In today’s episode, Joe talks to Alex Harling of Dynamite Jobs. Alex handles Account Management and Operations, focused primarily on remote jobs hiring. Launched in October 2017, Dynamite Jobs is an efficient way to connect companies in the Dynamite Circle with remote job seekers to thousands of remote jobs posted each week.
The discussion is focused on remote hiring, the right way to post successful job listings, top hiring tips in a remote setting, ways to announce a job opening, and the latest updates at Dynamite Jobs.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:49 Welcome to the pod, Alex Harling!
- 03:38 How Alex started at Dynamite Jobs
- 04:52 Common ways to announce job openings
- 08:01 Top tips and changes in the hiring process
- 13:15 What makes a job posting successful?
- 21:54 Hard skills and culture fit lead to better hires
- 25:56 Typical clients at Dynamite Jobs
- 30:10 What is Dynamite Jobs Hiring Pro?
- 34:36 What will be the team’s focus this year?
- 42:12 Get discount to use Hiring Pro, use code: WPBUFFS
Episode Resources:
- Visit Dynamite Jobs
- Email Alex at alex@dynamitejobs.com
- Dynamite Jobs Hiring Pro discount code: WPBUFFS
- Leave an iTunes review or binge-watch past episodes
- Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
- Visit the WPMRR website
Podcast Transcript:
Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Kind of Woody folks, Joe Howard here this week, I got to sit down and chat with Alex Hartley. Now Alex comes to us from a job board called dynamite jobs, where they focus on helping people, uh, hire and recruit, uh, remote workers for their companies. And that’s actually how I met Alex. Um, I was, uh, posting a bunch of different job boards.
They posted the done at my jobs and then Alex personally reached out and was like, Hey, what’s up? Uh, how can I help? Can I reach out to my network to try and fill some of these positions? Hey, can I like posts? Some of these other jobs too, like really not just nice and friendly, but really wanted to help and put the extra time.
And they’re just like reach directly out to me. I thought that was really cool. Not a lot of other job boards did that. Um, and so I thought it was a cool differentiator. And so eczema over the last, I don’t know, month or two of has been emailing a lot now it’s just like, yeah, Alex, you’ve got to jump on the pod.
I got a lot of questions about hiring and how to onboard someone, how to go through the hiring process. What do I need to do to like recruit people better? Uh, you can enter some of my questions. I’m sure, sure. Those answers will be really helpful for our listeners as well. So. Uh, having Alex on the pod this week was a ton of fun.
We got along really well, super easy guy to, to get to know and talk to, uh, and yeah, and answered a lot of my questions. And we talked about some stuff I wasn’t even planning to, but all of it was super valuable. I took a bunch of notes during this episode so that we can level up some of the stuff we do with hiring.
Here at WP bus. All right. That’s it for the intro of without further ado, please. Welcome Alex Hartley.
Hey, what is up folks? We are here on the pond this week. Uh, with the one and only Alex Harling, uh, Alex, tell folks a little bit about yourself. We know each other a little bit jokey before you have gone today. Like we emailed a lot and this is actually the first time I’ve like met each other in like a video call.
So, um, yeah, I know what you do, but tell folks a little bit about what you do online.
Alex Harling: [00:02:08] Thanks for having me. Yeah. So I’m Alex Harling from that on my jobs. And I handle account management and operations over at that time of my jobs. And what I do is I help people hire all day, hire remote workers all day.
Yeah.
Joe Howard: [00:02:22] Nice. Oh, you got your elevator pitch like down. Cause I feel like I’m still working on mine, like WP blocks. Okay. We do website management for folks and we do white label. It’s like, it’s a little bit too long, but you got your it’s down to like a few words, which is nice. So helping people hire remotely, which is totally.
That’s how we met. We do a lot of hiring remotely and dynamite. My is like one of the, we we’d probably post to like 10 different job boards for dynamite jobs is a one where I can I come to where I feel like we’ve gotten really good results. Then my job posting. And to every time I post a job, you always emailed.
And you’re like, Hey, like, thanks for posting. Like, Hey bro, that’s at the shop. We can post that. We’ll just throw that one up there too. Like I’m like, Oh, Alex is awesome. I know my job is awesome. So you guys do a really good job just to. Making customers happy, but yeah. So dynamite jobs, where, where is that dynamite jobs.com?
Alex Harling: [00:03:13] Yeah, we became a.com uh, this past year, actually, you know, we were.co for a while now we’re on.com level. Um, so after two, two, half years, three years with the Dakota Maine, uh, we went all in on.com. So dynamite jobs.com is where you can, you can find us and you can see the latest, uh, WP bus jobs on there.
Yeah, you can. Yeah,
Joe Howard: [00:03:31] you can. Sweet. Um, alright. So, um, for my. Personal selfish, wanting to know what, tell, tell me a little bit about like how you came to dynamite jobs and kind of how you became that kind of an account manager. The operations guy there in
Alex Harling: [00:03:47] 2017. I was, I was working for a digital marketing agency, uh, during the, uh, the cryptocurrency ICO.
Boom. Um, so I was helping with some marketing plans, mostly doing cold outreach to different companies. Um, and the job was fine. Um, but I was looking for new opportunities and I found, uh, uh, the tropical MBA podcast, which, uh, started dynamite jobs.com. And so that was during 2017 when they launched the site.
So I followed all of the site from prom since day one, and I was actually using the site to apply to jobs on there. And I didn’t get any jobs. I was applying to jobs on there. And then, um, the, the owners of dynamite jobs.com wanted to hire. Different there was the first hire. And so, um, it was an apprentice ship style role.
It was, uh, yeah, gentle operations, uh, trying to figure out, uh, where to take the company and working directly with the founder. So I applied to that and, uh, yeah, I started working with them in 2018. So this is my, uh, my, my third year, third year there now.
Joe Howard: [00:04:44] Nice, nice. Okay. So the dynamite jobs have a dynamite jobs, job listing on dynamite jobs, or what did you kind of like just, did you do it to the emailing with the founder and then you found out like, Oh, they’re hiring.
Maybe I should talk to him more about that.
Alex Harling: [00:05:00] They, they, I believe the way it worked was first, they announced it on the podcast as a way to get the most, uh, the people who were following their audience first, which I think is smart. If you have time to hire, I’ll try not to get too much into hiring strategies in this, maybe the subject matter.
But, um, uh, that’s how I first heard about it. Yeah. I found the job listing through the podcast episode, um, applied that way. And then after, um, they listed it on the site, I was fine. A while back, we were looking through old listings and we found those, we were doing some SEO work on the pages and, um, we were looking at listings and someone said, isn’t this, the job that you applied to?
Oh my gosh. Yeah. That’s the job three years ago that I applied to.
Joe Howard: [00:05:36] Very cool. Yeah, I’ve done some job announcements here on the podcast too. Um, we do like a little intro for every. Episode now. And sometimes the intro, if we have something, you know, we’ve done like, Hey, we have this like little survey about around community, you know, I’ll take it.
Or, and then we’ve also done job stuff there. Hey, you know, Christie and I had done jobs, went forward, both talked about like, Hey, we’re hiring for this kind of position at our companies. Uh, and if. Do you have any interest can talk to us? Cause I think you’re right, like that, like a podcast is like, it’s like in a lot of ways, your most intimate audience.
And so, you know, those are the people who like, maybe they’re not just reading your content or videos or like demos some of your podcasts, like they’re like seriously, like in your circle. So that’s a good place to reach out to folks. I think, I think you’re right
Alex Harling: [00:06:21] about that. Yeah, I see the podcast announcement, a Twitter announcement, and then an email list announcement as common ways before going to the public.
Um, because it’s kind of like a referral. People are most comfortable with referrals before a cold applicant.
Joe Howard: [00:06:33] Yeah, totally. And now we’re getting into like more of the, kind of like hiring strategies or maybe recruitment strategies. This is a lot, this is honestly why I wanted to have you on the pod today because.
I have a lot of questions about this stuff, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be able to like, get, hear these answers and it’ll help them as well. So I’ve found as our company has grown, the WordPress base is very, um, it’s a, it’s like there’s a community around it because WordPress is open source.
And so the community in essence kind of builds WordPress, uh, and the code bar code based behind it. So I found a lot of our best people that I have found hire, like really. Core parts or their core members of the WordPress community, because they care about open source software. They cared about, you know, democratizing, publishing, they care about WordPress.
And so those, I find a lot of are my most dedicated people I can find in order to bring on to my team. So like I’ve started to do, it’s kind of a combo. Like I sometimes I’ll post on. You know, on job boards, if you want to get a good number of candidates in, but also like as the CEO of a company, part of what I feel like my job is, is to talk to people and use my network a little bit to find people who are good fits for certain positions here.
Somebody we don’t have to go through the whole, like get 500 applicants and sort through them all, but I can just like find it. The best people and kind of plug them into what we’re doing. So, yeah. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Maybe how you see people doing hiring, I guess in both those senses, you know, both job boards and also kind of like the recruiting aspect of it.
Alex Harling: [00:08:02] Yeah. I mean, hiring has changed. So at least in our little remote work world, um, which is now a big remote work world, um, hiring has changed so much. And every time someone asks for hiring advice, you know, it’s, they ask for advice. I felt a lot of questions to figure out what is what’s, what’s the best situation because everybody hires differently.
And, but one thing that’s pretty common to start is that, um, looking to your referrals or looking to your network first, because I mean, opening up your, your job is it’s like a to, to the world is not like opening up your home in the way, but you’re opening up your company to. Who, who knows who and you’re, and you’re signing yourself up for a lot of work.
Um, looking at applications, talking with candidates, distributing the job. It’s a lot to do it. So I do recommend that people start with their initial network, um, when they, and that’s open was coming CLCs. Someone will post a Twitter status and say, Hey, I’m looking for a marketer who you recommend it, but that the issue with that is it can also lead to so many referrals and without much context.
So I always recommend if you’re going to go to your, your network, would that with whatever platform, have that job ready first. Because if, if it’s just a project, if you need someone to, uh, we’re going to do random examples. Okay. For WordPress, for example, um, you’re having an issue with a. You need a theme update and you’re worried about updating your theme.
And so you want to have a developer in there to check everything when they update the theme, that’s could be a small term project. So have that mapped out and know exactly what you want. And then ask around. I need a WordPress developer. Who’s very comfortable with this theme type, instead of saying, I need a WordPress developer, because that will narrow it down.
And the responses you get will be more, um, targeted, uh, to, to you though. People will not just say I’m WordPress developer, they’ll say WordPress developer. And all I do all day is theme updates.
Joe Howard: [00:09:39] Yeah. I think that’s really. Smart. I think whenever I’ve tried to do some recruiting, kind of outside of posting a job description and it’s, it’s worked okay to have conversations with people who I think are good candidates, but it’s missing a little bit of that.
I’m not quite bridging the gap between like, Are you good in the general area that I know you’re in now that I talked to you and are you a really good fit for this specific position? Because for every job position we post, like my big thing is wanting to have outcomes. For the job description, like, what do you need to do in your first year, in this position?
Like that needs to be really clear on the job description to me. So it’s like, yes, like right now we’re hiring an operations person. It’s like an operations manager and operations assistant. Um, yeah. So shout out people who are listening, if you’re looking for an operations position, come and talk to me.
Um, but in that position, like there’s people who are generally have been in operations, but like, what do you need specifically to do at WP boss? Okay. You need to handle this and like, Some people ops work, we need to handle like, even like more specifically, like need us to create like really rigid and systemized, like onboarding and like hiring documentation and like best practices we can use.
And then there’s like, there’s more actual like systems implementation in terms of like the software. We use a WVU bus, um, which off the top of my head. Can’t think of exactly what that stuff is. Nick is our head of operations. He’s the stuff that I am, but in suffice to say, I want to know like exactly what people want to get, like needed, what outcomes they need to accomplish.
If they’re thinking of joining this job so that when they see that, you know, either say, Ooh, that’s not really my skillset. Maybe I’m not the best fit for this position, which is fine. Obviously you want people applying who are like going to be effective. And then the people who apply, they say, Oh, like, this is my bread and butter.
Or I at least feel confident I’ve done similar projects in the past that I can accomplish that outcome. I’m with you on the job, on having at least like a basic job description to together before kind of throwing it out there, or else you’re going to get a whole bunch of people in who are like, totally, I can help with that.
Uh, probably. Well, you’re not really sure.
Alex Harling: [00:11:53] Great. And you have those plans. She’s ready to make sure they’re a right fit. You know, if you had to jump on the phone with them right after seeing their resume, you could ask them, what’s your familiarity with SLPs similar roles you’ve been in. You can ask them about the day to day of that job and then, you know, faster that’s the right fit.
Um, I see a lot of people get in the trap of they start hiring and then they realized they don’t. No exactly what they want. So having that ideal, uh, like a customer persona, like a candidate persona in your mind that will really help.
Joe Howard: [00:12:20] Yeah. We’ve never hired people that we didn’t know exactly what we wanted for the position.
Of course not. I’m totally joking. Like we’ve definitely, definitely done that in the past and it has more depth and we’ve we’ve, I know I’ve hired people on who I’ve made that mistake before and I kind of hired based on gut feeling. And it didn’t really work out, not necessarily because I thought my gut feeling was wrong.
Like they were good, maybe in certain aspects of like digital marketing, for example, but they weren’t very good at exactly what we needed for our position. They were more of a generalist and less of, they didn’t have the exact expertise needed. To do what we needed them to do here at our company. So that was, I think, where the, where the gap was.
Um, but I, I’m always interested to hear, especially from. Someone who runs a job board. What, what do you usually see from like the most successful job postings there? Cause you see a bond. Yeah. You probably see hundreds of job postings, you know, probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of job postings over your career there.
Right. So. What are like some, this is kind of a hard question because it’s like, every company is different and every remote company, especially a lot of things are contextual, but I’m sure you’ve seen some things. One needed at that work that worked pretty well in your job description in order to effectively hire someone from, from Denmark jobs.
And that person is a really good long-term employee and does really well for you. So maybe some things that have worked and maybe some things that like, Oh, you definitely don’t want to have that in the job posting. I don’t know if you can say positive or negative, it’s kind of, I’ll leave you the choice to you.
But anything that pops out to you is just top of mind, I’m going to be really helpful for people. I. Oh, a lot of listeners trying to hire great people and maybe like me, they’ve struggled a bit in the past. So what can they do in terms of job descriptions when they’re posting to, to improve that conversion?
Alex Harling: [00:14:22] Yeah, I think, uh, it’s I always try to think of some universals, I guess, universal job rules, um, when helping people hire and a lot of clients will ask, they’ll say, I’m interested in hiring a marketer. Um, what kind of job posts, uh, perform the best. And I’m happy to share some that have performed the best, but there’s different.
Performance metrics that we can measure. And I mean, some of them will get a lot of, Oh, I look at John, I’m trying to think of a thinking out loud, what we were looking at in terms of what performance. Well, because some, we could get some job posts, a ton of clicks and tons of use. And then, um, You spent time on pages longer.
Um, and then, uh, just like you would for a, like a normal marketing campaign, but then we always look for the, the application conversion. And then after that, the quality of the applicant, I’m trying to equate it to like marketing charts, maybe like the lifetime value of that application, you know, who is actually a good fit.
And so I think some of the universals we started is one is, is, is getting that. Uh, candidate persona down is, um, when you say you need to hire like, uh, you need hire for a certain category, but who are you looking for? Uh, what, what do you want them to do day to day? What is some of their a month long, three month projects?
Where do you see them a year from now? Is this budgeted are all the stakeholders involved when all those initial pieces are in place, we have a good foundation to hire, and that’s when I get, I’ve posted a lot of jobs where it’s missing something, maybe the partner, uh, wasn’t quite ready to hire, but the other partner said, no, no, we’re going to do this.
And. Drop fell apart, um, because the foundation wasn’t set or even the day to day where you ha we had a lot of good candidates, but as the candidates came in, we realized the company realized they needed a different skillset. Projects were changing. And that’s okay, because we can, we can adjust when, when, when the job is live and perhaps some of the candidates have already received, um, they, they might be a good fit.
So the first thing I would say is getting the foundation after that, it’s the, um, the job post itself. I mean, it’s got to look good. We hit, uh, I hope I don’t insult anyone. When I say we get a lot of jobs, scriptures that are really short and it looked like project, project jobs, descriptions. That’s fine.
If you’re hiring for a project, you do that on our site. But if you want someone to be around for the longterm, I think you really want to, um, You know, excite them, you know, if they’re about to spend time submitting application, um, tell them why. And I think that’s going to give you guys a shout out, you know, WP buffs.
They have, um, you guys have an amazing, um, page that shares all the, uh, why you should be on the team. Not only do you, do you define the job and what the job is, but the, uh, people can, kids can imagine themselves working on the team. They can get excited about it. The work that you do day to day. I mean, that’s like, yeah, it’s exciting, but that’s not everything.
It’s also the people you’re around. It’s, it’s what you’re representing. That’s what the company is. All those little things out to the job as a whole. So when we always, we share resources when we’re creating job descriptions, because that’s what I really encourage. So that’s the other piece is having a well-defined job, a good job description after that would be the application itself.
And this is where things have changed the pre COVID now and how we can say that pre COVID world when there were more candidates than there were remote jobs, people were very hungry to give it their all and applications. And maybe you can tell what you’re seeing Joe on your end, but were we, we were seeing a little at the end of last year, less applications, whereas in 2019, 2018, we were seeing.
Ton of applications, people would bend over backwards and do whatever you wanted to, um, to apply to a job. So I’m not sure if you’re seeing something like that and all this applications or,
Joe Howard: [00:17:36] yeah, I haven’t talked with Nick about that because I don’t know he’s reviewing the applications cause it’s an ADAPs operation session right now, but, um, do you think that’s related, do you think that’s like COVID related, do you think that’s like a, some like.
People. I see, this is interesting to see some of these trends. Cause sometimes they’re the opposite of what I think they were like, I would think if there were like a significant amount of people out of work right now that people would be putting more time in. So do you think like the work, the remote work industry is like just grown so much over the past, like 18 months that it’s, or maybe not 18 months, but 12 months, the last 12 months, that application that applicants are not.
Or people are not as, quite as like. Needing to find a job because maybe they already have one or
Alex Harling: [00:18:25] something. Yeah. I think, well, dynamite jobs and the other people that are in our remote work world, we work remotely remote. Okay. All of us are doing really well. Um, because we were ranking for some of the top agents for different remote work categories.
Joe Howard: [00:18:39] That’s what I was going to ask. Have you seen a lot more applicants or a lot more job postings over the past year or so? A lot
Alex Harling: [00:18:46] more. Yeah. Everything and everything’s become so much more saturated. So we were doing when March, April hit, we were doing really well in terms of getting traffic and then indeed LinkedIn monster.
It didn’t take long for them to switch over, add in remote, remote work from home. Um, and so they were, they start getting a lot more traffic as well, um, for that search. And so. I think what I, what I was saying about the application side is it was great. It wasn’t, it wasn’t great for people with, uh, for, for, for everyone.
And it was a very difficult time. Um, April may, and it’s still a difficult time, but for someone who was hiring, you really did have your pick of the litter. Um, there were so many applications coming through, but then it’s summer the, um, the applications that the amount of candidates looking and the amount of, um, Job.
They seem to have a been about even because we’re seeing less applications, still the same amount of traffic, but less applications. There were people were becoming more picky. And so our site had a lot more longer applications with, uh, video intros, cover letters, multiple, uh, questions, um, uh, and, uh, it’s longer applications.
But if you’re a candidate who can just apply to 20 jobs in indeed with one click over and over again, you’re going to go for that. And I don’t blame candidates for that. So that is what people are now competing against when they’re hiring is you want to make it easy enough for Qantas to apply? I mean, well, I guess I go different different directions here.
I mean, you can make your job easier to apply, um, by having very few fields and we can just get the resume. What have you, and, and apply, um, or. You can give your job extra, extra promotion, wait longer to increase that top of funnel with the most amount of applicants, have a few more application questions.
So you get like, I guess, like less candidates and presumably you’ll have more targeted, interested people.
Joe Howard: [00:20:22] Yeah. That’s so I think about conversion optimization, I think about like, how can I. Get the most bang for your buck, really? Like how can I make this specific funnel, the most effective and to me, and it’s not always just like getting the most like lead generation, like I don’t want to get the most leads necessarily more leads is good as long as they’re high quality leads, but like I want to get more high quality leads.
So in the job posting, I might say. I would actually personally, please tell me if I’m wrong. I want to like learn from you. I might add more job, feel more fields, more questions. Uh, and because I’d much rather personally have like a hundred people apply to a job. We’re all really pretty well qualified. And I’ll clearly like put the effort in to put a good application and then like 500 applicants who maybe a lot of them are not as high quality.
So I might actually like. Anti conversion optimization. Like I might like make it a little bit harder to apply. And I might ask for like a loom video that goes through some answers to some questions specifically for a role that’s maybe you’d have to like hop on calls for that role. Like, it’d be, I might not ask for a video.
So like, And like engineer role, maybe that kind of role doesn’t need to like be on video all the time. And maybe that’s not specifically their skill set for someone like that, but for like a marketer, who’s doing webinars, like clearly you have to do video. So like, okay, shoot me a little video with like X, Y, and Z.
And for people don’t do that, maybe they’re not a good set that’s for people that do do that. They went through the extra effort to say like, I want to work here enough to like, Jumped through a few hoops. Um, so yeah, I don’t know if you, what do you think about that? Or if you’ve seen people successfully hire based on like maybe adding more fields, making it actually a little bit more difficult to hire?
I don’t know. Yeah.
Alex Harling: [00:22:01] Yeah. I think that people who have more fields, um, and sometimes I’m for that, uh, this is very, again, it’s hard to have universal rules for hiring, so these are all. Like, these are kind of general General’s things and I’m oftentimes we post roles, we try different, um, test different things out to see what works well.
But yeah, if you’re hiring for a specific skillset, uh, I guess we call them hard skills internally. If it, the hard skills are the most important thing. What I do is I, I encourage the company to make it easy, to apply and ask about that specific skill, because that’s what’s most important. But if, if attitude, uh, there, the person’s, um, uh, how long they’ll be around like the culture fit.
Yes. Yes. And I, I think we should have more fields and we should ask a few more things that I think that’s totally cool. And that, that leads to hiring honestly, necessarily faster, but maybe a little more straightforward because you know, who’s the most interesting, whereas I think the bolts will take ’em up, uh, both ways we’ll take the same amount of time.
The other option that we’re seeing lately is instead of having one long form to start or, or. Part, one of them, one long application to begin with, uh, companies are trying out, uh, two parts of the application. So just the very basic, a few, few, few questions just to bring, just make sure the person has the, the main skill necessary for the job.
And then an automatic email. After applying with automatic email, after they, the initial applicant applies saying thank you for applying you pass part one, you are invited to part two. Sometimes the CEO, the CEO, or the founder will be CC’d on there and it will look. It’ll look good or it’ll be signed by them.
And that gets a lot more conversions because again, like maybe do not want more conversions, but in terms of if, if the skillset is really important, the best candidates are getting picked up very fast. Um, okay. Another example is actually pretty crazy that the beginning of the summer or mid summer, there was a few Google spreadsheets going around.
And they, they had the list of all these of developers and people from really talented, uh, candidates. Um, and from, from companies that were shutting down, for example, it was, that could be, uh, could be that video app that just failed. They had amazing people on the team, so many amazing people, anyways, that spreadsheet was going around.
I’m not sure how many people saw it, but I would go on and try to invite developers to certain roles and try to share with the different opportunities they were getting picked up so fast. I’ve never seen so many head hunters, so many recruiters moving around. So the other part of, of the, of the application part is whether you want it long or short is to think about that is people are getting picked up pretty quickly.
And even now for, um, other roles, I mean, here we are almost a year later, um, Are six, eight months later, what have you on, uh, at least, um, like one or two jobs a week that I work with, one of the top candidates get, gets picked up somewhere else. And, uh, so you could have only applications, but I guess there’s also the sense of urgency, you know, keep people engaged.
Uh, yeah. I’m, I’m going all over the place. There’s so many, it’s so situational, but it’s, it’s interesting.
Joe Howard: [00:24:47] Yeah, totally. You mentioned kind of the world of like head hunters and recruiters. That’s not something we’ve ever engaged now. I don’t know. It’s because we just didn’t necessarily need it. Honestly. I just never even really thought to do that.
Have you seen that? That is, you know, it’s kind of a weird time with COVID because hopefully we’ll be like turning the corner in 2021. I’m doing better this year than we did last year fingers. Cross. Yeah. Yeah. You can’t get very much worse, but that’s whole another conversation. What I want to talk about is, I mean, just the world of head hunters in general, is that something you’ve seen companies engage in and it’d be effective for them?
This is maybe we can talk about this in the context of like smaller businesses too. Probably more than people you work with. More people I’m connected to. I don’t know, you know, CEOs of a lot of fortune 500 companies, but I do know a good number of people who are, uh, you know, and maybe the fortune 50,000 or something, you know?
So I noticed some people who are maybe running some smaller businesses, maybe doing, you know, half a million dollars a year, or, you know, maybe up to like $3 million a year, which is like a bigger for small business, but still small in the grand scheme of things is that the kind of size business that you’ve seen.
Use recruiters to really find talent or is that really, maybe more with like, I don’t know, a VC funded company, as opposed to someone bootstrapped
Alex Harling: [00:26:09] in our space, in our space, um, with our work we have, we offer technical recruitment, um, as a service and yeah, they’re mostly, uh, VC backed, um, at the, at the minimum or the, um, there’s a few C-suite.
Executives, um, usually a CTO and there or a COO. Um, I’m trying to think of two people that we usually work with. They’re most likely to want to work with us because, um, yeah, they, they want to save time, um, and recruitment, head hunting. It’s expensive. It takes time and. But, um, I think a lot of people are opting towards that as a it’s talent.
It’s still very competitive. I mean, there’s a lot of talent on the market, but it’s so easy to connect with. W w with candidates, um, job boards, Twitter podcasts, LinkedIn, that, that person that you might find, uh, they might be contacted on. Some other way. So things are very competitive still. And, um, we’re seeing a lot more interest in that.
Um, but yes, mostly, um, VC back, you know, the larger companies, maybe they’re 20 to 30 employees. Um, but generally there’s an exec team and they’re trying to grow out their, their, their team. Um, but they’re pretty involved in recruitment process. We’re not placing well, we do there. There’s very many types of recruitment when we’re doing it.
We’re not just saying here’s the best person on the scale. Here’s the best person with the skill you need, you know, Put them in your company. It’s this is this, these are the people based on your parameters. And then the company will take it from there and speak with them some more after we’ve spoken with them and assess them.
Um, so there’s still very much involved, um, as they’re technically early hires in a company. Yeah.
Joe Howard: [00:27:37] It’s interesting to hear that most of that is done by VC backed companies. Um, you know, I’m a big, uh, like member of the indie hackers, um, Very much for, you know, revenue funded company, like run a revenue, funnel the company, if you can drive your company, if you can.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with raising VC funding. I think it’s necessary in some areas for some businesses, but this would be like, actually what I might think of as an advantage for running a VC funded company. Like as a Reverend fund a company, we really have to like be cognizant of like the revenue we’re bringing in.
And like, there’s not a lot of waste. Which probably is how every company should run, but if you’re VC backed and you raise $30 million, like you can spend a little money, like recruiting a good people and you can actually, it’s actually probably beneficial to maybe waste a little money or to like, I guess over pay like recruiter like you to help, help you put good people in those positions, because like, you have to grow fast as a VC backed company.
So like, you better have like really good people who are ready to like do that. Whereas for me, it’s like a little bit more laxed, which is good for me. That’s how I want to run the company. But. It would also be nice to be able to like, Hey, in a month to have like five awesome, perfect candidates for a high-level position hiring for.
So maybe I’m stuck between two thoughts there, but, um, yeah, I wanted to also just talk a little bit about dynamite jobs pro, which I believe correct me if I’m wrong, but this is something that I signed up for now at dynamite jobs. Um, and I’ll give a little backstory because I mentioned the beginning of this episode, I’ve hired a bunch of jobs sites.
Most of them, you post a job, you have to format it differently for each job posts, just like totally tedious. You go through, okay, blah, blah, blah. Posted. You get an email with your invoice. Maybe you get a thank you email. And that’s kind of, that’s kind of all your jobs there and they’ve been maybe linked to your website so they can apply there.
But like, that’s, that’s all you get. But when I hire dynamite circle, you personally reached out to me and you were like, Hey, like, how else can I help? What else can we do to like, get you more candidates? Oh, I have a pool of candidates, Joe. Like, I can, like, I am dynamite jobs. I can actually go and talk to people and see, I’ll give you some of our best folks to like, come potentially apply for this position.
And that was like super refreshing, like way. Better services. And most job boards I talked to or, or posted jobs did so kudos for that. But that’s a reason I signed up for dynamite jobs pro, which maybe you can tell folks better about everything you get in that. But to me, it was like a no brainer, like, Oh, okay.
Like I get to work with Alex and he gets to help me in like, Do a better job hiring, like, all right, let’s do it. But maybe you could tell people a little bit more about what dynamite Johns
Alex Harling: [00:30:13] pro is. Thanks. Thanks Joe, for mentioning that. Um, yeah, we, when we first started working together, it was, we were doing, um, that job moose still do job listings.
Um, but job, job posts and, you know, as you pay on and we sent your candidates and hopefully it works out. But we were trying to figure out, uh, for the past two years, you know, what’s a more personal touch and also more useful. Um, it’s one thing. Anyone can send emails and follow up, but we wanted to do something that was useful.
We found is following up and asking, how’s the job performing, we’ve got so much feedback and we’re able to, you know, adjust listings, you know, send candidates and w. We are not just working with the clients. We’re working very closely with candidates too. As we have a database of candidates, we handle interviews for certain roles.
So I I’ve got lists and lists of, of, of runners up, um, candidates for, um, that that we’ve personally spoken with. And so. Having, uh, having a WP boss as, as a hiring pro member, you’re able to post as many jobs as you want, which is, it was just, it was just cool. Um, and, uh, you can also browse a database of candidates.
And so what, um, my favorite thing about the job have about this about hiring pro is we’re able to go. You signed up, I think two or three weeks ago. And, um, the initial emails between us was, uh, Oh, these are the, these are the roles you’re hiring for. They’re live on the site where we’re sending candidates, this application form.
But, um, we were discussing the cans. We had the database, you know, you got in there and the database messaging people, it’s still very much in beta mode. It’s. Yeah, hence it’s affordability and flexibility with everything we’re testing everything. Uh, but we were able to share a cancer with each other to discuss them.
And then when I’m discussing with, uh, we’re, we’re hiring for other WordPress developer roles right now, I’m able to share your role with those candidates and vice versa. Um, and also the, the operations assistant role. Um, so it’s, it’s kind of an ecosystem. And that’s what we’re trying to do is allow our hiring pro companies, Postmate jobs, as they’d like Rouse candidates messaged them, but then also work with us, um, cause even like, I mean, as you said, it’s not good for, to give a WP off right now to bring on a big recruiter or an agency to do all this hiring hiring is still very much personal part of the company.
And I think that’s, I think that’s excellent. Well, we can help give a little extra support, whereas your team members are busy running the company. You now have a dynamite jobs in your side to help with these things. Um, and that’s uh, yeah. That’s, I guess that’s hiring pro in a nutshell or a few nutshells.
Joe Howard: [00:32:25] Yeah, there you go. Uh, cool. I thought it was, uh, I think it’s a great idea. I think about like, honestly like a fortune 500 company, or like a VC backed company, like. People with a lot of money to spend to do it this, but I think there are a lot of people out there. A lot of remote companies, a lot of smaller companies who need like a level of that down version or that maybe they don’t need all the bells and whistles, but they would love like something that’s like, Hey, I run the BP was a productized service company.
Like, Hey, something multiple subscription too, which is good for you because someone pays you on a month monthly basis and they can hook into someone who can maybe on a slightly lower level, like help them to do something like to find good candidates and like fill positions. As a company companies with good people, which actually I think works for everyone because I think about like playing by like the best possible candidate for every job I could have, like past those people, I probably can’t afford.
Anyway, if I’m being honest, it’s like, again, we’re running that company. Like we’re not DC that we don’t have. We’re not paying like huge salaries to people. Like our salaries are probably average for, you know, our industry or whatever. So we’re maybe not like, so we have to. Be a little bit more flexible around a 10 out of 10 person for a salary way out of our range.
Or maybe I want like a nine out of 10 person who fits our salary range. And sometimes we have to make those a better fit anyway, and maybe a better fit for like the kind of like price range of what then my jobs pro cost is one thing about recruiter, I think about expensive. So. So my job is pretty, somewhat affordable for us, you know?
So, you know, to me it was no brainer. I was like, yes, let’s do it.
Alex Harling: [00:34:02] That’s good. No, it’s really great to have, uh, have you as a hiring pro client. And, um, I worry that I’m annoying that my emails sometimes, cause I’m, I used to check it a lot. I check it a little less, but I want to make sure people are getting the best out of it because the company’s return and they keep hiring with us.
So I really encourage you and other pro clients is let me know what’s working. What’s not working. You know, if the candidates aren’t turning out well, we’ll make adjustments. It’s. Um, more often than not we have who, who, who you need. Um, you just gotta get their attention and, and send them your way.
Joe Howard: [00:34:32] Yeah, totally.
So, is that, what, uh, is that what you think your, your biggest focus is for the rest of 2021 or for like the foreseeable future? Are you going to keep, like, is, is the pro the pro thing, something that you just want to keep growing on and getting more people in there? Or like what’s the, yeah. What does the future look like for dynamite jobs for up or down the jobs, Joe?
Alex Harling: [00:34:54] Oh man. That’s the funny thing about having a company with a two-sided marketplace. We’ve got the companies, we’ve got the candidates, so we’re trying to, we’re trying to help them both. And there’s limited resources to grow up both sides of it. So our team has expanded, um, A lot this past year and I’m actually hiring right now.
I’m gonna bring another person on to help me enter this week. They’ll be brought on. And the whole purpose of that is we’re trying to expand both sides. One person is, is our CTO. Um, and he he’s building out that, the platform that you’re on right now. So our main site is based on WordPress, which has been amazing for our flexibility as.
For the past three years, but the, the back it’s like called the backend, the cult of the database or the platform that’s been custom built, um, by the CTO right now. And that’s for companies and candidates right now, because candidates are in there that you, you can message them and, and companies are in there.
They making message candidates, but. There’s not much connecting the two parts. And so we were trying to build out more where you still have to submit your jobs through a form and then we’ll get them live, but you’re not able to, you have to do everything through email, uh, with me, if you’re a company, um, you know, just send me messages and say, Hey, can you pause listing or, or let’s change this.
You cannot. If we don’t have a dashboard set up like that or a really, really good, um, system set up. So I want, I would like that to be built, uh, sooner rather than later. But on the candidate side, we’re getting almost a, I would say just around between 1000, 1,200 new people signing up for the platform. Um, on the candidate side, we have a decent audience for our email list and our, our social media, but.
People joining the platform, giving us their information that is growing a lot. So we’re also building out options for them. So candidates can now sign up for candidate pro there’s, hiring pro and then there’s candidate pro and with candidate pro. You are, you show up on the top of the search results in our database.
When companies search for your skills, you can also list offers or services. So if you’re, if you’re a designer, you can, you can list your design services. If you’re a developer, you can list your hourly rate, some things on there right now, as you have sales people listing their rates. We have, um, I was just looking through them yesterday.
They were showing them around, uh, social media audits, um, different kinds of, uh, SEO work. So that has been built out. It just needs some improvements. Um, but. Candidates are really liking that as they can, they can share their offers. We share those with companies. Companies can find them when they search for candidates.
So. What’s so, yeah, to answer your question, what are we going to focus on this this year? I would like to build out more things for my hiring for our clients, but then I also, I love helping the candidates as the user platform more, um, they’re getting hired on there. They’re starting more conversations. I mean, the emails we get from candidates who say like, I’ve, I’ve gotten more messages, more valuable messages on here than on LinkedIn, and it means a lot.
Um, and that’s, you know, something’s working. Um, so rest of the year is we’re building out that platform. And we may connect the WordPress site with our database sooner or continue to build out the database and the key functions within, within there. But no matter what, there’s a lot happening. So if you’re following down on my jobs, if you’re a client of ours, you’re going to see a lot of changes and a lot of updates, which is exciting.
Um, I, nothing should, should hurt our clients or candidates. I think everything is going to. Help everyone. And most of the people like that, they feel really happy to be a part of a beta project and to give feedback, um, you know, it’s still a little, um, uh, duct tape and bubblegum, but it works. That’s what’s going on there.
Joe Howard: [00:38:13] Yeah, cool, man. I, I know I could like potentially find candidates to hire on LinkedIn, but honestly there’s never once crossed my mind to do that. And I think the reason is like, LinkedIn is not cool for me to me. I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone, but I’m not like got a recruiter on LinkedIn.
Like that doesn’t sound. Like fun for me. Like I’m much rather go to like, like a indie site, almost like a, like a, a remote specific, like, honestly, like run by you kind of site to like hire or promote higher end. Like LinkedIn does not sound like something I’d want to do for that. I think that you’re going about building things out the right way.
Cause I think the most important thing. Is to see if people will pay for something and see if you can give good value. People, get feedback from people to keep building things out, but to launch something, this is a great example for anybody listening. You’re not have to have everything fully automated and fully built out when you start.
Like I have no problem, Alex, like emailing with you. Like when something. There’s there’s a little thing in the dashboard. Like I can’t do. That’s fine. I literally don’t care. It’s nice, actually. Cool. I get to email to Alex. If it was automated, maybe that would be nice, but like, it doesn’t, I don’t personally care that much.
If I need to email you, I think you took the right step. So like, okay. Joe paid for it. As did 50 other people. Okay. Now we’ve got a little revenue coming in the door. Now we can pay some, a developer to come and build some of this stuff out to make it better for people, but the proof of concept and the company grow into something bigger.
It’s more important to answer that question than to actually build it. And. Let me say, I’ll cross my fingers to see if this is something people want, because you’ve done it. Probably the hard part. Now everything’s hard, right? Every, every step you’re like, this is the hard part, you know, but you’ve passed a hard part and now you can do the part where a little bit more automation, a little bit more dashboard control.
Um, the things people want to see, but honestly, the thing is your early adopters, like me will be like excited to give you feedback on like, Oh, that dashboard is cool. Like you should totally be sending me emails when you’re working on stuff. Like, Hey Joe, I just built this. Like thinking sketch, how does this dashboard look like?
Oh, it looks cool. I’m glad you’re making that. So I think you’re on the right track for that kind of stuff.
Alex Harling: [00:40:25] That’s great to hear. Yeah. I love hearing the feedback on that. Um, but be careful and I’ll be sending you emails every, all the time now know, and I’m going to expect you to reply, like what should we do?
Joe Howard: [00:40:38] Uh, Oh, here we go. And here we go. Yeah. I’ve asked, I’ve asked for too much. Now you can hit me up. I’ll I like giving, I like giving feedback on that stuff. I like seeing what people are doing. Honestly, it gives me ideas. I’m not running a job board or anything, but it’s funny when people come to me with challenges, whether they’re like WordPress website support 24 seven specific, or they’re like, totally like they’re making chairs.
I had around deck chairs out of their garage. Like. There’s always something I learned from those when they ask, Oh, what is this I think about? How does that affect us? Like, there’s like an operation sort of thing. Okay. Now, I mean, that’s interesting because that kind of applies to this part of our operations here.
And it gets me thinking. So selfishly, you can email me when you want to, and I’ll try and give you feedback because it’ll help me as well. It helps everybody. All right. Cool man. Well, we have about 45 minutes now, so we’re going to start wrapping up, but this has been awesome. I learned a ton just from hearing about like some of the best practices around posting job board on job boards.
How I can use my network a little bit too in like the correct way, like find candidates, good potential candidates for my network. Maybe I should have a job description up. I should have a real focus on my job. Descriptions about maybe the outcomes, like I mentioned also, when you mentioned just like have a really good persona for what that job is.
And that seems like a big differentiator between places that have maybe more successful recruiting pipelines in one and one center, still working on improving them. So let’s wrap up now, but let’s, uh, tell folks about where they can. One finds you online. And two, if you’ve got a little discount code, so people could post jobs or sign up for stuff at dynamite jobs.
Why don’t you tell folks about that too? Great.
Alex Harling: [00:42:24] Yeah. Please head on over to dynamite jobs.com or just search down dynamite. My jobs. We should be the first result. There have questions specific to hiring. I’m happy to happy to help email me at, uh, alex@dynamitejobs.com. Um, we’re always, we love discussing hiring just like we are now.
Um, and then for the discount code, uh, w if you sign up to be a hiring pro a member on the site, and you can find that through our sales page, on the site, you get $10 off your first, first month with a WP buffs code. That’s capital letters, WP buffs.
Joe Howard: [00:42:56] Nice, nice. I watched the, uh, social dilemma recently, so I.
Pushed off my Google search engine and doctor go, but I had you come up first and talk that go search engine as well. If you didn’t know. So yeah. Dynamite jobs. Yeah. Then my jobs.com for folks who want to everything from, so it’s both sides. So the candidate and looking for a remote position, go check it out there and apply to some WP, loves jobs as well.
And if you’re hiring as well, if you’re a WordPress company, great place to go hire, you can post a job or you can like actually get some. Recruiting efforts to help you run your business and scrap one of Alex’s subscriptions there. So totally cool. Alex, the last thing I ask our guests on the show to do is to ask our listeners for a little iTunes.
So, if you wouldn’t mind asking listeners right now to give us a little review on iTunes, I appreciate it.
Alex Harling: [00:43:43] All right, listeners, it’s time to, uh, to give Joe’s iTunes review. You know, we know how helpful they are and how easy they are to give. So let’s give a little five stars. Yes,
Joe Howard: [00:43:52] appreciate it. People can go to WP mrr.com.
Forward slash iTunes. If you’re on a Mac or an Apple device forwards you right there, it can leave a little review. Uh, you can just leave a star review, but we like when you leave comments, tell us a little something you’ve learned from this episode. Then we can send a screenshot over to Alex and say, thanks for the review.
Here’s what people learned. And also gives us a lot of good feedback into what people really liked about the show. But if you left a review, it means like you liked this episode a lot, so we’ll know, Oh, we’ll do more episodes around hiring. We’ll do more episodes around how to hire, how to be a good candidate and all that kind of stuff.
How to build out your team, remote team, all that stuff. So, uh, leave a comment and it also kind of gives us motivation to continue going. So the more, every time I see a review, I’m always like, Aw, Thank you so much. Like it was a personal thing. I appreciate some of it took even two minutes out to go do that.
So go leave a review, WP, mrr.com/itunes. If you are a new listener to the show, I don’t know exactly what episode this is going to be 120 something I believe, but we’ve got 120 something odd episodes on the sorts of topics around WordPress about growing your business about running the business or around hiring.
Team building and that kind of stuff. So go through and use a search bar on WP MRR Ford slash podcast, and go find an episode you want to listen to, especially now you don’t have to go and be in that new Netflix show. Queen’s gambit I heard is pretty good, but other than that, you should feed bingeing WPM or podcast episode.
So don’t hesitate to go and do that. Uh, if you have questions for us at the show, feel free to shoot us an email at yo. Y o@wpmrr.com. So we can do some Q and a episodes. Do you like to do those occasionally here? So shoot those in, or you can just hit me up on Twitter at Joseph H. Howard on Twitter.
That’s it. For this week’s episode, we will be on your podcast players again next Tuesday, Alex. Thanks again for being all, man. It’s been real. Thanks, John.
