#7: The Secret Weapon to Hiring Top Talent: Paid Test Projects Explained

In this solo episode, Alyssa Lang dives deep into the power of paid test projects as a game-changing hiring strategy for business owners. Alyssa unpacks why she implemented this system, breaks down the exact costs and steps involved, and shares the critical factors that will help you find high-quality team members—saving you time, money, and headaches on your next hire!

In this episode you’ll hear:

• Why paid test projects can transform your hiring process and help you avoid costly team mistakes
• How the exact paid test project works, from job ads to narrowing down candidates
• What the costs look like for ad spend, candidate payments, and the overall investment in hiring
• How to structure and decide on what to include in a paid test project for your own business

Resources mentioned in this episode:

🏦 Relay Bank

☎️ Book a 45-minute paid strategy call with Alyssa Lang

Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me, @magneticprofits.

For more information about The Magnetic Millionaire Podcast or interest in our services or offers visit our resources below:

Visit our website: magneticprofits.com

Check out our courses: magneticprofits.com/services

Check out our podcast page: magneticprofits.com/podcast

Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alyssa-lang-mb

Connect on Instagram: instagram.com/magneticprofits

Connect on Facebook: facebook.com/magneticbookkeeping

Transcript

 If you've ever found yourself in a situation where maybe you hired someone, whether that was a contractor employee or whatever that relationship was with the two of you, and you find that a couple of months in, all of a sudden they're just not. Working up to standards, they're just not getting it, and you're just feeling a little bit frustrated because maybe what was said on the resume and also what they said during the job interview was exactly what you wanted to hear, but for some weird reason, they're not lining up with the actual actions that they're taking.

This podcast episode is for you because I'm actually breaking down something that we use across both my companies. They're called paid. Test projects. We've actually helped some of our clients actually implement these, and it is one of my favorite tools, and I'll explain in this episode the reason why we decided to start doing paid test projects.

I'll talk about who we were actually hiring in this example that we were doing this paid test project for. I'm gonna break down the cost, so how much we spent in job ads, how much we spent paying each of the candidates. Then I'm gonna be breaking down in total, I'm gonna be going through. The actual paid test project process.

So what did we do? How did we go about that? And then finally, I'm gonna be breaking down a little bit about what we actually provided for this particular paid test project for this particular role to kind of get the wheels turning for you. So if this is something that you've been really struggling with and you feel like every time you hire, you have to hold people's hands, this is going to solve a lot of that for you.

 This is The Magnetic Millionaire Show, the podcast for women skilling past seven figures who want more clarity, more freedom, more profit, and less doing things just because everyone else is. This isn't another business podcast recycling the same tired advice Here you'll get real numbers, real strategies, and real vulnerability.

It's where strategic insight meets unapologetic ambition without the gatekeeping, it's made specifically for women who aren't afraid to go against the grain. I'm your host, Alyssa Lang, a three times founder fractional CFO Business advisor, millionaire, and a woman who always has done things on my terms, and I'm here to help you do the same.

Let's dive in and build your next million on your terms.

 So I'm so excited for you to dive in today's episode. Okay guys. I actually was so excited to record this podcast episode number one. If you've been already tuning in, I cannot believe that we are one week since we launched this podcast. It's been such a long time coming and it's just so much fun to see it come to life and to see what people have to say about the podcast.

It's been so fun and I've gotten so much love and honestly. I had a couple of you guys actually who were listening to already previous podcast episodes who were like, I'd love for you to expand on this piece. So I really appreciate that because we've got a lot of really great podcast episodes coming out based off what each of you guys wanna hear.

So I wanna quickly, before we dive into today's episode, 'cause it's really ju juicy and there's so much going on and this, it's a lot of data, data-driven information. If you haven't already caught all the other episodes, then you know I love giving data and it's all truth fact and exactly what we spent and the exact process.

I don't like to gate keep. I'm not one of those people. I think there's so many podcasts out there that give you all the fluff in the world. That is not gonna be my podcast. So I'm actually going to quickly read a quick review. So please, guys, if you have and you love these episodes, please leave a review.

It always helps out the show and lets me know that you guys actually like this. So I'm actually reading this from one of our. Lovely listeners. And so this is actually a client of ours here at Magnetic Profits, which is so cool that she gave us a, a great review. Her name is Sarah, but it's a social media song in Apple podcasts.

So she said, Alyssa is so easy to listen to and her expertise is a breath of fresh air. If you run a business and want a continuous spring of in inspirational ideas, wisdom around finances and straight talk, she's your person, the best kind of hype woman to have in your ears and on those hard days in business.

And I will say, Sarah, sending you all the love and all the hugs I. Am obsessed with working with Sarah. She's such, she's a social media agency owner and we've been, you know, advising her for, oh my gosh, it's been almost a year and a half, two years now, and she's just grown and she's just. I just, I love you.

So Sarah, if you're listening, thanks for the review and also, I'm so glad that you're in my life. So let's go ahead and dive in. There's a lot of juicy parts of this episode and a lot of things kind of going on, so I'm just gonna get right into it. So first things first, let's talk about why I actually started to do pay test projects within the companies.

So I've now owned three companies over nine, a nine year period. For the longest time, I've always just kind of hired, our hiring process got bigger and better over the years and we got more efficient, we got better hires. We've, you know, landed people. And I will kind of preface that I have hired people very successfully without needing a paid test project.

The paid test project just kind of took it to the next level for us. But we do still have team members that we hired without doing this process, and it worked out really well. I will say, you wanna make sure you have the budget for this, but at the same time, if you don't even have a budget to do paid test projects and sometimes I may, maybe you don't have a budget to actually hire the person, right? Like you have to make an investment in the team. So. Why we chose to do this. I had a rough hiring year. I always like to tell you guys exactly what it is. I don't, I'm not gonna sit here and sugarcoat that. Business is perfect and everything's great, because that's not the reality of it.

Business is great 90% of the time, but 10% of it is really freaking hard, that's for sure. So we started rolling out these paid test projects because last year in hiring, so in 2024. For some weird reason, it was a weird hiring year for me. Like I lost two team members, not lost them. We actually let go of both of them.

Well, one of 'em, we let go of the second one. She turned in her notice after a hard conversation together. But that's a whole nother podcast for another episode, another day. Anyways, so we chose to hire these two candidates and when in the process one of the first candidates she. You know, everything was perfect on paper, the interview was great and you know, getting into it.

But man, every single thing that she did, she would only take it up to 75% and would never finish. She was not a finisher at all, which was not good because like I'm a great starter, but not a great finisher. So like she was my personal assistant and my executive assistant, and she was a full-time team member and she made a lot of really costly mistakes, like purchasing things that were like.

10 times the amount that like was budgeted for things like that. And then also not completing things. It was a whole thing. So the reason I'm sharing that with you guys is because. It was her actually, that made me really decide that something's gotta change. And then our second hire that came after that like I said, I hired, hired many people prior to these people, but these were the two that were like back to back hires that like, for some weird reason, just didn't work out and made me rethink the way that we do our hiring.

So the second one in this case was an as another assistant, but not my personal assistant. We actually hired her as an assistant for the companies. She was gonna work across both of our co our active companies Right now. Anyways when hiring her, same thing, you know, not as qualified and hey, I could do, you know, I could do virtual work.

It's easy. Like people think that working online is like super easy. And yes, while it, it, it has its perks it's a whole nother level of sitting in a room by yourself. It's a whole nother level of not having a coworker sitting next to you. It's a whole nother level of having to slack someone and wait for them to respond 24 hours later.

And so it's just a different dynamic. So. With those two hires, it just didn't work out the way we needed to. But I also know that my standard of the quality of team members and we always give them the 90 days. If after the 90 days they don't work out, we will, we will have to let them go or we have a hard conversation.

And sometimes through those hard conversations, they either turn the right way or they just say, you know what, this is just not the role for me. So that was why we kind of decided on these paid test projects. And so that was the biggest thing is like the on paper, anybody could chat GPT at, at this point in life.

Anybody on paper can look so good. They could put the most perfect resume, they can have the most perfect, you know, interview questions nailed down. They're really good on the spot, but however, they're really terrible at their job. Right. So let's talk about for this paid test project in in particular. We were har hiring for a full-time marketing, I think we called them a, I can't remember.

I, I didn't even pull this up, but something around the lines of a marketing coordinator. So they were a mix of, a bit of strategy, but also execution as well, because we didn't wanna split off the role into hiring like 10 different people. I had gotten advice from a really big name person in the industry who teaches some marketing tactics.

And she kept telling me like, you know, you need to hire individual contractors, individual roles. Like you just can't ever hire one. And like that, we proved that wrong for sure. I'm always really big on going with your gut guys and always deciding just 'cause a guru tells you one thing doesn't mean you have to follow that.

So I chose to do a marketing, I'm just calling it marketing coordinator 'cause I can't remember the exact title we gave it. Anyways, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of implementation. We were very straightforward about that on the job posting. So with that being said, it was full-time, full benefits, full everything.

They were actually gonna work 80% in my Workflow queen company. So my Workflow Queen company, to give you guys a little bit of context, is like a course education business. We specifically helped the accounting space with teaching them how to create systems, hire their team, or remove themselves from the day to day.

And it's, it's a beast of a company. 'cause the marketing's always moving. 'cause a course business is just, and it's very large. We, we bring in like a lot of revenue every single year. We've got a lot of moving parts here at Magnetic, she was doing 80%. This person that we were hiring was bringing, doing 80% of their work.

So 20% of their time, I'm sorry, 20% of their time, I'm sorry, 20% of their time was gonna be at magnetic profits because it's more consistent here. 'cause since we do like advisory and like we're advisory bookkeeping, stuff like that. It's a little bit more consistent with the marketing. So therefore she was 80% workflow queen, 20% in Magnetic, which is a whole nother podcast for another day on like how we split that payroll out.

But that's neither here nor there right now. So with that being said, that's who we are hiring for this particular example here. So the hiring process itself. So I wanna talk about some of the breakdown of costs. So if you don't know what a paid test project is for me to take a step back. It means instead of doing something for free, 'cause we used to do test projects when we would hire in the past, but we did not do a paid one.

So it was like five questions. And after the interview we'd be like, if we knew we kind of wanna move forward, we would send them an email and be like, Hey, we do us a favor and just do these four little things that we didn't pay for them. And it was just like super simple. It'd be like, how would you organize our inbox?

Like depending on the role, we always put these teams together and while those were great, it just, I wanted something more comprehensive. And so the paid test project. Allows for us to pay for that, pay them to do a certain amount of time on an actual project to see what they were going to do and how they were gonna, and compare, compare them against each other.

So with that being said, that is what a paid test project is, and I'll break down exactly what this paid PEs project is, especially if you are planning to hire a marketer. The concepts remain the same. I don't care who you're hiring, it's the same thing. You just have to work it backwards, which we'll talk about later on, how to decide what to actually test them on.

So let's talk about the hiring process and the cost breakdown. 'cause I think context really matters here. Sorry guys, if I keep, like you hear all the noises in my mouth I just got done being really, really sick for 10 days, so I'm still like recovering a bit. So let's talk about number of applicants.

So we had. 1500 people. 1500 guys apply across LinkedIn And Indeed, because we posted this job on LinkedIn and Indeed only, we actually had this job application up for five days and we had 1500 people apply. Granted we were paying a good fee for this and we were also giving really good benefits for this to come work for the company.

And we give a lot of likes. Perks, which is a whole nother podcast. If you guys are curious about what perks we give to our team, let me know. Either leave us a review or come over to Instagram at Magnetic Profits and let me know what you guys wanna hear more about as I like talk through things.

So from the 1500. Applicants that applied for the job via LinkedIn. And indeed, we had 150 people follow every step of our job posting. Our job posting is quite comprehensive. I think we have a thing that says, number one, include a secret subject line number two include a video recording of yourself, letting us like introduce yourselves and why you, why you're a good fit for the role and include a PDF resume.

We are so strict. If you do not put the right subject line, you're immediately disqualified if you put the right subject line. You do not include a Loom video and you do not include like a video recording, then you are immediately dismissed if you do the Loom video or like the video recording plus a subject line, but you fail to upload your resume as a PDF and instead you do it as a Google doc immediately dismissed.

We are very, very strict about this because at the end of the day, if they can barely follow detailed instructions on just applying for a job. Then they are not, they're not working for my company. I'm super systematized. Our team loves to be organized. I need someone with that same energy. So of the 150 people who actually followed our steps, which is great, from 1500 people who applied, we actually interviewed 10 of those people, which was really cool.

So it's kinda like a. It kept breaking down to 10%, which is kind of funny. So we did about 10 interviews, which is really cool. I'm the one who actually interviewed them. Usually I have a team member who interviews all of our team members, or sorry, all of our employees or all the candidates, and she's the one who selects the hire.

But in this particular case, this marketing person was gonna actually come directly to me since I'm like the marketing brain here. So from the 10 people who got interviewed, five of those people is what we ended up offering the paid test project to. So AKA five of those people we interviewed, we were like, great, you're perfect for the role but we wanna first test you before we move forward.

So we had five candidates that actually went forward with the paid test project. So let's break down a little bit more of the cost as far as what we paid for the test project. So I don't remember the exact salary that we had written out inside. It was a range though. Like we had a, it was depending on like their experience, but what we did was we calculated out the salary that we were offering at the lowest amount of the range that we were offering for the job.

And we converted it to an hourly rate, which ended up being 31 25 an hour. So we were gonna pay them for the Texas project at the lowest part of their salary that we were gonna eventually offer if they got offered the job as. Just an hourly rate, if that makes sense. So it was 32, or sorry, $31 and 25 cents was what we were gonna pay them per hour to do this test project.

The average hours that were spent per person, some people went over this, but this was the average I calculated this morning was 25.08 hours was the average that each candidate did. So it's five candidates. So we had five candidates in total. We spent $3,918 and 76 cents on paying out each of these candidates as they actually did.

The pay test project, which I'll break down here in just a minute. So I wanted to give you guys a little bit of context. So almost four grand is what we spent just to pay the candidates out for the pay test project. And we only picked the candidates that we interviewed that we were like, yes, hell yes.

Like you would be great for this role. So at the end of the pay test project, so we had five people going through that. Two of them went to the final round. So like we like really, I'm sorry, it was three originally. Three originally went to the final round of I'll explain what we did during this round, but there was a final round.

We sent them one last thing that they needed to fill out. Once they did, we kind of drilled it down to two people. And from those two candidates I selected one. So we ended up offering the job to one of them, which is really great. Now let's talk about ad spend before we get into the logistics of the actual breakdown of the paid test project.

We spent $391 and 70 cents on LinkedIn. 'Cause we ran ads. We don't ever do the whole like, let's do things for free on LinkedIn and Indeed, like we don't mess around. We just get straight to the point. And that's why we have so many applicants. But we have a really good vetting process so we don't have to filter through 1500 applicants.

If they don't follow the rules like it, we don't have to go through it, which is great. So indeed we spent $679 and 80 cents. So we spent in total for ad spend for the job was 1071 50 cents, which was really great. So total ad spend and paying out the test project, so AKA, how much it cost us to actually hire.

This one candidate, it costs us $4,990. So AKA like five grand. So it costs me five grand to find a really good candidate. And so this is something that. I think goes really overlooked is that a lot of people are like, oh, that sounds really expensive. You haven't even hired them yet. That's true. But however, this is going to save us so much money in the long run because we're gonna find the perfect fit candidate.

So. Let's deep dive into what was the actual paid test project. So like I mentioned, if there's at any point you have any questions, you wanna break anything down, I'm such an open book. I love giving information and data. Feel free to come on Instagram at Magnetic Profits, we actually build out these for some of our advisory clients.

We've actually helped walk them through these paid test projects. So if you've ever wanted to build one of these things out, I will link in the show notes for you guys. A strategy call that you guys can pay, I think it's 45 minutes and it's 3 95. We'll get on a call together and we could, if you wanna submit some important information, I do need to know some info from you about the business, and if you wanna talk through what this process looks like, how can you go about this?

Feel free to book that strategy call and I'm happy to walk you through that. It's one of my favorite things to do anyways. Okay. Breakdown of the paid test project. So this is the exact order of what we do, what we did for the actual process itself. So number one. We obviously put out the job ad and they like applied and if they didn't follow all the steps, they were immediately dismissed.

If they did follow all the steps, then we looked at them, we reviewed to see if they were a good fit from even their resume and what they submitted. From that, we decided on who we were interviewing. Then we went down the process of actually interviewing them, so we have a series of questions that we asked and then we had ready to go.

Then during the interview is typically because I was the one who actually interviewed this person. And my team also was trained that, like during the interview you kind of just have to go with your gut and just be like, I actually think they'd be a really good candidate. So usually towards the end of the interview, I already know if I wanna offer the paid test project or not.

So I did, so that's what I did. So during the interview, if I was like, oh, I think they'd be a really great fit, I love their personality, I love who they are, they're super smart. So then we did the, offered them the paid test project, and we were like, Hey, we want you to move forward, but in order to move forward.

We actually need you to do a paid test project. This paid test project, I think we told them like Max would be 35 hours. It'd be due in one week. That was very strict that that deadline was super strict. It's due in one week. I think that was a max, but everyone on average only spent 25 hours. And we'll give you all the information for it.

You'll get paid at 31 25 per hour, you will track your time. All that fun stuff. So we kind of laid it out and then from there they would tell us like, Hey, yeah, I'm down for a paid test project. Every single candidate we offered it to the five of them because half of them we didn't even think it was a good fit moving forward.

They all said yes. So. On that call, I pretty much let them, let them know we're gonna send you an email with the instructions of what to do next. So this is where my team got kind of looped in to help me. Actually send off this information. So we sent them an email to candidates to let them know that number one, they need to sign a contract.

This contract was something that was produced by my lawyer. Highly recommend that you look and chat with your lawyer was produced by our lawyer, so that way we were protected to say that whatever you create during this paid test, pro project is owned by the company and not owned by you. And then two, like this is like an NDA.

Like you're pretty much gonna see the backend of the company. You are not allowed to take the information, do anything with it, but repackage it, resell it, all the fun like legal. Shenanigans that you have to put anyways. Second thing that we asked 'em to fill out is that they had to fill out, in the United States, we call it an a CH authorization form, but essentially we just needed to collect their bank information.

So that way once they were done with their paid test project, we literally were like, we're gonna pay you out as soon as we received the email within 24 hours. So they had to fill out that form if they did not sign the contract and fill out the a CH form. They immediately didn't move forward again, but every single one of 'em did.

There was only one that did not. And she ended up not getting hired because she literally took three days to finally respond to that email. And I'm like, I'm sorry, but if you're about to get hired, I expect you to respond pretty quickly. So we kind of like dismissed her. So anyways. They had to fill out the a CH form.

And it's also fun fact guys, if you are doing paid test projects, if you're paying someone over $600, if you're paying them via a CH bank transfer, you will need to 10 99 them. So that's why we require the a CH information upfront. Your bookkeeper will love you forever. We tell our clients to do this as well is if you want 10 99 season to be smooth, just get it upfront.

So once they filled that information out, we didn't give them any information yet. We did not tell 'em what this pay test project was or anything. We needed to make sure to get that contract signed before we can hand over. Company access. So in that same email before we were like, Hey, make sure to fill this out.

We made two very. Key points that we wanted to make sure to communicate so that they were aware of upfront. Number one was limit AI use. I actually think I told them, do not use ai, and I did make a note that said, I understand that in your role, AI is probably heavily used, but I wanna see how you shine without the use of ai.

Because the last thing that we need is if. Chat, GPT fails or something happens that you like, literally don't know what to do because if all else, all that falls and crumbles, we need to know that you know your shit without all that. Right? So we told them, limit the use of AI or don't use it at all. And then the second thing we told 'em is that tracking hours that they did need to track them on their end.

So once they signed everything and they filled out the a h author authorization form, we immediately sent them an email that actually broke down information about what to expect next, any of the details that they needed for the paid test project. So. What we did we actually had said to them, we explained to them all the different like details about this particular project.

So for example, for this project, I did a Slack mini course. Marketing project. So what this meant was I originally was gonna give every single one of them their own individual project, but thanks, thankfully for my biz bestie who talked me off the ledge. I was like, but it would be so great if I give them all individual projects so then I can have.

Five projects completed in the company. She was like, Alyssa, you're just trying to get them to do work. Like as far as like getting things done, you actually need to compare them against each other. And I was like, I know, I just like really would like for them to also complete five different projects, but it's fine.

So. I ended up doing the same project per person and they all were working on a Slack micro course marketing project. So I'll explain a little bit later like how I decided on this particular project. So I'm gonna, but I'm gonna go through this one. So this one project, I wanted to give them access to, like the resources that they would need to actually create this.

So I'll explain what they needed to create. So for number one, I gave them access to their own individual Google Drive folders. That way they could create any of the resources in that folder. I did not provide them. And with any structure I did not pro provide them with here's how you would organize things, here's how you name things.

I actually wanted to see how they did it naturally, if they were organized. We also gave them access to Canva, so they got access to a very, a private folder in Canva where they were able to create their designs, which I'll break through down, like what we actually had them do. And then I gave them access to one of our programs inside of my Workflow Queen brand, where essentially we asked them to.

Look at this particular program and break out the slack part because in our big program it's called Breakthrough. We actually have a Slack mini course. And so essentially what we were trying to do with this paid test project is we wanted to see how they were gonna take this program and look at this part of the program, like only 5% of the program, and essentially pull out that part of the program.

So the Slack part, the slack bonus, and create it as its own standing course that maybe could filter into our larger program. So that was the whole. Concept around this. The whole thing was that this was due in one week, so they were required to do this in one week. Now, as far as what we actually had them do that, these are the deliverables of this particular pay test project.

Number one, they had to create a strategy document. I. So essentially we gave him a Loom video in like I gave him a Google Doc with a Loom video and then also broke out the details of what we wanted them to execute. And in that Loom video, I pretty much was like, we've got this program and we've got this little mini bonus thing that we actually wanna break out of the program.

And we'd love to use it as a way to not only sell as an A side offer product, but also something that could filter into breakthrough. 'cause our breakthrough program is all about how people can hire their team and remove themselves from the day to day. The only people using Slack are literally people who actually have a team.

You would not use Slack by yourself. And so that's why we were like, it's a perfect fit because then we know if you're using Slack, you have a team, which therefore you should work with us in breakthrough. So the whole idea was give them a little bit of information. And I will tell you, I strategically didn't give all the information in this document because I wanted to see.

How many times they would reach out for questions? What type of ways are they asking questions to us? I wanted to purposely limit the information so I don't get, I didn't give them everything that they needed because I genuinely wanted to make sure that I'm sorry guys, but. Is someone coming to me and just saying, what would you name?

This is not helpful, but what is helpful is someone saying, Hey, I'm doing some working titles. I have three options for you here. This is the reason why I believe these title options work. Which one do you feel works the best for you? But however, I think it's this one that is way more of a better team member than someone who's telling you like, what do you want as a title?

That's not helpful for me. That is not what I wanted. So I purposely. I didn't give as much information in this pay test project. The document that I gave them to kind of see how they were gonna ask me questions, how were they gonna develop the plan? Were they gonna make assumptions or were they actually going to ask for facts and data?

This was all important information. So their deliverables that they had to deliver was a strategy document that meant that like they had to like. Come up with the idea of what's the strategy behind this mini course that you would create if you worked for the company Next, they'd have to come up with the funnel plan.

So this would be like, what is the actual funnel itself? Like how many emails are we sending that sell 'em into our breakthrough program after they purchase Slack? How are we marketing this Slack program? We pretty much have this all broken out in a document. It's so thorough. It's just, I'm not gonna sit here and read it the whole time.

If you're curious about this type of plan like I said, you can book a strategy call and I can walk you through all this and like I can actually help you set this up, which is exciting. So in that funnel plan, we just asked them for like visual representation. So I wanted to see how they were gonna put together a flow chart, things like that.

Because if you're in the marketing space, you know how to put together a flow chart. I also wanted to see what type of landing pages were we gonna have as far as like they didn't need to build the landing page. Essentially. They just needed to tell us, like we would have this many landing pages.

We would also break out a landing page for ads and then one for organic. Like I wanted to see how their brain was working and how far out they were actually thinking. The next thing that they had to deliver was branding and resource plan. So this was all about what are your branding guidelines for this particular program, which include your hex codes, font style recommendations, brand voice, stuff like that.

Any suggested assets that we would need to create. So like maybe that they mentioned Hey, we need to create A PDF over here. Whatever that looked like. They also were given that they had to create the title for the program that you think would be great for the right audience. A KAI wanted to see, 'cause I didn't really give 'em all the information.

I wanted to see how much they were like, gonna look on our website, look at who we serve, what we do. And then what I had them do was I put together. I had them put together a like brief that was gonna go to our marketing, like we have a social media team, and then we also have our internal team, because like my operations manager would need to be looped in.

So I had them put together like a an actual brief that is if they were to present it to our other remaining team members to communicate to them like, here's the program. This is the strategy, this is what we're doing. So they actually had to build that document. They also had to create copywriting and design samples.

So I did list out, I actually had them do a landing page copy and design. I had them do a thank you page, copy and design. I had them create the welcome email, and then I also had them create a three, an email sequence with three to five emails. Three for onboarding them, and then three for upselling them into our breakthrough program.

Social media, ad copy, two variations and images, and then graphic ads, two to three samples and copy. I know that you're probably like, holy shit, Alyssa, that's a lot of stuff. But in the grand scheme of things, it was an average of 25 hours is what people spent on it. I paid them for it. We still haven't actually created this Slack mini course, which is actually on our radar to do so.

Cool. Part is they've already kind of, I have five people who wrote it so we could go in and pick the best one if we wanted to, and they signed a contract that states that like we can use it. So that's pretty cool. Next thing that we required of them. Was SEO and content strategy. This was not like write us a bunch of blogs and do this.

It was more like propose two to three blog topics, propose five to 10 target keywords. What suggestions are on three Bs or resources do you think that we should create in order to create lead magnets to move into this? Essentially into this program. And then we asked them for two to three ig reel scripts for me to follow in order to entice people to purchase the program.

So what we were looking for there is, we were trying to look for like, how are they looking at the angles of oh, this is a Slack mini course. Oh my God, Alyssa, you could talk on a podcast about how to communicate with your team, how to do this, how to do that, how to have hard conversations in Slack, like how to have a good team culture in Slack.

There are so many things that they could. This was where I got to see really where their brain was going. The next deliverable that they needed to do was podcast topics and CTA script. So same thing, but instead for the podcast, 'cause we do have a podcast as well. For my other brand, my workflow Queen brand.

And so I wanted to see what type of topics and CTAs they were gonna tell me to do. Because I wanted someone on the team to tell me what to do on the podcast episodes rather than me having to figure it all out. The last thing that was part of their deliverables was feedback and ideas. So this was them like, pretty much we just asked them like, offer, this is literally what we said, offer street.

Strategic feedback on how we can integrate this marketing plan to effectively launch the program and have a positive outcome. Include ideas for webinars or other ways to attract and convert leads into the Slack micro course and breakthrough as the upsell. So this is another place that we were like looking for ideas.

So. In all we had I think it was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 deliverables that they had to gap give. So just as a reminder, strategy document, funnel plan, branding and resource plan, copywriting and design samples, SEO and content strategy, podcast topics, and CTA scripts. And then finally the feedback and ideas. So the final step of this, and then I'll go back into like how I decided on what to have them do for the paid test project.

The final two steps were number one, once they submitted. The actual paid test project, they would email us and let us know that they were ready. They would tell us the number of hours that they worked and where everything's at, and then we would go in and pay them. So immediately we turned around, we went in and paid them.

We used Relay for our bank. So we had went ahead and just submitted their payment to them immediately. We made a note. So that way our bookkeeping team, even though I, we do bookkeeping at my firm here at Magnetic Profits I do have a team member who manages the bookkeeping. So I wanted to make sure to make a note.

We just noted in the memo, paid test projects, so that way our. Bookkeeping team can actually know what that actual transaction was for. So we paid them out. After that, we let them know Hey, we're just waiting on the final people to submit their final paid test project. Once it's completed, we'll take five days to review it.

So we just let them know to be patient. And then as soon as we make a decision, we'll let them know. That's when we went through the paid test projects. It was so interesting. I will say I'll kind of get to this in just a minute 'cause I don't wanna get distracted, but we made this selection and one thing that we did end up doing was like, of the five people, we had three of them that we like, I really, really liked.

I looped in a couple people in the industry that I knew really, really well, that were like good at some of the marketing things. This is the first time I ever hired a full-time marketer. I've had copywriters and things, social teams, like left and right, but never a full-time employee doing fully marketing.

So I leaned on a couple people that I got on calls with just to pick their brain. I actually had them like kind of review the paid test project with me to see if they maybe saw things that I didn't, and that was actually really helpful. So with that being said. We had three candidates from the five that we really liked.

From there, I sent a final form because, like I had a couple more questions on I could see like where they lacked like expertise based off what their resume was saying was like one thing, but then what they actually did was different. So I sent out a, a final Google form that just pretty much said, can you fill this out with your full honesty?

Do you like doing copywriting? We just listed out everything that we did based off the responses. Two of them were immediately dismissed based off the way that they responded and what they said they won't do. And that was something that was part of literally the job posting was what we required.

And they literally said they wouldn't do it. So it just came down to one person and we offered that job to her. And it worked out really well. She's, she's a great candidate. And so we ended up offering the job. So I wanna kind of touch on how I decided on this paid test project. So my recommendation is look at your job posting.

Your job posting is the number one most important thing in the business, in my opinion, as far as like how to make sure your team is aligned. That job posting will take you to the next level. I can't tell you how many times I look in the online space or even in general, and I'll go to Indeed randomly. I see people put job postings.

There's five freaking bullet points. There's no information about what the job actually is. So our job posting is literally like a sales page because we're convincing someone to trade their life to come work for us. Granted, we're paying them, but like you get the point. So we're in so much detail of what they need to be doing.

So we always go back to the job posting and say, what do we actually want this person to execute within the company? Now let's work it backwards to say, now how do we test someone? To see if they can create that same outcome by giving us just a little bit of taste. I did write down my negotiable, not negotiables, my nice to haves and like my non-negotiables as far as when someone did this paid test project, if one of the big ones for deal breaker was for me was if they were a terrible copywriter, they were not getting hired. Even though this role technically they could hire people to help them do the work and do the actual copywriting, it's important that the person overseeing them understands how to write copy.

And so there was a couple things that were deal breakers. There were some of 'em that like they had to have experience with. Building webinars, even though like they might not need to be perfect at it, it's just like that was a non-negotiable for me. So I wrote that down. So I said, if these are my non-negotiables, these are what we need and this is what the job posting is saying.

How can we work that backwards? Fun fact, you could throw it into the chat GPT if you wanted to, to see if it works backwards. I do have to say that if you don't really know how to hire, then it's gonna be a little bit hard to prompt it. And like I said, if you want to feel free to book a strategy call with me, it's, it'll be linked below.

It's a 45 minute call. It's paid, it's 3 95. We can get on a call, we can map out this paid test project together. This is literally one of my favorite things in the whole entire world today, to be honest. And so we decided on what was gonna be the actual thing we wanted them to deliver so we could test the actual attributes of what we needed for the role.

So that's how we decided on this paid test project. So it's, it's a beast of a thing to roll out. I will tell you, and it sounds like a lot, but like guys, you're literally hearing my exact process. In who knows, 30 minute of a podcast episode. Like these are things that I had to learn, trial and error, and go through myself and figure it out, and oh my God, how much am I gonna spend?

I had so many questions going through this myself that I really wanted to create this episode to empower you guys to. Take that next step and say, how can we infuse paid test projects into our hiring system to make sure that we're attracting really good candidates that are gonna take the business to the next level?

This will save you so much money over time 'cause you're vetting them upfront. I can't tell you how many of these candidates guys some of them didn't ask questions or they just did the work. Some of 'em waited until the last minute to get things done. And we're able to use this information to say well, I don't want someone who's scrambling last minute.

I want someone who's asking question the right questions. Not just questions but the right questions. I want someone who's actually gonna output really good quality, but maybe we could train them up in certain areas. The girl that we hired wasn't the best at design, but I was willing to. Let that go because there was other parts of what she did that I love, but then one of the other candidates was really great at design but lacked this other area.

So like everybody lacked in different areas. But I had to decide as a founder of what am I willing to train? How receptive are they to training? How much of a culture fit they are they for our company? I. So on and so forth. So if you have any questions about this, like I said, if you want help mapping this out, I'll link that strategy call below for you guys.

If you have any cues about some of the details or if you wanna share like what you wish I would've expanded more on and maybe a solo episode come over on Instagram at Magnetic Profits or email our team support@magneticprofits.com. If you love this episode and you wanna hear more of me actually breaking down costs and breaking down my process.

Let me know because seriously it will shape the way this podcast is being done. I'm so excited. I'm hoping next week my will be 100% myself and not sick and feel stuffy 'cause I feel really stuff stuffy right now. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know if you have any cues. Other than that, I'm out. I'm excited for you guys and let me know how it goes.