressure and the workload of your current position in your business. And maybe you’ve thought, well, I couldn’t possibly afford to hire somebody else.

Or is there somebody part time that could do this? I don’t think they would want to, like, All those considerations, this episode is going to help with that. And, if you’ve been overwhelmed by the process, we’re going to share with you some of the simple things that we did that made things like writing a job description So easy.

Rachel: what we stumbled upon was gold. for this So we’re really excited to extend this resource to you so that you can fill these gaps and holes in your business

Avram: Yeah. So I think a good place to start with is the first or the next hire, right? How do you figure out what that role is? And then we’ll, we’ll talk about some of the mindset things, and then we’ll get into some of the nuts and bolts of what we did. That was really successful and powerful. We want to pass on to you.

Rachel: yeah, and I think in that training what was really really cool about it is that one of the key elements is that you must know the thing that you are passing on. You must know it well enough to grade it, teach it, review it, and move it on, and actually delegate it fully to that person. If you don’t know those things, you have no business giving it to somebody else to do.

Avram: yeah. And a lot of times we think that the stuff that’s not getting done in the business right now is the thing that we want to hire for

Rachel: Sure, right, because it’s just not getting done.

Avram: A good example is like, oh, we should be doing social media, I should hire somebody to do that. But to what Rachel’s sayin
g, if you’ve never actually done it yourself, or it’s not getting done on a regular basis now, it’s really hard to turn around and delegate that to somebody.

And it doesn’t alleviate you of any of your work,

Rachel: it also doesn’t help the person that you’re hiring that is feeling insecure in this brand new job to feel like they’re crushing it in that job feel secure in the job that they just got and the payments that are Always going to come to them moving forward, you know So you’re not helping your teammate that you’re bringing on and you’re not helping yourself.

You’re not creating space I know in previous episodes we’ve talked about how One of our guideposts like really huge guardrails For doing anything in our business is not giving you Avram more work in the business or myself You’re the one that most likely always

Avram: is the bottleneck

Rachel: Gets things dumped onto your plate because you know a lot of the things I’m the one that helps things move forward from A to Z through the process But keeping that in mind, you don’t want to keep create more work for yourself And you definitely want to give confidence to those that you’re hiring so that they are happy They stick around, and they feel useful.

No one likes to be in a job where they are insecure about their next day, their next paycheck, their next week.

Avram: yeah. So the first aha moment in this was understanding that there’s really only two types of roles that you should hire for in your business. Uh, at least if this is your first few hires, number one is the stuff that you’re doing a lot of, and you’re very good at it.

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: And then there’s a second. Part that you could also hire for which is the stuff that you are really good at but you don’t like doing it

Rachel: Right.

Avram: And so giving up control and hiring somebody to do these things that you’re already doing or that you some of them that you really Like could be hard But the thing is is like if you’re if you’re capped out right now like 50 hours a week You need to hire somebody to get it back down to 40 or 30 with the stuff that you’re currently doing right now.

Rachel: Right? Because if you’re just bottlenecked, if you’re the bottleneck in your business and you’re not able to receive more, you have no more capacity to receive more business, your business will stagnate. But not just that, it’s not going to evolve. Right now, our industry, social, or, excuse me, search engine optimization is constantly changing.

And with social media and AI and all these things coming up, we have to stay on top of that. So if you, Avram, are not educating yourself and keeping up to date on what is changing, we will be the dinosaurs within a couple of weeks or months, depending on how quickly, you know. So time goes by really, really quickly, and we really do have to be aware of that.

Avram: So that’s just a key distinction. We’ll throw a blog post in the, uh, the show notes of this episode, babiesandbiz.com/72. You can get all the show notes and resources that we’re talking about today. I did another blog post video that talks about these like four quadrants that we worked through and how to decide what that role was going to be that we’re hiring for.

And the summary of it is. Look, it’s the stuff that the founder is doing that they either like or they don’t like, but they’re doing a lot of it. Those are the only two places that you should hire from versus, Oh, we’re not doing this yet, but I’d like to do that

Rachel: Exactly. Well, because that doesn’t give you any time back. So excited for you to have this resource

Avram: Yeah. It doesn’t give you any time back.

So what do you say to the entrepreneur, Rachel? That’s like, well, I don’t know what I could give to somebody because you know, I don’t know if they could do it.

Rachel: You know one thing that we got out of Clockwork Accelerator. I think it was the program was the mindset, the mindset around running a business and having people in your business doing the work was really incredible. And the mindset that I took from that, the change for me was if you currently are doing, we’ll just say five things.

You are doing five things and you are using your time. So, You think about it, five things, not any one of these is getting a hundred percent of your time, effort, or energy. Or creativity. So we’ll just say 20 percent, just to be fair

Avram: for each five roles.

Rachel: 20%. If you were to hire somebody to take on one role and that is all they did, just with those percentages that we just talked about, do you think that they would do a better job just based strictly off of the time that they could dedicate to it?

Avram: Oh, absolutely, because even if they were half as good as you, they would still be at a 50 percent versus your 20.

Rachel: Exactly. So If you do the task, and you know the task well enough to improve upon it, To create a system around it because you know it well enough, you know, all the elements that are required I guarantee you, you will be able to bring somebody in that can do better than you can. So our mindset was previous to this training was like, well, how could someone do it as good as me?

You know These are really critical things that need to happen for this client and yada yada yada You build it up to be this really grandiose thing that you only you can do. But In reality if they were able to spend more time on it than you That element alone makes them better.

Avram: It does.

Rachel: So that was the mindset shift for me one of them. What was what was one of them that came for you as opposed or um as applied to hiring?

What was one of the things you loved

Avram: Well, that’s, I was kind of hoping that was the thing that you would talk about.

Rachel: Okay, good

Avram: Right? It’s, it’s because you, if you think about your business on a spectrum, on one end of the spectrum, you have control. so you’re, as the business owner, have your fingers in everything, right? you got, everything’s got to be through approvals, okay?

And then on the other, and you’re maybe micromanaging, that’s one side of the spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum is freedom, where you’re like totally hands off and maybe even a bit disconnected from the business. There are pros and cons to being on either side of that spectrum,

Rachel: Sure, but with the spectrum you can only have one or the other

Avram: Right. So as you move further towards wanting and design more freedom, you have to give up control to do that Which means hiring building systems doing all this other stuff. If you want to have you know I’ll use the word perfection and everything that’s coming out of your business and what people are doing you’re gonna give up freedom to be more involved and have that control.

So that was

Rachel: so you get one

Avram: Or the other. You have to choose, you cannot have both. And so this is an exercise of giving up control. So, the thing is, is if you hire the right person for the role, a lot of the problems that you’ve experienced in the past simply go away. Like, people want, you know, dating and relationship advice, but you know the best piece of advice?

Choose the right person from the beginning, and a lot of the problems that you have been talking about, or obsessing over aren’t even a thing

Rachel: Well, because in relationships, you’re trying to resurrect a bad relationship when you’re asking for that advice, most likely.&n
bsp;

Avram: Yeah, or something’s just off the rails, right?

Rachel: or you have these intuitions that you’re trying to deny. Another story for another time, I’m sure.

Avram: Yeah.

So I think that’s Just the most important part of

Rachel: Absolutely. That point.

Avram: of this so

Rachel: Well, I wanted to talk about another resource. I don’t know if we had talked about this previously, but one of the things that helps us like maybe in your mind you’re hearing this and you’re thinking well, okay, but how do I really select that person? How do I know if they’re gonna be good at this?

Well, you’re doing the hard work on the front end of hiring somebody. You want to know what is the one skill. If they come in with one skill, what is that one skill? And then you have a secondary skill. If they’re good at this that’s a plus. But they don’t have to possess that Secondary one.

And then for us, we just love the Clifton Strength Finder test. It tells us so much about the person. It tells us, it actually helps us understand how to communicate with them because we know better how they communicate. But really all in all, we want somebody that feels at home in our business, really likes the work that they do.

They thrive. They love coming to work. They love doing what they do. You know, if you want to create that in your business, that’s a really great resource.

Avram: Yeah. Hot tip, the more clear you are up front and the more focused you are on the role that you’re hiring for, the better the outcome is going to be. So I think it’d be appropriate to shift gears now and just give you the example of what we recently went through and cherry pick some things that stood out for us that were different then everything we’ve been taught before about hiring and then go from there.

So money I think is a big issue for people, they’re like, how could I possibly afford somebody? Listen. We live in a very global village. And there are a slew of folks that do not live in your town, in your city, or even in your country, that have the skill sets that you need to move your business forward.

For a lot of people, there’s a lot of administrative tasks that they feel like somebody else couldn’t do. But guess what? They can.

Rachel: and they really like it

Avram: And they really like it and they thrive on all that detail and the fast pace of juggling all those things. What we propose is looking at those administrative tasks or those other things that you want to hire for, there is somebody that part time could totally help you and be excited about it.

And if you’re looking at full time, possibly hiring somebody who does not live in your country

Rachel: Correct.

Avram: because they’re very skilled.

Rachel: Yes.

Avram: So we’re going to talk about that. We knew in our business, one of the next things we needed to do was to get a copywriter and AI copywriter. So somebody is skilled with all these tools coming out with a background in copy.

So maybe a journalism degree or communications degree. Uh, it’s using these tools to help create the content for our clients. And that was a huge bottleneck for us after our previous employee left. Right? So we looked at when we went to hire this person. What is the number one skill this person needs to have?

What is the most important thing if we’re going to hire somebody just to do copy? And it was, perfect written English skills. That’s the number one thing. So I don’t care where I’m hiring this person from, as long as their written English is perfect.

Rachel: Yeah

Avram: I don’t care if they show up on a, on a Zoom call and it’s, it’s harder for them to speak in our language if it’s non native.

Rachel: Sure. Because you know, spoken language is different than written language. Totally different. And the way that you come across and all, all sorts of things, but it doesn’t really matter. We knew what that skill was.

Avram: Yes, and so the thing that we learned was in writing the job description, all you have to do is focus on the most important thing. You could list a secondary attribute that would be a bonus if they had it, but then you don’t need to write this huge job description that talks about all the ins and outs and daily responsibilities and the culture fit and

Rachel: Right. It’s not about all those things. It’s actually about this one skill. Do you possess this one skill? Are you really good at it? And really then going from there.

Avram: So, we created a job description that was about three sentences long.

Rachel: Very simple, but did the hard work of knowing what are some of the things that we’re going to be delegating to this person. So we already knew that we would be able to get them work right away. We already knew what they would be doing.

Avram: The other thing that we learned was, what, it’s kind of like a question, what if you didn’t have to set up and schedule all these in person or Zoom interviews or, or phone calls with people? Because how frustrating it is when somebody doesn’t show up. That happens a lot, we hear it.

Rachel: and also, if they’re not going to be somebody that needs to show up on a zoom or in person call, you did not need to be doing an interview like that. If you’re going to have, like for us, we did our interviews through email and what a great way to do that because if they weren’t good at English, written English, how are they going to keep the conversation going in a really impeccable way day after day and be really prompt with their responses?

Avram: Yeah, so we learned this whole different method of interviewing, which was posed to us through a challenge we’ll post up in the in the show notes. We’ll talk about it here more in a minute about how to run the interview. So the interview is just, uh, A series of email back and forth with your candidates and at every stage, you’re going to have some deal breakers there inside of your interview questions that if somebody breaks that deal, you’re going to tell them, thanks for your time.

We’re going to move forward with another candidate.

Rachel: It could also just be speed at which they reply.

Avram: Right? So we had, we ended up having like five or six rounds of questions that I was sending people and people would drop off during the interview.

Rachel: Right

Avram: And, so the ones that were really interested are the ones that gave longer answers, more in depth stuff, and they stuck with it, they were prompting them responses.

Rachel: And you could tell they really worked on it. Like they really thought about It really impressive.

Avram: let me tell you what happened with this process. I posted a job listing. We had over 140 applications within 48 hours. 143 applications. Okay, so that’s a lot.

Rachel: Where you go from, like, I don’t know who I’m gonna hire to, oh my gosh, how am I going to pick the ideal candidate from all of these people. That’s a great problem to have

Avram: It is. We had a little screening mechanism that we put into the job post itself that dropped that number from 140 plus down to 43.

Rachel: Impressive.

Avram: so I screened like 60 percent of people right out of the gate because they can’t follow or read directions. And what happened next was I took those 43 people through the interview process.

There were about 15 or so that I took all the way to the end

Rachel: Correct.

Avram: and When I got to the end of those 15 there were five that I was like man These folks are really talented. I need to give them some kind of simple test I’ll pay them for that two or three hours and then I’ll see what I get back So I had them do the test Everybody got their stuff back and then I had two people that I just could not decide between

Rachel: Yes.

Avram: so we hired them both

Rachel: And it has worked out really, really well. really cool is, they came in with those skills that we knew were absolute necessity, and, uh, they just really crushed it.

Avram: Yeah, so I started everybody with a two month probation period just to make sure that everything was going to work smoothly. We’re operating in different time zones. By the way, we hired these people from the Philippines. So our team members have, have, um, bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees in journalism.

So they’re like extremely talented folks, that are just operating in a different time zone and they can do their work anytime. It doesn’t matter for our clients. So here I was thinking it’s going to be this like 60 day warm up. where it’s going to just take all of my time to be training these people

Rachel: No, and you found that it was like two weeks of like, kind of heavy review of what’s going on so that you can give feedback and work out those systems. Absolutely. You can feel confident and then totally up to date. And now, just really, really awesome where we have so many systems and processes in place that they just do seamlessly.

Avram: Yeah. So we’re like four months in now. I don’t see anything. Um, you know, gosh, in the past you would have already seen issues.

Rachel: Yes.

Avram: so we’re just so happy with these, these team members and excited to do this podcast with you because the resources that we got were what changed everything for us

Rachel: Absolutely. And we’re really excited to share the resources with you.

Avram: Yeah, so we took this this challenge called the one VA away challenge So we’re gonna throw that in the show notes.

I think it cost us 50 dollars.

Rachel: It was the best 50 dollars we’ve ever spent.

Avram: Oh my gosh It was two hours of training to learn the process Okay, and then from that training it was recommended to Join this community. I mean job board just sounds so much less Interesting than what it is. we joined this platform called onlinejobs.ph and we spent like 300 dollars maybe to have access to this platform for an entire year, post unlimited job posts and, and request resumes and stuff like that, which is really cheap.

Rachel: Well, and what’s really cool is on that website, there’s also ways that that website grades people and you can see their specific things that you can look for, things that are red flags, things that mean really good things, things that you can look at and don’t matter, you know, all sorts of different things.

There’s a really cool walkthrough. Of the website and, just the training about how, communication is a little bit different in the Philippines and how, there’s just so many small nuances that actually made such a difference. And, you know, when we leaned into the process and we said, you know, okay,

We don’t understand this, but let’s try it. It really, really served us well. We went with every single, we followed every single suggestion that was given, and we have been richly rewarded two really, really talented. folks here

Avram: Yeah, so shout out to Barbara and Glenn, our newest members here at Digital Harvest, they’re crushing it.

Rachel: and you can see their blogs. We have some blogs about them on the website

Avram: Oh, yeah, we’ll yeah, we’ll throw that into the the show notes as well You can see these amazing people that we’re talking about The one thing that we forgot to mention in all this is why places like upwork suck for hiring.

Rachel: Yes. Yes.

Avram: so Places like upwork are based on a gig economy upwork, fiverr.

There’s a couple others And when you go to that Marketplace and you post a job. Everybody that’s applying to that job is working for 15, 20 other people in different projects.

Rachel: Right. And it is project based in their mind. It is project based. That is not where you’re going to find a great employee.

Avram: Yes. So we actually had a, uh, a situation about two years ago where we hired somebody from there and had multiple conversations with them about how this was, this was a long term, like you’re a team member and we talked about that. Even our contract for them mentioned that, you know, this is not like a freelance thing, this is a team member thing.

And like three weeks in they’re like, this is not what I signed up for, you guys, you guys have too many expectations and this and that, and I was like, dude, it’s cause you’re part of the team now, we talked about this, in his mind he wanted a client, he did not want a boss,

Rachel: And he also didn’t want accountability. He wanted to be able to do the stuff whenever he wanted

Avram: and however he wanted to do not following systems and stuff.

Rachel: And so the quality control.

Avram: Yeah, so we found that in Upwork and Fiverr and places like that So avoid those because the mindset of people in there is not right. With a platform like onlinejobs.ph Everybody there is looking for a job. They’re not looking for part time stuff.

Some are but they’re not

Rachel: But you can filter those out as well. If you write a good job description and you’re talking about full time, all those things can filter them out, you know. The point is that through the, time that you are interviewing them, that you’re able to get down to the bottom of everything

Avram: Mm hmm.

Rachel: and find the ideal person, and we just so happened to find two.

Avram: Yeah.

Yeah. So that’s the quick and dirty on our process of hiring new folks. You’ve been listening to us for a little bit now. You know that we’re on this journey right now to grow the business enough to hire our next person, which will replace Rachel in the client happiness role. So right now she’s the, the forward facing person who’s talking to clients all the time.

And that’s, that’s tying her down to her desk at times when are, that are difficult when you have two young kids.

Rachel: Right. Well, and, and it also makes it very difficult for me to really focus on the number one thing that I do, which is project management. I keep things going from every single team member. We have projects that we do that touch every single team member. And sometimes it goes multiple rounds through different team members.

So I do have to keep things on track and on time to meet the deadlines that we have each month and with all the clients that we serve. We are making room for more clients. So we do have to get these processes dialed in and keep ahead. So that’s what I want to be doing more of is project management and less of the you got to do it at this time kind of work.

Avram: Yeah, so the interesting thing is is like when you make this next hire It might be a little bit uncomfortable for you But what’s crazy is the universe meets you where you’re going. So when you hire that next person you’re saying i’m ready to go

Rachel: Yeah. And when you hire the next person, you are also Not going to let them go without work. So it forces you to work on your business. If that means that you’re building systems as they are working with you and they are actually part of that build, that’s great. But you are
not going to hire this person full time and pay them full time all these things and not have work for them.

So it is going to force you to up level your business just because you are now accountable to someone for the hours that have for them.

Avram: Yeah, and if you’re following the advice here and you’re hiring a person to do one thing, not a million things, it’s going to be really easy for you to, like, record a video for them every day about the new task that you’re giving them, and then you can review it when they’re done, then you can have them go do it again and again and again.

Rachel: And to that point, also, if you’re hiring for one thing, you can also make sure to hire the person that really enjoys that thing instead of someone that is doing all of these different things with, like, if you look at what they’re doing and you thought about the person that possessed all of these talents and things that they would, that, that it would be enjoyable to them, it probably doesn’t exist.

That person does not exist. They don’t like all of those things

Avram: The person that’s going to

Rachel: and they won’t be good at it. So when you delegate something to them, it’s going to come back. Not that great because they’re not good at it. And maybe you’re not good at it and you didn’t train them enough. You know, I think that a lot of their success is based off of how much information we give them.

Do we allow them to be successful based on how we are informing them about that task and keeping them in the track of what we hired them for and what they enjoy.

Avram: yeah the person that is super detail oriented, that’s managing your calendar and doing administrative tasks may not be, and probably isn’t the person that’s going to be super creative in like coming up with social media campaigns from scratch. That’s a very different type of person So you’ve got to really think about that.

Stop hiring people that you’re hoping to become unicorns, because they don’t exist. Yes. So hire somebody for the one thing, let them go, do that thing, and they will crush it. You’re, you’re, uh, 20 percent that we talked about earlier. 20 percent across 5 roles? Well, now you’re going to have 4 roles that are at 25 percent and they’re going to be crushing that one out at 80 percent plus.

So way above what you could have ever done on your own.

Rachel: Absolutely. So take this information and run with it.

Avram: Yes. So we’re going to, yeah, go to babiesandbiz.com/72, the number 72. And we’ve got all these resources that we mentioned here. The 1VA away challenge, onlinejobs. ph. Those are affiliate links, by the way. So if you click on them and you do it, we get a small commission. But that’s not why we’re sharing it.

We just finally found something that’s really good that I’d recommend to everybody. And the last thing is our community question. So if you go to that, if you go to our website, score on the bottom, the question we have for you is. Who is your next hire? What is the next role you’re hiring for? We’d love to hear about it If you’ve got other resources or places that you’ve found great talent, we’d love to know about that too

Rachel: absolutely

Avram: Yeah, so thanks for listening to this episode If you’ve got a friend who is talking about their next hire and they’re scared to do it Maybe they’ve complained about the money side of it or the time of it Or just that they’ve been burned in the past and can’t find good people.

Send them this episode.

Rachel: yes,

Avram: who is that friend?

Send them this episode. They don’t even have to have kids to enjoy it, right?

Rachel: right. This is all about how you hire. And you know, we have goals behind it. And that’s why we’re talking about babies and business. definitely help that friend to that big leap and get that freedom and time back.

Avram: So thanks for sharing this episode. If you haven’t already, give us that five star review on Apple, iTunes, or Spotify, wherever you’re listening. And we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Rachel: Bye for now.