Cómo evitar 5 errores al contratar staff remoto offshore (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey y'all, it's Zach, and welcome to the Lawyer's Podcast, one of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthier firms, better businesses, and more sustainable lives. Today I talk with Raquel Gomez about common pitfalls attorneys make when hiring staff, how to prepare for that hire, and how the term VA can be holding you back from building an incredible team. She's the CEO of Staffie, which is a virtual, well, team company, but really she's got a background in psychology and runs a virtual distributed global team herself. So stick around and check out what she has to say.

[00:00:52] Speaker 2: Hi Raquel, thank you for being with me.

[00:00:59] Speaker 1: I appreciate you being on the podcast with us. I think we've had you on before, but if not, people that are common listeners to the podcast or Labsters, I'm sure they've seen Staffie or heard you talk or seen you around as well. So thank you for being on the show.

[00:01:14] Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:01:16] Speaker 1: Today, I want to talk about, because Staffie is a staffing service, I want to talk about the five mistakes that law firms make when hiring VAs.

[00:01:26] Speaker 2: Let me stop you right there.

[00:01:28] Speaker 1: Okay. Okay.

[00:01:30] Speaker 2: First of all, let's not call them VAs. Let's call them remote offshore staffing.

[00:01:38] Speaker 1: Okay. So, well, I mean, jump in, we'll get into mistake before, mistake one. So why though? Why remote offshore staffing?

[00:01:50] Speaker 2: Because VA is, you're dehumanizing the person, you know, when you're calling them a VA and language really matters. It's really important in order to be successful in this journey of growing your law firm through remote offshore staff, it's really important that you treat them as well as you treat anyone who works for your law firm on site. And that's really the formula for success. And we're going to go into the five mistakes and all of that. And that's the beginning of it. So treating them as a human, treating them well, investing in them and just incorporating them into your law firm, just as you would with on-site staff. So that's why it's important to call them differently.

[00:02:36] Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I really like that because obviously I, in my wording, I didn't mean anything.

[00:02:42] Speaker 2: Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:02:44] Speaker 1: But it, but it, it makes sense. When we say remote, you know, um, offshore talent or, or offshore staffing or something like that. Now we're talking about incorporating this into our office instead of saying, well, this is my virtual assistant or my, you know, right, right. And so I guess kind of we were boil it down. If a law firm is going to treat this like cheap labor instead of a team member, then, then they've really already kind of failed before they even get started.

[00:03:14] Speaker 2: Exactly. And like you, people don't, it's not like people have bad intentions when they say VA, it's just the way it's like a terminology that was created and, and kind of took off. Right. But, um, in a way it, like language really matters. So you should call them VA, you're almost making them disposable. Right.

[00:03:38] Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense.

[00:03:39] Speaker 2: And that's what makes them, makes law firms fail. When you, when you see them that way, when you treat them that way, then it's when things don't work out.

[00:03:47] Speaker 1: Well, okay. So I think that that's a great lead into this because I think a lot of the, the five mistakes that we get into here also kind of boil down to that in, in a lot of ways of just not really thinking everything through and thinking of it as, as like a real hire. And frankly, I think people do a bad job of thinking through, you know, um, all of their hires in the first place, but let's, let's jump into mistake one. What's the first mistake, um, that, that people make when hiring offshore talent?

[00:04:21] Speaker 2: It's really, um, hiring reactively instead of strategically, like waiting too long to hire and being desperate when you want to bring someone who want to bring anybody, uh, into the mix and you don't take the time to truly define the role. So defining the role is the first step for success when working with remote staff, offshore remote staff or remote staff or in-person staff.

[00:04:47] Speaker 1: I mean, I think, yeah, this can go for, for hiring anytime, right? Yeah.

[00:04:50] Speaker 2: Anytime. Yeah. And, and defining the role really comes from auditing where your time is going and taking the time to define, okay, where am I spending, which tasks am I doing daily that are taking me away from being the true CEO of my law firm? Right. It's just making me very busy. A lot of times when you're busy, you think you're productive, but you're not.

[00:05:17] Speaker 1: I feel that. Yeah.

[00:05:19] Speaker 2: Right. So you have to start delegating, delegating all the busy work and, and it really starts with auditing your tasks, identifying your tasks, and then you can define the role. That's that would be the first step for success.

[00:05:35] Speaker 1: And so defining that role, the kind of the flip side of that is getting into really defining or building a job description, right? Like what are we actually hiring here for?

[00:05:45] Speaker 2: Right, exactly.

[00:05:47] Speaker 1: Okay. And again, that, that's not just offshore talent that is, that is really hiring in the first place. So, okay. So we don't, we don't want to hire from a place of desperation. But I think people, people still do. What's mistake number two then?

[00:06:02] Speaker 2: The number two is doing a through vetting and screening assessment. I think most law firms, they they rely on only one or two interviews when making a decision and is like a decision based on their instinct and not in analytics. So would really recommend not skipping any steps into doing a through vetting and screening process, which should definitely include assessments, behavioral personality, skills, soft skills assessments, because there's a lot of people who interview really, really well and they show their best behavior and their best self in an interview. So you're being seduced by the hire and you're hiring them because, oh, that person's fun. You think, oh, I like that person. I like their energy. But in reality, you're not, you're not hiring a best friend, right? You're hiring someone who can execute on the tasks that you need to let go, that you need to delegate. And so there's a lot of people that interview really well, but there is half of the population who don't interview well, but they're incredible assets. And I've seen this over and over again. So super, super important to support your decision with assessments. The assessments and the results of the assessments, they're going to, they're going to be aligned with what the role needs. So for instance, if you need someone that is client facing to do intake, you need them to have good social skills. You need them to show empathy on the phone, right? You need that type of personality that can like be okay with being on the phone for extended periods of time. 90% of their day, seven hours a day is being on the phone. If you're working for a high volume law firm, right? And you need to assess those things because someone can be very pleasant when you interview and you're like, oh my God, this person is going to be a great intake. They can even do a role play and you can do a live role play with them while you're interviewing and it's going to be, oh, they did great. They did amazing. I want this person on my team. But then this person burns out in the first month because they cannot keep up with being on the phone seven hours a day. So those need to be assessed so you're not having high turnover. The same thing when you need a paralegal, you need someone who is very great, high executor, very organized, attention to detail is key, but social skills is not that relevant, you know? So you need to be able to test things.

[00:08:46] Speaker 1: They don't necessarily need to be able, I think this is an interesting flip side of this. They don't necessarily need to be able to interview extremely well. They don't necessarily, you know, they need to get the job done. And for all of these people, they need to get the job that again, we've described really well.

[00:09:03] Speaker 2: They need to be able to get that job.

[00:09:04] Speaker 1: So what are the, I want to hang on to this for a second because I feel like this is a place where Staffie really, you guys have a lot of experience and what are the types of things that y'all do to actually vet people? Because again, this isn't something that I think a lot of lawyers are extremely skilled with of like, okay, well, let's put, you know, let's have people take a personality test or something like that. What are some things that y'all do to do that?

[00:09:30] Speaker 2: So we do the assessment as the first thing to see which role they're a best match for. And then we do English assessments, oral and written. We do multiple interviews. One of the interviews is led by our in-house psychologist, because also depending on the traits that are showing in the assessment, we need to challenge a few things to see if they will be, they have the values that we want. We don't want to hire people who are arrogant. For example, people who are blamers, they blame others, they're not learners, things like that. The other thing is, so I mentioned, so the interviews, the assessment, the English, okay. So you also call, we call five years of employment to see if that person would be rehired.

[00:10:16] Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

[00:10:17] Speaker 2: And we call universities to validate the degrees just to make sure, you know, all the information that has been provided is true and accurate. What else are we doing?

[00:10:28] Speaker 1: Those last two are things that I know that as attorneys, we know we should, but I think there's a lot of people that won't make those last checks, those, you know, like actually calling references, actually calling or connecting, you know, and y'all are kind of pre doing this. You've already, you've already done this because you have a roster of people that, that are, you know, here and you're matching with, with other firms. So you've already, this isn't something where you've necessarily doing it in real time. You've done this.

[00:10:59] Speaker 2: Right. Right. And, and, and, and the thing is that it takes, you know, it takes a lot of time to do it. And also you have to constantly be following up because it's not like references are going to pick up the phone the first attempt, or they're going to be able to talk to the right person in the university. So, you know, it takes persistence and being on top of it, but it's important that you do it because you don't want to hire people who lied on their resume, right?

[00:11:23] Speaker 1: No, no. We do not want to hire people that lied on their resume, but that's, that's exactly. Okay. So we've got mistake. Number one is hiring without defining the role. Mistake number two is, is weak vetting. You know, what's mistake number three?

[00:11:41] Speaker 2: Not having a predefined solid onboarding process. A lot of law firms, they hire someone and they think that person would just figure things out with time, or they're just going to shadow people around while shadowing is highly valuable.

[00:11:56] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:11:57] Speaker 2: And there's a lot of people in the assessments, which is interesting. It shows how someone learns. Does someone learns with, with more like data and SOPs and reading things by step? Or is that person a learner that will learn with experience and shadowing? So those are the, the also information that we're capturing from the assessments that are highly valuable. But so, so having a weak onboarding really leads to demotivation, feeling demotivated and turnover. 3% of new hires, they quit within the first 90 days on the job because of lack of clarity. So that's a really relevant data.

[00:12:36] Speaker 1: Yes, that, that makes a lot of sense. But I, I like, again, I have my assumptions coming into this and my assumptions are generally, let's have SOPs and let's, you know, let's make sure that people can work from SOPs. But what you're also saying is like, yeah, for some people and some people do really well with, with, you know, shadowing. Some people probably do really well with both.

[00:12:57] Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:12:59] Speaker 1: And I can see how this, the onboarding system actually, again, all these things connect. This goes back to mistake number one of having the role clearly defined because if you know what the heck they're supposed to do, what, what, you know, what you're hiring for, then we can say, okay, well, how do we, how do we teach this, this new person, this new hire how to do this? Yeah.

[00:13:19] Speaker 2: And I know that a lot of law firms, they don't have the SOPs and they're small and they don't have the time to create the SOPs. Usually we hear that. And what we suggest is that when we're hiring this person, you, you record everything. So whenever you're teaching them something, just record, record, and record, and have that person turn those recordings into SOPs if need be. Right. So that's a way, that's a workaround. Also for intake and non-attorney sales, I highly recommend role-playing, role-playing and shadowing and listening to how you would take an intake call or how someone else like listening and role-playing, give them two weeks before, you know, that's between one and two weeks, depending on the type of person and how they learn. But usually people that are good with client facing, they need to see it, feel it, touch it in order to be able to perform, learn and perform.

[00:14:21] Speaker 1: That makes sense. That makes sense. Okay. Okay. So we've got, I am, I'm just going to keep recapping these so people keep them in their head. We've got hiring without defining the role. We've got weak vetting. We've got no onboarding system. I, I see rushing to hire being number four here.

[00:14:40] Speaker 2: So, so rushing to hire is actually number one.

[00:14:43] Speaker 1: It's part of number one. Okay.

[00:14:45] Speaker 2: You should give yourself at least like a month to be able to get that right person in the right seat. If you're going to be like, oh, I need to hire someone tomorrow. You most likely you're going to fail.

[00:14:57] Speaker 1: Okay. So that, that would work tomorrow.

[00:15:02] Speaker 2: They may be somebody that lied on their resume because we need to make sure that we're successful with the placement.

[00:15:09] Speaker 1: So, so hiring without defining a role, which is also rushing to hire is, is number one. Then we've got weak vetting is, is number two, number three, no onboarding system. What, what's number four for us?

[00:15:20] Speaker 2: So number four is really integrating them into your, your team. So remember we talked about the whole terminology of VA. There's a lot of law firms that they hire an offshore or near shore remote staff and they isolate them. They simply send them tasks whenever they need them. And that person is going to feel very excluded, totally demotivated. They're going to lack understanding the big picture. They're not going to feel part of the team. Remember they're humans and humans need to feel motivated. They need to feel integrated. They need to feel part of something meaningful in order to stay with you. And I'm telling, I'm saying this from experience. So staff is about 11 years old and we have, so we work with right now currently 450 law firms in the US, but internally we have a hundred staff. And from this hundred staff, I believe only four of us or five of us are in the US. So our entire team is in Latin America and I make this work and I have, we have employees that have been with us for 11 years and it really takes integrating them. You know, there's different things you can do, but number one is like include them in all forms of communication, have regular team meetings. Obviously if you're a solo, you're meeting with this person regularly, meeting with them daily, you know, the technology that we have, use video. If you use Teams, Slack, whatever you use to communicate, add them to those communications, have them meet with other team members, have them collaborate with other team members. Just make them part of, if you, if you plan an offsite, invite them, you know. You know, we do, we just came back right now from an offsite in Colombia. We flew 20 people from all over Latin America. Last week we were in Medellin. I just got home on Sunday, Saturday.

[00:17:10] Speaker 1: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you had to leave Medellin.

[00:17:14] Speaker 2: I know.

[00:17:15] Speaker 1: I love that place.

[00:17:17] Speaker 2: I didn't know if I did.

[00:17:18] Speaker 1: I have, I have. It's amazing, but I can talk to you about that. So green, I know. So green. Yeah. So green. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Okay. So, so y'all had a, a retreat that I envy in Medellin.

[00:17:32] Speaker 2: Yeah. Big training. So we're training them and continue training them. Yeah. So those things are important, you know, and, and people, and I know sometimes as a business owner, you're in go, go, go mode, but the staff needs to feel part of.

[00:17:46] Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and I'm, I'm going to kind of reiterate this because we, I've, I've worked with multiple staffy hires on, on our team currently working with, with one right now. And I talk with him every single day. And he is a part of all of our meetings, our team meetings and all of this stuff. Yes. And it, it is something where like, he's, he's our team member. He's, he's, and it kind of flipping it from the other side of this person needs to feel motivated as well. I need to understand that this person is my team member and that we're working this person who was hired to do a job into the, the integration of our team. And so now I can rely on him.

[00:18:32] Speaker 2: Right.

[00:18:33] Speaker 1: You know, and, and I know, I know what he's good at. I know how he works. I know how he likes to be managed, all of those things. So I, I really, I want to put a big star next to this number four of integrate the, the person into your team. Cause I think it's, I think it's huge. Yeah.

[00:18:51] Speaker 2: Yeah. And the return that you will get from your hires, it will depend on the type of investment that you put in a hundred percent. Um, and I think this is, uh, you know, across the board, but with offshore, I think it's even higher just because they are not physically in the same place and they need, and you need to have that relationship as if they were in a way. Right. So that's why making use of video if you're traveling, but making, making sure there's a lot of collaboration is super important.

[00:19:25] Speaker 1: Yeah. It's actually, it's, it's funny. And again, I'm probably hanging on this point point too much, but it's funny because, you know, we are a fully, uh, dispersed digital team. And, but having, you know, offshore talent is easy for us to integrate into our team, but also it makes it easier for me because I travel around all the time. And this is a person that is used to me showing up with different backgrounds, you know, like different backgrounds in my camera. But I, I meet with everybody from my phone when I have to, from my computer when I have to all of those things. So it is, it is kind of like part of the ethos here, um, in our, in our company. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:04] Speaker 2: So it's easier for you. Uh, but we'll, we work with a lot of law firms that they have a main office and everybody's yeah. So it's harder for them, but that's why our team is with them every step of the way. And we've created an onboarding methodology in a month. And then after that, for the first 45 days where we're meeting with the client weekly, we're meeting with the client monthly, we're like reminding, we're like giving them homework. We're like there because it's really important to have that strong foundation for long-term success.

[00:20:33] Speaker 1: That makes sense. Okay. What, what is, what is mistake number five then?

[00:20:38] Speaker 2: Um, it's, it's really giving up too soon whenever there is a challenge. Uh, I would say that's the last mistake. And continuing to invest, you know, mentoring, coaching that staff for long-term success. So again, going back to the investment part, we just met with our team and we offer this training, uh, where everybody got together. There's some social aspects, there's training aspects. Um, it's, I, I think like it's harder maybe for, for law firms, depending on the size, but that the coaching, you know, mindset coaching has a importance here. Um, specific job coaching. I mean, it's harder when you're a smaller law firm to have all those things in place because they are costly. Right. But you can always designate a staff member to be the person, like the go-to for questions, but also someone who can coach that person in like best practices and things like that. In our case, we have our coaches that are assigned to every staff that is assigned to a law firm so that we provide, we have psychologists that provide the mindset coaching. We have, um, paralegals with years of experience in the different areas of law, depending what area of law our clients, uh, practice. So that's an advantage you have when you, when you, you work with us. Um, but it's something that is important. You know, someone has to be that coach, that mentor, um, to the, to this, the staff, whenever they have questions, they have to feel like there's someone who's approachable that they can come in and they can talk about things like whatever it is, if what things they're feeling or questions and things like that.

[00:22:25] Speaker 1: That makes sense. So, but, but it's also, it's kind of like not giving up too soon, but also making sure the flip side of that is investing in, in your, in your people that, that makes, uh, that makes a lot of sense. Well, so when you touched on some of this, um, in, in talking about kind of the coaching and, and making sure that we're pushing this forward, what, obviously you're with staffie. Um, what makes staffie kind of different from, from some of the other places that I might go to, to, to, um, get offshore talent or get help or, you know, things like that.

[00:22:58] Speaker 2: Yeah. I think my background is in psychology. I'm a psychologist. And I think because I view the human being as I have this holistic approach of seeing someone, I know how important it is. From the way we assess them before we match them, we offer the same assessment to our clients so we can better understand and communicate with them. And we can better match client with personalities as well. But also in the implementation, we're super hands-on with our clients throughout the whole entire onboarding and after onboarding as well. Which makes them feel, uh, very supported, uh, is different than just, Hey, I'm going to give you someone, this is a great match. Now it's all on you. We're there every step of the way, right. To make sure that we're guiding them, that we're supporting them. Um, and then the whole methodology around coaching our staff. So anyone who was assigned to the law firm is, uh, has at least two coaches assigned to them who are meeting with them regularly, um, to make sure, you know, like anything mindset related. Sometimes people feel anxious, they feel nervous, they burn out. There's a lot, there's a lot of law firms that deal with, uh, clients that go through a lot of trauma and that can cause burnout. So we're taking all of that into account. So, and, and that, that is a major differentiator as well, because we're there not only supporting the law firm owner, but we're there supporting the offshore remote staff to make sure that they're doing okay. They are keeping motivated. They're keeping productive. So there's, uh, two sides to this in order to be successful.

[00:24:37] Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Well, before we wrap though, um, you're also building something new for immigration firms, right?

[00:24:45] Speaker 2: Oh yeah.

[00:24:47] Speaker 1: What, what is this and who is it for?

[00:24:50] Speaker 2: All right. So, uh, immigration case outsourcing, we launched it, uh, six months ago. Uh, right now we are working, we have a hundred clients already, uh, going through this, uh, okay. It's being highly successful. And we, uh, we created this service just because of everything that immigration lawyers are going through. There's a lot of changes, a lot of restrictions, a lot of burnout, and we saw a lot of law firms having to let go of staff, but still having a huge workload to deal with.

[00:25:22] Speaker 1: Still the same amount of work. Yes.

[00:25:24] Speaker 2: We're like, how are you going to do it? How are you going to make it? How are you going to pay your bills? How are you going to survive? How are you going to thrive? So immigration outsourcing is a very flexible service that they come to us. We take the production. So they hand us the cases. We work on the cases. We have a team of lawyers and paralegals working in house, um, you know, putting together from document collection to putting together the forms, the packages and, um, handing it a full executed package to the lawyer so they can reveal and file. And we charge a flat fee that is very inexpensive, um, to the, to the attorney.

[00:26:02] Speaker 1: Okay.

[00:26:03] Speaker 2: Humanitarian family-based, I'm sorry. Employment-based type of cases. There's a wide variety. You can go into our website. You can check, uh, and it's very flexible because we don't, um, require any minimum. You can send one case today, one case in six months. Uh, so, so there's no minimum requirement or minimum contractual, um, term.

[00:26:29] Speaker 1: Okay. And they can just go to, uh, get staffy.com to learn more.

[00:26:34] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:26:35] Speaker 1: Okay. So we've, we've talked about kind of the, the mistakes that people can make here, but let's assume that people are, are going to get this right now. Um, if a law firm does get this right, what's kind of the, what's the upshot? What changes for them?

[00:26:47] Speaker 2: Wow. You get a top performing team that allows you to step into the true CEO of your own law firm, a team that you can delegate to, that you can rely on. And isn't that a dream, the dream of every business owner?

[00:27:05] Speaker 1: Yeah. I, I love that. You get a top performing team that lets you. You execute your vision. That's wonderful. I mean, that's what we're looking for, right?

[00:27:14] Speaker 2: Execute your vision and live life.

[00:27:17] Speaker 1: Ah, yes, yes, exactly. Well, Raquel, thank you for, for being with me and sharing all of your knowledge on this. If people want to learn more, um, about staffy, where can they go?

[00:27:27] Speaker 2: www.getstaffy.com. So get staffy G E T S T A F I.com.

[00:27:37] Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, thank you once again for, for being with me and we'll drop that link in the show notes.

[00:27:41] Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you so much. What's fun.