The Hiring Process

Transcript

Transcript of the recorded lesson. Recorded 2023, reviewed 2026.

In this video I'm going to go over our hiring process. There are many variables for hiring good people. In this video I'm going to go over where to find good people and onboarding. From an employee hiring platform perspective we currently use Indeed. With Indeed you get a lot of candidates, but you do have to spend a lot of time sifting through them to find the potential right fits for the position. Before we started using Indeed we used Craigslist for years. We actually stopped using Craigslist for the majority of our positions because we just weren't getting that many quality candidates. Indeed is the platform we recommend if you're looking to hire an employee today.

Depending on where you live you may need to search for another job search platform if Indeed isn't popular where you live or is unavailable. Once we find a good candidate we schedule a phone or zoom interview and ask several questions to determine if they are a potential good fit for the position. There's a lot of things that we're looking for. The biggest thing that we look for in candidates is customer service experience. We're not so concerned about photography experience because our processes are so simple that we can train just about anybody on photography. From our experience it's easier to teach photography skills than customer service skills.

Once we've moved forward with a candidate that meets our expectations we sit down with them at our office or over zoom and go over the role, responsibilities, and expectations. Once we know that they're 100% on board with our expectations then they move on to the training process for two weeks with a media specialist trainer before going off on their own. Now we also implement a 90 day probationary period with all our new hires. This helps us to make sure that the person we interviewed for the job is the one that shows up for work. From time to time you might get a candidate that interviews really well but doesn't

fulfill the basic expectations like showing up on time or being courteous or maybe they had a great attitude during the interview process but then a couple weeks after you hire them they have a terrible attitude and seem to complain a lot. We like to follow the philosophy of hiring slow and firing fast. If we feel like somebody isn't the right fit we don't waste our time giving multiple chances especially during the probationary period. Years ago we used to tolerate a lot of nonsense and since changing our philosophy we have fewer problems and a team that works well together. We also provide company vehicles to our media specialists so we also do background

checks and driving record checks to ensure that they are insurable. We once hired somebody without doing a background check and they couldn't drive a work vehicle because they required a breathalyzer so make sure you do your due diligence before making the job offer. Arizona is an at-will hiring state meaning that we can pretty much let somebody go for a lot of different reasons but depending on where you live and operate the rules and regulations may differ so make sure to become familiar with hiring rules and regulations for your area. In the bonus section of the course we have attached a list of hiring questions that we use for new hires so if you're not sure what questions to ask

potential candidates you can start with those. Now that's our process for hiring employees when we're talking about freelancers and contractors it's a little bit different. If you're looking for virtual freelancer help we recommend using Upwork. For Upwork freelancers we usually have to go through two or three before finding a good one. We occasionally get bad hires and in those cases we move on and find new ones. If you're trying to find freelance photographers to help with customer orders then we recommend using Thumbtack to find local realistic photographers. We hire contract photographers in all our non-Arizona and Nevada markets. If you feel they're a good fit and follow instructions we will bring them on as a contractor

as long as they agreed to our pay structure. So regardless of whether we're hiring employees, contractors or freelancers we want to build a team of individuals committed to doing quality work and delivering an excellent customer experience. That's going to do it for this video reach out if you have any questions. We'll see you guys on the next one.