A few months ago, the Australian branch of The Guardian, was outed for offering an experienced journalist $0.15 a word to write an advertorial for a national bank, ANZ.

The journalist made the case that it was impossible for writers to make a living at that rate and that “you get what you pay for”.

Now let me clarify this right upfront: this is not a post about politics. Whether or not people can make living at that rate, or whether or not businesses should pay more are not topics we’ll cover here.

What I want to talk about is that last part: “you get what you pay for”. Is it true?

I’ve hired dozens of offshore talents in the last couple of years and I’ve never gotten what I paid for. As a business, you should always get more than what you paid for. Because if you just got what you paid for, you’ll be just like every other competitor of yours.

Hiring, in other words, is a competitive advantage.

Now note here that I’ve never argued for hiring cheap labor. Cheap employees can prove extremely expensive for the business. What I’m urging you to do is to always look at your employee ROI.

So far so good?

Here’s the part people don’t like to hear though: ROI is a function of cost (in this case, the employee’s salary). If a cheap employee performs awesome work, you get awesome ROI. But if an expensive employee performs awesome work, you get average ROI.

The argument, for a lot of service providers, is that by paying them more, you get better quality work. What they meant is that they return higher ROI for businesses who hire them, but most employers are too shortsighted to see that fact.

Here’s what they think the ROI Vs Pay graph looks like:

assumed employee roi

In reality though, employee ROI for most jobs conforms to the law of diminishing returns. In other words, the graph really looks like this:

reality of roi

Take writers for example.

There are writers who charge $0.05 a word and there are those who demand they be paid $1 per word.

As a business, who should you hire if you want to expand your content marketing team?

Well, first you need to establish your baseline metrics. Sessions, number of shares, conversions – these are all common things businesses measure their writers by.

Individual articles go viral or go bust for no reason at all, so allow your writers to produce 20 – 30 articles to get a good amount of sample to analyze for ROI.

What I usually find is that the $0.05 a word writer almost always performs the worst – she is probably trying to write so many articles to make ends meet that she simply doesn’t spend enough time on each article.

As the rate rises, so too does the ROI, but only up to a certain point.

Once you pass that point, ROI starts to dip. A writer who charges $1 a word is not necessarily better than a writer who charges $0.50 a word (exact numbers depends on your circumstances).

This is true for many professions.

Where To Recruit Talents

As you can see, I am, at least on the side, a writer. There are ways you can both increase your fees AND the ROI you produce for a business. But that’s not what this article is about.

Instead, I’d like to go into what businesses can do to maximize their employee ROI. And if there’s only one sentence for me make my point, it’s this: look beyond your country and the “first world”.

Here are three reasons why:

  1. Talents exist everywhere – even in India and other third-world countries.  Who do you think Google, IBM, Apple and other multi-national companies employ when they enter these countries? To dismiss more than half the world’s labor as being “low quality” is, to me, extraordinarily ignorant and nothing short of insane. In the last couple of years alone, I’ve hired writers, web designers, UX designers, graphic designers, frontend and backend developers, mobile designers, data analysts, link builders, SEO strategists, content strategists, SEM managers – all remotely from developing countries such as the Philippines, India, Indonesia and Vietnam.
  2. You get what you pay for, only if the world is perfect. But we don’t live in a perfect world. Even the most talented individual would be capped by what local companies are willing to pay. They will almost certainly not be paid as much their boss – and their boss are paid local wages. For example, I’ve hired two Google engineers in the past for separate projects. How can I afford to hire Google engineers? Because they reside in India, working for Google India.
  3. Some of the most talented people I’ve worked with are travelling the world – sometimes for years. Sure these people want to maximize their income but they care more about experiencing life. And some of the best ROI I’ve had has come from these people.

Ok great Andre. You’ve convinced me. Now how do I go about looking for these people?

  1. Don’t let Upwork and other similar sites be the only place you recruit from. Post a job ad in a popular local job board. The US has Monster.com and Australia has Seek.com.au. India, The Philippines, etc have one too. These sites will get you more traditional workers – many of whom might suspect a scam when they hear of “remote” jobs. But I’ve hired some of our best talents through these job boards.
  2. Hang out in their digital communities. I’ve hired dozens of various types of designers by hanging out in Behance and Dribbbble. And I’ve hired a number of writers by actually reading local sites written in English, like Forbes Indonesia.
  3. Hang out in popular niche blogs and look for bloggers who are open to freelancing. Sometime it can be difficult to find communities in certain niches. In that case, search for: “work with me” KEYWORD or “hire me” KEYWORD in the LOCAL Google – and you’ll find various bloggers in your niche who are open to freelancing in a specific country.
  4. Ask for a referral and give them an incentive to do so. Many of the activities that you outsource – like link building – isn’t exactly rocket science. So what I like to do is recruit a graduate and train them from scratch. It’s hard to un-train bad SEO habits and these graduates don’t have them.  By going the referral route, it’s easier for the first person you trained to help you train your second recruit (and so forth) because they can meet each other face-to-face.
  5. Browse LinkedIn profiles. Found a person you like who has a full-time job? You’ll be surprised how many people are open to freelancing on the side.
  6. Poach. This is where you take it up a notch. This is where you find team leads and high-level managers. Look for people working in agencies as senior managers on LinkedIn (again, filter for country) and connect with them. Don’t expect to pay $600 for these people – I usually pay them somewhere between $1500 and $2000 a month, based on performance. Not exactly cheap for small businesses but again, focus on the value you get here. These managers can take a lot of day-to-day operations off your hands and they can make sure all other team members hit their KPIs.  It’s how I’ve quickly scaled SEO teams without burgeoning the office and going through HR.

Nothing groundbreaking, right? There’s one thread that’s common amongst all these methods: you need to actively reach out to talents.

The best people are not browsing job boards.

(The views, opinions and positions expressed by me are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of any of my employers or colleagues.)