Looking for high-quality freelancers? Say hi to Noel Andrews of Jobrack.
In Episode 62 of the Bean Ninjas Podcast, CEO Meryl Johnston talks to Noel Andrews about finding high-quality Eastern European freelancers.
Interested in learning more about hiring high-quality freelancers in Eastern Europe? Listen to our interview where Noel Andrews, CEO of @jobrack1 Click To TweetTaking control of Jobrack
Before Jobrack, Noel had a lengthy career in corporate IT. He was mostly doing management, team hiring, and team development.
Also, he was running an interview coaching business. This meant helping candidates get ready for interviews.
At first, Noel was coaching people mainly for IT roles, later he coached for other roles as well.
At one point Noel was working with members of the Dynamite Circle online community, consulting entrepreneurs on how they could hire developers and freelancers to grow their businesses.
“This was something like a done for you hiring service.”
At this point, the people running Jobrack part-time decided to focus on their primary business.
These guys were looking for someone to move the business on to, to someone who’ll make it grow. For Noel, this was a great business opportunity with massive potential.
The timing was perfect, Noel had built a few online products before but this was the first business he acquired.
Noel was a member of a mastermind group where he asked for a developer. The recommended developer did a review of the technical code and the database.
“I’ve never been a hands-on coder, I can just about read code a little bit and have an idea what’s going on, and to check small changes, but not do a technical review.”
It was important for Noel to understand what he was buying.
Process-wise, taking over Jobrack was fast. The transferring process and taking control took 4 weeks, legals, the implementation of the website into Noel’s infrastructure.
The first few weeks of taking over the business were crazy as the final transfer happened one day before Noel flew to Bangkok. He had an annual conference of around 350 online business owners and entrepreneurs.
These people were Noel’s absolute perfect target market and lots of them have used Jobrack before.
Related: How to buy a business – Interview with Jennifer Anderson
When Noel did his presentation he figured people were already informed about him buying Jobrack. People were glad that it wasn’t going to shut down.
“Learning starts at day one, and I’m not sure that the learning will ever stop, but it gets more comfortable.”
For Noel, the hardest thing was getting comfortable with the codes as the website had an app that was running.
“You can’t see it, and you don’t know it unless you developed it yourself you don’t really know what’s in the background, what kind of hidden horrors, what kind of bugs are there.”
Noel started prioritizing, making lists and lists of things to do. He got into changing things, doing tweaks, learning and discovering.
“You gotta decide how you focus your time, there’re only so many hours in the day.”
Related: Time Management Lessons from Bean Ninja CEO
Initially, Noel was focused on just running Jobrack and learning along the way. So, the first few months he ran along with the business.
Noel was observing how things work so he could get a grip of them.
Mainly observing the process of jobseekers to apply for jobs and for owners to seek workers. The idea was to work closely with both job seekers and employers.
Noel’s vision of Jobrack became a reality.
They specialize in finding and getting amazing remote workers for online businesses. They help online business owners to really find the absolute best remote talent they can possibly find.
Since UpWork is mostly focused on acquiring freelancers, Jobrack is more similar to Seek.
“We are more about business owners finding part-time or full-time hires that will become real members of their team. Medium to long term bases as opposed to the freelancing kind of thing.”
Scaling Jobrack by changing regions
Jobrack tried hiring from US, UK, Philippines but it was difficult for them to be profitable or scalable. Also, it was hard to find the quality they needed to grow.
Key reasons for transferring to Eastern Europe are their culture, education system and great value.
The work ethic of Eastern European people provided evidence of great determination for better living and seeking amazing online opportunities. People are willing and ready to work hard.
There’s a lot of people with two college degrees, which describes the quality of potential freelancers. Their education system, the quality of graduates and the quality of technical understanding they can produce is amazing.
The key difference is that people are very direct; you get no fluff-talk, just straight answers.
Last but not least, you get great value at a low cost.
Related: 5 Reasons Why You Should Hire Freelancers From Eastern Europe
This region is known for its’ developers, but also project managers, designers, assistants and an awful lot of content writers.
Jobrack represents 21 countries.
“Whatever you want, we can find it through Jobrack.”
Here’s Noel explaining how to hire people using Jobrack:
Need help scaling your business? Seek employees and post new job positions @Jobrack. Click To TweetBuilding high-quality job relations
Communication is the absolute key. The more time you put into communicating with your hire right from the very start, the better results you’ll get.
“Communication’s what really makes a difference, and being interested in them, and being invested in them as a team member. You want to get to know them, you want to know about their family, their own life and what things are like in Eastern Europe.”
Job-wise, it’s important to know the culture of your team members, as they could be aligned to a slightly different calendar.
Have one-to-ones, work on your company’s culture and as a result, you can turn someone into a long term member.
Related: Why Is Team Communication Important When in Teams?
Start the mornings with people logging into Slack and saying things like “Hey, morning.”
Do the same at the end of the day, like “See you later.” as if you were working in an office.
Set really clear expectations. At Jobrack there’s a document shared before anyone joins as a part of the onboarding.
Pay attention to trivial things, like the way you want your team member to change a document. Be specific, be open, and present all the varieties of working ways.
Related: Top 10 Strategies To Motivate Remote Employees
Noel suggests tools like Asana, Slack, etc. so that team members can communicate outside of work as well.
The idea is for people to want to give and receive insight about their team members. Noel has giphy added to Slack so they can share funny gifs, or he shares pictures if he’s doing anything interesting.
Implement frameworks, and make sure to follow the development of your team and its’ future.
Train your team, push them. Be open to new ideas to grow and offer more to your clients.
Jobrack has a great database so far, they are constantly focusing on quality and expanding the services they offer.
Their focus remains on growing in a sustainable way.
They are driving growth by implementing marketing strategies. They’re looking into podcasts, new partnerships, etc.
“How can we help and who can we partner with to get the best possible result to help business owners; it’s all about it being a win-win. Try things, if they work, great, if not fail fast and look at other things.”
Related: How to bring on a new business partner after your business is already running with Tommy Griffith
Want to acquire a growth mindset? Check out this infographic:
(Source: https://www.pierrelechelle.com)
Listen in to learn more about finding high-quality Eastern European Freelancers.
Meryl and Noel Andrews discuss:
- Noel’s journey
- Acquiring his first business
- Getting comfortable and personalizing your business
- Why it makes sense to higher Eastern European freelancers
- Scaling strategies through choosing specific regions
- Building long term relationships
Resources mentioned in this episode
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