251: From Application to Job Offer
Brought to you by Pet Sitters Associates
Summary:
Why is it important to have a multi-stage hiring process? It protects you and helps the applicants understand what to expect out of the position. in this episode, we break down the 4 stages in our hiring process and why we think they are critical. We also explain how to remain impartial throughout the process and the importance of knowing exactly what you’re looking for before you start.. You should have a plan and know what is a good vs bad answer to your questions. Then, Natasha O’Banion answers, “How can I celebrate holidays and still run my business?”
Main topics:
Why have a process
Questions to avoid
Staying impartial
Making the job offer
Ask a Pet Biz Coach
Main takeaway: Know what you’re looking for before you start, so it’s an easier process for you and the applicants.
Links:
Episode 249: www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/249
Episode 247: www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/247
Pet Sitters Associates: use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
question, people, client, person, position, hire, asked, responded, interview, business, dog, pet, job, background check, hiring process, explain, working, cat, answer, holidays
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Meghan 00:10
Hello, I'm Meghan I'm Collin and this is Pet Sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 251. Hello. Thank you for listening today. And we hope that this is a helpful episode to you. We want to thank our sponsors, pet sitters associates and our wonderful patreon supporters like Doug, Janney, Katie, and Savannah,
Collin 00:39
you really do help make this show possible every single week. And if you want to learn more about what it means to be a Patreon supporter, if you found value in this show, you can go to petsitter confessional comm slash
Meghan 00:51
support, if you haven't already, we encourage you to go back and listen to our first two episodes on hiring the hiring process, which is 247 and 249. We talked about what you should think about if you are choosing to hire and if it's a good idea for you. And then also it a little bit about our job ad and what you should include on there.
Collin 01:12
But today, we're talking all about having an effective screening process. Because well weed out people that aren't a good fit, either ones that don't read, pay attention to details, follow directions, you don't want those kinds of people working for your business, and we need to find them and weed them out early.
Meghan 01:30
And so at each step, you're able to really clarify and set up expectations for the job so that the potential hire knows exactly what they're getting themselves into.
Collin 01:39
And as a caveat, as with all of these hiring episodes that we're going to do, what worked for us may not work for you, you likely have different goals and desires for your business. So we are just hearing what we did.
Meghan 01:51
There are hundreds, probably 1000s of questions you can ask applicants, and there really is no set standard for what to ask. So think back to what this position is, who it's for, and what your end goal is for your company to help you gather and shape your questions. We hired for three different positions, two of them were in our remote location, and one was here locally. And for these three positions, we had a well over 300 applications with a lot it was a lot but it was great, because we had a lot of people to pick from. So how do you sort through all of those? How do you know which experiences are more or less applicable to your position than others? So first, we had the indeed application which we talked about on episode 249. And then we had written questions that we asked them to send to our business email with the title joining the bunch. And then we had the phone interview with to written questions followed by a an in person interview, if they made it that far, if we wanted to offer them the position, we sent them a contingent offer letter, and then we had them undergo a background check through accucheck.
Collin 02:57
Yeah, it was an awful lot. But we liked having those multiple stages, because it allowed us to screen for different things along the way. So indeed.com has a pretty good way of actually tracking the applicants. But we ended up going with an Excel spreadsheet to track where certain people were in the process and our ranking of them throughout. But we only really started tracking them once we were contacting them for a phone interview. Because we didn't want to waste our time for people who didn't answer our initial questions. There are actually a ton of applicant tracking systems or ATS out there. But given our current size, and that we had nothing set up to begin with the spreadsheet ended up working just fine for us. So today we're going to talk about each one of those steps that Megan mentioned, why we included them? And what we were looking for. We've already covered what was on our indeed posting. So what made us move someone on to the next step what made us move someone on to asking for those written questions.
Meghan 03:52
I think it was really two main things. The first one being relevant experience that was huge. Have you had specific pet care experience before. And then also a well written resume, grammar, punctuation, very key. So for our first hires for the remote positions, we were not interested in people who had no pet care experience, we were not going to hire somebody who was switching career plans or wanting to just give this a try. So they had to have actual pet care experience. Now we did allow for people who had pets that for family and friends on the side before since they would at least be familiar with the general idea of what we do. And then that resume, like I mentioned, had to also look good. The formatting had to be correct spelling, punctuation of full sentences, capitalization, these things that we all learned in elementary school, they needed to apply here. And we probably spent about 30% of the people that responded these written questions.
Collin 04:51
At this point. We know a lot of business owners will have applicants print out the pages of the questions, physically write their answers in them and then mail it back to the business Basically as a way to test their seriousness about the job and have another hoop for them to jump through, we felt that having an email with the subject line joining the bunch was sufficient, given what we were looking for. And we gave them three days and until 5pm On that last day to send in their answers to those written questions,
Meghan 05:18
and that really weeded out a lot of people. But I, we couldn't be waiting around for a week or two for these people to get around to respond to us, we needed to have a set deadline that we knew they knew. And here was the like setting the expectation of, okay, if you're not serious about this job, and you can't complete this within three full days, you don't want this job, and I don't want to hire you well. And
Collin 05:42
we deal with deadlines all the time in this position, the visit has to be done at X amount of time for X amount of time at x time during the day. And they need to be checking their emails and their notifications, because that is super important to for this position. So what were the questions that we sent in? Why was it important for us to send those
Meghan 05:59
we needed to send them because we almost exclusively deal with our clients through writing. And I'm sure you do do text messages or emails if they're out of the country and don't want text charges. written communication is crucial to this job. So we need to know if the people applying can write well, we're looking at their answer to the question, but we're also looking at capitalization punctuation, appropriate use of verb tense,
Collin 06:23
all of that good stuff.
Meghan 06:26
So and not surprisingly, a lot of people get weeded out at this stage, they either didn't respond promptly within the timeframe or they didn't have good answers or whatever.
Collin 06:36
Yeah. So here are some of the here are the questions that we actually asked for them to respond in writing to. The first one was described your pet care experience. So we've already seen their resume. And they may have noted that they have pet care experience on there. We want them to elaborate on that want them to expand and give a lot more specific details. Because this is where we find out really, is this somebody who has had a dog for 10 years? Or is it someone who has actively cared for others pets? over 10 years? We asked, Are there any pets or animals that you would be unwilling to work for and with? Since we offer services to everything, as long as it's legal? We do need people who are comfortable around that. And then we can kind of gauge is this person going to be suitable for us, given our current client load? We also asked if they had their own reliable vehicle, and smartphone. We actually had a few people apply, and then in response to this question, so that they could have a friend that drives them around. Nope, not gonna work. Yeah, which was totally unacceptable to us. We also asked them to list their availability during the week, this gives us some idea of how much they'd be able to work and what kind of bookings they'd be good for.
Meghan 07:41
One of my favorite questions was, why did you apply to this position? Many people said, I love pets. Well, no, that's not good enough, as others said, they thought this would be a fun job. Nope, not gonna get you the job, either. We were really looking for someone who recognized the need for quality pet care, and needed flexibility in their schedule as well. After that question, we asked Are you able to pass a background check, because we will do a background check. This also gives people an opportunity to really explain anything that we would find in the background check. And several of them actually did which we appreciated.
Collin 08:15
An obvious question for this position is, are you able and willing to walk several miles during the day in all weather conditions? Again, we're trying to make sure that they know what we do and set expectations for this position. So there are no questions whenever we actually bring them on and start going through that training process. We asked them to describe themselves in three words and three words only. So this is again, having them try and follow directions. So some people gave five words, some people gave a sentence. Nope, that's not going to cut it. We have to work with and alongside these people, we have to be managing and guiding them. So are we going to jive Well, is this somebody whose personality is going to fit well with us and how we operate?
Meghan 08:54
Well, and it's some can be hard to describe yourself in only three words, it
Collin 08:59
was meant to be a challenge so that they had to think about that and give us the most relevant ones.
Meghan 09:03
The next question was, are you willing to download an app on your phone to update clients and send photos, we realize that the way we run our business is actually pretty tech savvy. And so someone with a flip phone really couldn't use our systems, something we really needed to know was, Are you going to be comfortable working by yourself for long periods of time? This as you know, is not a group job. And many people like working with others and many said, I get along great with other people. I'm a team player. And while that is important to a certain extent, because obviously you have supervisors and you will have other team members day in and day out. You will be by yourself. So are you okay? Working and are you responsible enough and independent enough to be able to do that? If they had mentioned something like, I don't like people and only want to be around dogs. That would also be a huge red flag. Because you are gonna have to be going to meet and greets where you're interacting with people. You are going to be meeting people On the sidewalk, when you're walking dogs, you are going to have to interact with your other team members. So we kind of needed a person who was good at both who would be able to be independent, working by themselves a lot, but then also was a team player.
Collin 10:12
Another way that we tried to set expectations for this position was by asking them, this is a part time job, how many hours a week are you looking for? Because we'll also re ask this question later to make sure they're staying consistent. They're being honest with us. If someone responded to this ad, and said, they were looking for a full time job, they're not a good fit for us right now. Doesn't mean in the future, we can't hire them on. But even somebody looking for 20 to 30 hours was not a good fit. Because we're starting this location with zero hours. We don't have anything set in stone, and we're going to be growing slowly. We did have other work that we could give them like marketing, writing, blogs, social media stuff, we couldn't give them that full amount of time that they were actually looking for.
Meghan 10:53
And the last question that we asked for the written questions was, how do you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? And this was your favorite song, as you take this one? Oh,
Collin 11:01
I really enjoyed this question. Because it's out of the blue. Nobody expects to be answering this question on a written portion of some of a questionnaire. But secondly, it really showed a lot of people's character. We had some people who responded with I don't see how this is relevant. And then they didn't answer the question. We had some people who responded with, I don't like peanut butter jelly sandwiches?
Meghan 11:21
That wasn't the question. The question is, how do you make one It wasn't whether you like one or not,
Collin 11:25
what we were looking for was somebody who could communicate a stepwise process in a logical procedure in an illogical, coherent manner. If I was thinking of an example of coming into a client's home and there's throw up on the floor, how would this person be able to communicate that so that the client understood exactly what was going on? And what events led up to them finding that? So having somebody who just said, grab your peanut butter, grab your jelly, put it on bread and slap them together? That doesn't tell me enough, that's not descriptive enough for me to actually be able to understand if this person could communicate a complex situation. So while this is kind of a ridiculous question, a lot went into it. And we got some good and obviously some awful responses.
Meghan 12:10
So we just outlined the 12 questions that we asked for the written part. So what made us move someone on to a phone interview, if they followed directions, that was an obvious sign. So if they emailed us with the subject heading joining the bunch, and they did it within the allotted time, they use correct spelling, they gave a solid reason as to why they applied to this job that they really saw the bigger picture of quality pet care. And then also someone really rose to the top if they described their pet care experience. If it wasn't just, I've owned a cat for five years and a dog for 10 years. That is experience that you have had. But that's not what we were looking for.
Collin 12:48
Well, and they had to describe it well. So we couldn't be left guessing. What did you actually do? What were more some more details that we would like to see here. And we didn't go hunting out for those people couldn't describe the relevant experience the first time, it wasn't our job to chase them down and ask for clarification.
Meghan 13:05
So then we entered them into our spreadsheet, and we sent them a request for a phone interview with two dates and times that worked for us. And again, we did not want this to be open ended, we sent two dates, and times. If they couldn't make those work, we were a little amendable. But generally, we stuck with those times because this is not a free for all. We also said that the phone interview was going to take between 15 and 20 minutes again, setting up expectations that this wasn't going to be an all day thing or even an hour thing that it was going to be a relatively short amount of time, we just had a few questions ended up being nine questions for them. And that we just wanted to get to know them a little bit more, right. And again, depending on how many questions you have, and whether you are direct or verbose is going to determine the length of time this phone interview takes at the same time we sent them the request for the phone interview, we also sent them another written question a more long form question. It was where do you see yourself in one and five years, we were looking for people who were planning on being in the area for a while not very transient people, and then saw that pet care was going to continue to be part of their life.
Collin 14:16
We did have several people who responded to a particular date and time for the phone interview, but did not answer that question. So we factored that into when we sat down and ranked people at each step to see whether they had followed all of the directions are only part of the directions.
Meghan 14:32
And we also ask that again during the phone interview to see what the actual answer was because we are we do want to know that answer. Right. Next we're going to talk about what we covered in the phone interview. But first, as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Since you work in the pet care industry. You can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options. client can and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today. At pets@llc.com, you can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and using the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off today, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets it llc.com.
Collin 15:21
So we'd kick off the phone interview by reviewing the position with them, we want to give them a little bit more information and lay out some details about how we operate him. So I would say here's a little bit information about the position. The hours will vary by week, we have busy seasons, and we have very slow seasons. So the hours may range from around five hours to 30 or more hours in a week. Depending on demand. We have time blocks for when people can schedule their 30 minute services we have a morning, noon and night. The morning is booked between six and nine, noon between 10 and two. And the night is at six, and nine. And so it's not that you have to be available from 6am to 9pm. But we will have clients scheduling slots throughout that this is a position we are currently growing. So we are building our clients and we are marketing in the area, we are going to be looking for help and input in that process with this position and getting your input.
Meghan 16:14
Obviously this is going to look different if you already have clients you are ready to give them if you do already have a set schedule. Explain that to them in detail what that looks like for them and how many hours you can provide. I then
Collin 16:25
went on to explain that this person will collaborate with team members, though they may never actually see them much. We do everything digitally through slack, Google Google Docs, and we make social media posts independently with Canva. This position does need to be available during holidays and weekends. Because those are our busiest times. I'd open it and say do you have any questions about this position before we get started? And give them an opportunity to ask questions about the schedule or about hours or anything about that before we actually dove into the questions. And most
Meghan 16:56
of the time, people didn't have questions at this point. But we wanted to be crystal clear with them about where we were in the business growth process. The biggest hurdle that many people had was really trying to understand what our hours are. So we tried to explain it as best we could. But it is different. Because a lot of times, you know, people came from the restaurant world, they would use the word shift. And we don't do that in our business, you may do that. But we don't have certain shifts that we can you can clock in and clock out. And it's five or six hours. Yeah,
Collin 17:28
I started to explain it as we earn our money in 30 minute increments, is that's how our business runs and operates. And we also explain that, because we were hiring multiple positions that they the individual was not expected to be be available from 6am to 9pm, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Meghan 17:44
And we will circle back to this in coming hiring episodes. But we really wanted to make it known to the person that burnout is real in this industry. And we were going to do everything possible to not let that happen for them.
Collin 17:59
Yeah, that we were going to protect them. And we were looking out for them in this position. So that we moved on to those questions. And the first one was describe a stressful situation in your life and how you handled it. Maybe we'll reiterated the response that they gave for the indeed question about working with a difficult person if they responded to the phone portion of that. So maybe we'll ask a different question next time to start this off. But it allowed us to be very broad and say any stressful situation in your life at all? How did you handle that? We were looking for somebody who responded in a healthy and appropriate manner, and didn't just yell and scream or try and get somebody fired? Because it wasn't going well. We also asked them, What did they think of our website and social media, we were really here looking to see if they had researched our company at all. And one of the best responses that we got was from somebody who said, I saw it and I absolutely love the colors. And I loved all the images. I really felt like it was familiar and that I belonged here. That's exactly what we wanted. We wanted somebody who connected with our messaging.
Meghan 18:56
But I will say most people answered no to this question. And that's fine.
Collin 18:59
It wasn't an immediate doc on them. And there wasn't much weight added to that question. We were just kind of curious about how much backend work these people had done.
Meghan 19:07
I will say, really quick, very wrong response we got was that the one lady had said that she would had applied to so many positions that week that she did, she didn't have time. And basically she didn't really remember what this position was.
Collin 19:21
Oh, that was fantastic. That made me feel warm. And
Meghan 19:26
the next question was describe a scenario where attention to detail prevented a mistake. And obviously this job is fast paced. So being detail oriented is crucial. You know, three milliliters versus four milliliters makes a huge difference when giving medicine to a cat following directions is
Collin 19:45
important. This position is also being cross trained on a lot of different skill sets. So we did ask them to describe their experience creating social media posts. Basically, we were trying to gauge how much we would have to train them on Canva Instagram, Facebook, the writing portion of All this and also if they just flat out be open to creating content. Most the responses when we asked this came from people responding with they would post their own private information or their own, they would do their own Facebook, but nothing really for a business.
Meghan 20:13
I will also say that these questions were not necessarily in any order. No, you were just kind of splattered against the wall, which is maybe not the best approach. But we didn't really organize these in any particular way.
Collin 20:26
No, that's a good point about how we structured this, it was pretty much a question and then response, a question and a response and move on unless they had a follow up or clarification about that we really tried to keep these the exact same, so that we weren't going off on tangents that we didn't also do with other people we're trying to hire. So it could be a standardized as possible.
Meghan 20:45
The next question was, Do you have experience giving medications or shots to pets, this is a valuable skill to have as a pet sitter. And again, it had us gauge how much training we'd need to do with them.
Collin 20:56
We also asked how they would enter a house with the dog jumping against the door. So they are trying to get into the home. And the dog is actively inside, jumping in pawing at the door, trying to see how they would handle a stressful situation where the dog isn't behaving or listening to them. We're also looking to see how they would describe their dog handling skills, and most importantly, here looking for a gentle approach and a cautious approach. We asked how often do they travel? And what's your favorite place to go? This really got people talking and opening up about a lot of things. And that was the entire point of this question. It wasn't trying to gauge or be a gotcha question for oh, this person travels every single weekend, I can't hire them. We're again, we're really trying to get a little bit of personality and understanding see what kind of connection we have with this. When we do this, again, we may move this question up further in the applique in the process, so that the applicant feels more comfortable right from the beginning. But we
Meghan 21:48
did need this person to be available for weekends and most holidays. So somebody who responded with, oh, I go camping every other weekend. Well, that's not really a good fit for this job, because that would be pretty stressful on our end to manage.
Collin 22:01
Yeah, when we were trying to look at the totality of how this person would fit in with our availability, and our other hire as well to try and build that team with the redundancy that we were looking for.
Meghan 22:11
The next question was pretty key. It was how would you handle being late to a client, we know that things happen, but we need to be able to depend on this person and trust that they will be there when they say they will, it really helped us to know what they thought the chain of command was. And if they truly knew what this position is, because the majority of people here, say they would call the client to apologize. And then they would say sorry, again, when they got to the house. Well, that response told us that one, they didn't think to notify their supervisor. Obviously, we need to be clued in about that. And then to they thought that the client would be home. We know that some sitters walk when the owner is home, but we have yet to encounter that. And don't find that in our day to day job. So the client is not home. So this person did not understand that you would be walking into a home with no client. And then we
Collin 23:02
ended our discussion by asking them to describe and tell us their availability and how busy they want to be, again, trying to get at this meeting expectations both from them and for ourselves. just reiterating that this is a very, very part time position right now. And I feel like we had to hammer home this point several times over the over the entire hiring process of exactly what this position was because we wanted there to be no confusion about what people were walking into. We would then ask them again, if they had any questions, if that opened up anything in their brain that they wanted to ask us about. A lot of people would ask us some more about the pay of how that worked, and about our current client load again, and we could reiterate, we have zero, we're growing this position and you get to be an active part of that, we would then tell them that we would get back to them within two business days about whether or not they would move on to the in person interview. So after we've wrapped up the phone interview portion, again, we go to our spreadsheet, and we're putting people in ranking them what exactly is going to help us decide to move this person to the in person interview at this point? Well, first and foremost, we're going to look to see if they spoke coherently and really confidently during the phone interview. We're looking to see is this person personable? Did they ask additional follow up questions? Or did they tie in past experiences to help them respond and tell a good story? And we really paid attention to the being late to client question because that really was foundational for us to understand what role this person saw themselves as and how they would handle those kinds of emergencies.
Meghan 24:35
Because we are hiring this remotely. Collin had to drive down and meet with the people in person. So we only had one date, one set date with a range of times I think we had a five hour time window on that one day that they could pick from and so it was a first come first served basis four times available for the interview.
Collin 24:55
I really liked having multiple in person interviews back to back I think oh First time I did about six in one day, because it helped me directly compare everyone. But there were some tips that I learned from that. The first one is to take really good notes during the conversation and to also space out your interviews with at least 30 minutes between them. Not only does this give you time to decompress, but you can also debrief and write down your initial thoughts about that person. Additionally, when these do run long, you're not just sitting there literally going back to back to back to back to back. When we first scheduled these, we only gave ourselves a 15 minute window between these that was way too short, it was kind of tough to manage that it didn't give me enough time to write down my thoughts between them. Speaking of the questions, I wrote out the questions on a in a notebook with a separate page dedicated to each person that I was interviewing, I did not want to have a laptop or phone out to distract me or make them think that I wasn't paying attention. And it also literally lowered the barrier physically between me and the person that I was talking to, there was no screen that I was hiding behind, or no, basically, barrier that was between me and this person helped us get a lot more comfortable and really felt a lot less formal. And I chose a coffee shop to go to and I didn't tell them where I was sitting. So this is additionally another part of our hiring process. I didn't tell them where I was sitting because I wanted to see that one. I want to see what time did they arrive? So I could be watching and looking for them. And to I want to see how did they handle not knowing where I was? Did they message us and see, hey, I'm here? Where are you? Or did they wander around? And of looking and seeing if the one person was right or not?
Meghan 26:37
The in person set of questions is different from the phone interview questions in that they are more in depth you are able to see the person's facial reactions, when you're in person, you're able to see how they kind of process the question that you just asked them, and are able to really dive deeper into their knowledge and experience versus just a quick phone interview.
Collin 26:59
So I started off by asking, what's your passion, and I did quickly followed up with if you say dogs, that's cheating. A little jokingly here, but I did want to make sure they weren't just pandering to us and just say oh, my passion our pets. Okay, we get that that's why you applied for this position. But what else is there we're trying to get an idea of what this person wants in life, and really, again, trying to understand if this job is gonna be a good fit for them. We then
Meghan 27:23
asked, What did you like about your last job, we were not about to have them start bashing their last job or why they quit or why they got fired, or we didn't want any of that we wanted them to tell us what they loved about it to see if our position and company can meet that need. So if they said, all the people I worked with, as in they liked all the people that they worked with, it was a big red flag for us, because
Collin 27:46
they're not going to be working with a lot of people, they have colleagues and they have other staff members around them. But they're not working with them on a daily basis. As we've said earlier, their babies basically never going to see them. So if they love the fact that they had lots of social interactions in their last job, this one really isn't going to be a good fit for them. We also started to dive deeper into some of their animal handling knowledge. So we would I asked a dog steps out of their lead and harness while you open the front door. What do you do? I really loved this question because it helped me see their thought process. Let me watch their face to see as they really put in a lot of concentrated effort to figure out what's step one, what's step two, what's step three, and work through those details and how they would get that dog back under control. And then really the follow up question is, Did they mention they would let us know? Did they mention that they were going to tell the client about that incident, and really how far they took it. The majority of people really simply stopped at when they got the dog back under control. There was no follow up with that, which is fine. That can be part of our training process. But it was neat to see where people ended with that answer.
Meghan 28:51
Another pet care question we asked was what would you do if you arrived at a client's home and are unable to find their cat is happens a lot of times when their cat is just under the bed or Cullen You recently had a very interesting experience. Yes,
Collin 29:05
the lady had put her cat into their laundry room and said please check on my cat in there. And I came inside and I saw no visible signs of a cat until I heard meowing and kind of a distress call coming from behind the washer and dryer. So the cat had fallen behind there and was actually unable to get out. And it had been several hours I think since the cat was in there, but it did have to move the washer, move the dryer breech behind them and then get the cat up. And thankfully it didn't want to scare they recognize I was trying to help it certainly get clogged or bit but you find cats in weird places sometimes. And several people had to think about this for a while mostly because a majority of people are dog people haven't had a lot of interactions with cats. I will say the best answers were generally in the format of Well, I would know their favorite hiding place from talking with the owner. So I checked those places first and then let the client know since this position is working by themselves. The majority of the time we did ask how manage yourself when you're working alone, Megan and I recognize that this can be a lonely and it really is an unsupervised role, we needed people to respond with a story about working alone and how they manage their time, which I would not accept if something if they answered something along lines of, Oh, I'm just great at it, I would ask them to elaborate. And please expand on that and tell me more How has that worked in your life and what systems you have in place,
Meghan 30:24
we also wanted to judge their first aid knowledge. So we asked how would you handle a dog with a broken toenail? The best kind of answers had follow up questions about the severity of the break, and whether it was actively bleeding. It really showed that they were thinking about the steps that needed to happen with this. And because this is not always a glamorous job, we asked how do you handle cleaning up vomit and diarrhea? A lot of the times people will say I don't have any problem with it. But we were really looking for them to say, one I don't mind at all, or to a process of cleaning that they could explain and then explain how they would tell the client.
Collin 30:59
Another specific pet care question that I had for them was, what three steps would you take if approached by an awfully dog walking a client? This was really important to us, because not only are we out in the community an awful lot, but there are some very bad things that you can do in this kind of situation. So we wanted to know, Do these people know about that? And how would they handle this? And I specifically kept it to three steps, because I really wanted to make sure that they thought through every single one in order and in a logical manner, not just throwing out random things. There are lots of things that you could do. I want to know what steps and put them in an order that would make sense from beginning to end,
Meghan 31:38
as pet sitters. We are tasked with a ton of different things throughout the day. And so we wanted to know how they would prioritize and organize themselves. So we asked if you have 12 tasks to get done today. How do you organize them? We asked this because we wanted to know how do they self organize? Do they have a system in place already? Or are we going to have to teach them this? The best people said that they checked the calendar regularly and would check in with us for updates. And then we went back to more of the pet care questions. So we asked before you let a dog into the backyard, what should you look for? And many people were thrown off at this question, because they've never thought about it before, we would then explain to look for a down fence or an open gate or really any dangers that could be in the fenced yard. We also wanted to know if they had ever been bit before this is very crucial to our understanding of where they are in their pet care experience. So we wanted them to explain that as well. We were looking at animal handling experience. And some people explain their situation where it was obvious that it was their own fault, and that they learned from their mistake.
Collin 32:43
My favorite question and really watching the expression on their eyes was you come in and find the client home and they are naked in the kitchen? What do you do? I ask this because yea petsitting we never really know what we're walking into. It's always an unknown on the other side of that door. So I was looking for them to explain this in a professional response, they that they would announce themselves explained why they're there and asked whether they would want to continue, I would then use this time to explain to the applicant the difference between an accident, like is explained in the question versus a purposeful exposure. And that we as a company had zero tolerance for any aggressive or sexual advances from clients.
Meghan 33:26
Again, talking about that safety aspect that that is a priority for our company. And if they ever felt uncomfortable, either during a meet and greet, or during a visit that they would let us know that we can pat and have the authority to fire that client. Yeah, that
Collin 33:39
their safety comes first and foremost, and there's no amount of money or no client is special enough to make it worth putting our staff and themselves at risk.
Meghan 33:48
We then ask tell me how you've handled an emergency situation with an animal? And if you haven't had one, how would you handle that? We were trying to see the depth of their experience and what they considered an emergency. So it weeded out the people that said they've never dealt with an emergency before and they didn't have a good answer for that. So it tells us that they've never really thought of a scenario before where this would happen and wouldn't know how to deal with it.
Collin 34:11
Because we were so concerned about making sure that people understood the dedication and what this position entailed. I asked them, what is an appropriate everyday carry for a dog walker? And what does it mean for you to be prepared for a day of dog walks and drop ins. Because what they think they need directly relates to what they think they'll be doing, which means that we can see if they truly understand the job requirements. So if they start listing things that make no sense or are not relevant at all, to being outside, then that is a huge red flag to us. The really good answers here said things like well, before I would go out I'd make sure and check the weather for my entire day to make sure I have the appropriate clothing that I have the appropriate rain gear or boots to change into if necessary. I would have extra leashes I would have poop bags, I would have my walking belt, I would have a flashlight, if I knew it was going to get dark. These kind of items were what we were looking for them to respond with. And then just a standard question that we wanted to make sure we asked everyone was, when are you looking to start? We want to gauge their availability and also plan the hiring process for us. So if they were looking to start tomorrow, or maybe they needed three or four weeks to wrap up their current position, that would give us some idea of how to go about the process.
Meghan 35:29
Like I said, at the start of this episode, your questions are likely going to be different than ours. And you're looking for a different type of position, a different type of person. But whatever questions you come up with, not only should you know the questions that you're going to be asking in the phone interview and the person, but think through the answers you want them to give, what is a great answer, what is just an okay answer and a bad answer. Obviously, you can't be prepared for every answer, they're going to give under the sun. But you need to have a general idea. So that when you are conducting six interviews back to back to back, you are able to properly standardize this and be unbiased.
Collin 36:09
Yeah, it's a great way for each question have different weights to it kind of like a test. This one's worth five points. This one's worth two points. This one's worth one point. And that way you can kind of score them as they answer because you've already thought through what's a good answer? What's an okay answer, what's a bad and unacceptable answer?
Meghan 36:25
And then we also want to go for some questions that you should not ask, you can't ask about their marital status, if you call their references. If that's something you choose to do, you can't really ask a whole lot more than Would you hire this person again. So there is definitely a fine line here of it's great that there are hundreds and 1000s of questions that you could possibly ask, but there are definitely ones that you need to stay away from.
Collin 36:47
So that's our entire process of working through from job application to in person interview, which as you see is an awful lot. So how did we know it was time to send off that offer? How did we know which person we wanted to give the position to?
Meghan 37:01
So we had our spreadsheet, we had their name, their animal experience, any red flags throughout the entire process? We had the pb&j question we ranked it. Yes. Are we ranked it great? Yes or not?
Collin 37:15
Not good. Yeah.
Meghan 37:18
And then we ranked them. Obviously, this was made a little more difficult, because it's two of us. And so we had to really come to an agreement and a compromise on who we thought was the best fit for us.
Collin 37:29
But I think it was really helpful for us to be able to bounce ideas off of each other to go, hey, well remember how this person responded, or hey, you know, they did have this on their resume to remind us. And so if you are doing this through your by yourself, I would really recommend pulling in another business owner or somebody else to help you in this process, because it'll help you remind yourself about what's going on and the different criteria for each person. But laying it out in a spreadsheet of exactly the things that you're looking for will really help you determine does this person have this yes or no? Do they have this? Yes or No? Was I happy with this? Yes or no and really, like laid out in black and white, and then rank them, score them? One, two, however many that you're working with, and then pick your top two, or your top three and know that okay, I'm going to offer it to the first person if they say no, I'm going to offer to the second one. And then if they say no third person, but don't compromise, don't feel like you have to offer this to anybody.
Meghan 38:23
Because again, another option is you don't hire any of these people.
Collin 38:27
Yes. And that's, that's hard. That's a hard pill to swallow at this stage in the game. When you've gone through five, six in person interviews, to sit back and go, You know what an option is to an option that you always have is to not hire any of them, and to post the job again. So once we decided on the person that we were going to be hiring, we sent them that contingent offer Letter and ran a background check and we use the company AQI track, I think I see a lot of people using that same one. What's key here is that you set the start date for two weeks from the initial offer date. And this is a lesson that we learned. Because you need to send that contingent letter that explains that if you don't like what you find on the background check the offer can be revoked. And now there is an actual legal process of doing that, though, you can't just revoke and say nevermind, you actually have to send them a letter with the background report attached and let them know that you found something that impacts their ability to be employed with you possibly
Meghan 39:21
Yeah, so this is if the background check comes back. There's something on it you don't like and you don't want to hire them anymore.
Collin 39:28
Yeah, you have to make sure that whatever you find on the background check, it would specifically relate to their ability to do the job duties as outlined in your job posting. Now once you send them a notify that you found something that you're not quite happy with, they have two weeks to contest the reporting, because while background checks are awesome, they're not always 100% accurate. So legally, they have the ability to go to the reporting agency and say, Hey, this is not correct, get it expunged, and then come back to you and that's why that two week, contingent letter is so important.
Meghan 40:01
And this is in the United States, it may be different if you live in a different country.
Collin 40:05
Yeah, usually once you send that letter, you'll never hear back from the person. But you do have to send a letter. Otherwise there can be legal ramifications for you and your your company.
Meghan 40:14
So anyway, this has been a super long episode, but hopefully is super helpful as well. There's a lot of questions that we asked, and hopefully you would be able to use some of them in your hiring process. Or if you think that there are ones that we did not include that are super important and that you use and worked really well. We would love to know about them, you can let us know on Facebook or Instagram at petsitter. confessional,
Collin 40:37
we really wanted to detail out our process for you because hiring is a big scary step. For a lot of people I know it was for us. Again, we need to remind ourselves that the purpose of the multiple steps in this process is to screen across a wide range of skills, personalities and work ethics that are going to work for you and the goals that you have for your company.
Meghan 40:56
We just came out of a very busy holiday season. But if you are already planning for the next one, business coach Natasha opionion is going to answer How can I celebrate holidays and still run my business? Well, I
Natasha 41:07
of course used to do the boarding in the pet sitting so I was in the trenches as well. I used to always have like holiday themes for all my puppies are over at my house with me, but we've pivoted since then as well. For me the holidays as a family time is time I want to enjoy with my family. If you are doing petsitting in the holiday, I would highly encourage your team to do rotations. So whoever did Thanksgiving doesn't do Christmas, you know, whoever is on doesn't celebrate Hanukkah, you know will work that time don't have everybody on your team working every single holiday. Because then they're like, You know what, I've actually given my whole self to this business and I didn't give much to me either. Your team is gonna feel that too. So start getting in a habit of rotating out your holidays so they can enjoy their family and you can enjoy yours. You don't have to have the whole squad, you know, especially at the end of the year. We know how it is you know Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's, it's like, wow, have different teammates running those shifts rotate, don't don't burn everybody down. Yeah,
Collin 42:09
I think that is really critical to remember that. We have staff to help us avoid burnout and to serve our clients. Well, we have to be treating our staff well. So that way they don't suffer from the same things that we were trying to avoid ourselves.
Natasha 42:25
That's what that Network helps you out. Because you're going to get seasonal employees that are seasonal staff team, whichever you want, that can't do everything. But if they're like, You know what, Josh? I can't do Thanksgiving, but I got you on Christmas. So I was like, perfect. Alright, so you got me on Christmas. So then my full time team that's usually with me every day, they can take off on Christmas, and then they'll just do Thanksgiving. And I tell them that I say hey, listen, Tim, you're gone on Christmas. I hope you got plans. You better go do something because you're out. And they're like, oh, yeah, I can encourage them. I'm like, yes, you're out. You know, you're not working every holiday with me. And they're like, okay, okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right, I should go. I should go see my family. You're right. Let me go see him. Like I encourage them to not be like the hustle mentality because I just think that's very toxic in business. So even though they're like I want to make some more money, well listen, if you want to make some more money, let's talk about other things you can do during the weekday on a recurring basis, not that you're just going to kill yourself in the holidays, and not share those memories with family. To me, those memories are way more priceless than running business. Because at the end of the day, that's why we run business to make memories for our lifestyle.
Collin 43:36
If you'd like to work more closely with Natasha on your business, you can use the code PSC 20 for 15% off her private group and any courses that she offers.
Meghan 43:44
We greatly appreciate you listening to this today. We know it was quite long, but hopefully it's been helpful to you. And feel free to share it with another pet sitter or dog walker who is in the process of hiring. And we want to thank pet sitters associates and our awesome Patreon members for supporting this today.
Collin 44:00
Yes and thank you so much. Bye
