Here’s the transcript from Bill Hammond’s presentation:
Ryan: So now I’d like to turn it back over to Bill who’s going to teach us about some things we should think about before we start hiring or put the wanted ads out there, How to make sure that we’re asking the right questions when we get a candidate in for an interview and how to make sure that we’re getting the best possible team for our businesses. So Bill, you’re in charge now.
Bill: OK, that means I have share screen. Here we go.
Bill: Let’s see where am I at here? Where’d it go? No, there it is OK.
Bill: OK, before we get started what I’m going to talk about is going to cover whether this is the first time you’ve ever started to hire or whether this is the 10,001 time.
Bill: So it’s what I put together is the hiring process on this checklist, and I’ve had a checklist like this for years and I’ve tried, I updated it a little bit. I also put it on the chat. You’ll find a copy of it in the chat file.
Bill: The on boarding process, which is longer, matter fact that’s 5 pages. There’s some crossover between the two. So you can, you’re more than welcome to download both of them and work, you know work with them for yourselves whatever and ask and call me up and I can help you with them.
Bill: The reason why you want to have a checklist or a process, when you’re out there, you know there’s a lot of things that you can run afoul of as a small business owner and give you one that’ll kind of, I don’t know if any of you have ever heard of disparate impact, which is part of the EEOC issue.
Bill: Just recently, matter of fact last week, The House of Representatives, it’s not a law, yet they passed what is called Protect the Older Job Applicant Act of 2021.
Bill: What this does is allows applicants to file a lawsuit under the older Worker Protection Act. And actually, you say, hey, you had 200 applications. And out of all of those, you only talked to people that were ages 20 to 25 or 25 to 30. That’s all you did. You left out everybody who was 30 and older, whether as a result of that then you they could then get the EEOC to react. Or else they can take and file a lawsuit.
Bill: That’s, it’s a process. Those are the things you can run into if you don’t have a process that will keep you on track. And that’s what I’ve created over the years.
Bill: So the first thing to start out is to do just really and the other goal of this hiring process is to get your applicants engaged from the very beginning. They’re wanting to talk to you and ultimately you get down to the point where as, your employees are all engaged at this point.
Bill: They’re ready to go. You’ve given him the information you’ve kind of put the hook in. They’re ready to become productive and hopefully long-term employees because recruiting is expensive, the average cost of recruiting a new employee is, in this country right now, runs around $15,000. Plus, that’s an average.
Bill: The low end is a little less, you know when you’re talking about maybe the hamburger flipper, but at the high end where you’re talking about technical professional executive positions, you know that 15,000 dollars will balloon to 50, $75,000 depending upon what has to be. Another thing that you want to keep in mind before I get into this is a nice little tip.
Bill: If you can, cross train employees as much as you can, so that when somebody does leave, at least you’ve got somebody that can do the job. Maybe not as productively or as efficiently, but they can do the job. Things can keep rolling.
Bill: And you may, you know, you’re just going to have extra costs built into that because as I said, someone else doing that job that only does it maybe a couple hours a day to help the cross-training process is not going to be as efficient nor as productive as somebody who does it all day, you know, 8 hours a day.
Bill: So with that said, let’s take a look real quick look at how I’ve built the hiring process in my checklist and just remember, this checklist isn’t necessarily aimed at small businesses. You can modify it, but it’s kind of, it’s kind of across the board, so it fits all businesses, all sizes.
Bill: I actually put it together when I was, you know, in the corporate world and I’ve kind of like I said, kind of modified it over the past couple of weeks when it when Ryan asked me to talk about. The first thing a hiring manager, owner, whatever is going to notify human resources, whoever is going to be in charge of the process that there’s a vacant position. And mostly in small businesses you’re going to know it anyway.
Bill: The next step down is going to be, that’s really what I think the first thing is you’re going to have to look at the budget and see and confirm that everything is in the budget, ready for that vacant position.
Bill: You’re not going to hire somebody without knowing what are going to be the costs.
Bill: Claire, did you raise your hand?
Clair: I did. Which checklist are we looking at first?
Bill: Didn’t it share? It should be checklist hiring process.
Clair: Uh, I just see a file folder.
Ryan: Yeah, Bill, we’re looking at your File Explorer window. Did you mean to have a document open?
Bill: Yes, I thought it would pop right in there, let me go back and do it.
Bill: Let me see what happens here.
Ryan: ’cause I see that you put it in the chat, but right now all we’re looking at is your computer screen.
Bill: Yep, and I guess I’ve got to put this thing into the computer screen.
Ryan: When you click share screen, which option did you select?
Bill: Oh, I just selected the, let me go, let me stop the share and go back in. And let me get the, let me do this first. Hopefully that should do it. Ah, there it is.
Bill: Now that you should see it.
Bill: OK, thank you Claire.
Bill: I didn’t realize it didn’t click in there.
Bill: OK, hiring manager. I’ve got to the vacant position and confirmed the budget.
Bill: I mean, it’s you know small business, it’s pretty easy to confirm the budget, but the local employees you have, the more you want to make sure you’ve got everything ready to go for that vacant position.
Bill: Requisition form – a lot of companies want that, whether they’re small, medium size, or large, at least there’s something written down and given to human resources at that time.
Bill: The next thing down there is you gotta sit down with the owner, the hiring manager, whatever, and the most important thing is to do a job description. If you don’t have a job description, you’re really going to have a hard time establishing compensation for the position and justifying it.
Bill: You’re really going to have a hard time justifying how you classify the wage and hour issues such as non-exempt or exempt. And you want to make sure you’ve got the job skills, education level, all those things you need to have in a job description that are going to help you place that position.
Bill: And pay that position correctly and properly and also it helps out if there’s any questions you’ve got it all written down. Larger companies will post the position internally and then they’ll also move it to external.
Bill: Candidates, this is where kind of like, to Clair’s issue, you know, knowing the community. But even if you don’t know the community, ’cause I’ve done some remote recruiting to where we filled positions in California that I had responsibility for, and basically, I just had to know what was available in the community for like the positions I was looking for.
Bill: First of all would be the Employment Office for the state. Next might be any of the schools, high schools, career schools, vocational schools, Uhm 2-year programs like Ivy Tech here in Indiana and then you know, college programs or collegiate schools, especially, career planning offices, became pretty good for me in looking for some positions, and then you just know the newspapers and areas where you can put your advertising.
Bill: To kind of help start. Now with social media, Facebook, sometimes the Chamber of Commerce that you might belong to, they have sites where you can hang up your job posting announcements.
Bill: There’s all different sorts of things being done now in social media that in my time in the world of recruiting that didn’t have access to and you may also just decide you want to outsource that to a staffing agency.
Bill: You may want to pay a staffing agency to supply you with employees. You also can contact the Employment Office for the state wherever you’re at, and they will, they’ll do all of this work, put ads in the paper, stuff like this.
Bill: You’ll be surprised what they will do, they’ve really upgraded the programs over the years.
Bill: Then, once you’ve got that, you’re gonna have to make sure you have an appropriate application form.
Bill: Most small businesses go to Staples or Office Depot and just buy a pack of Employment applications. That’s fine, but also make sure that, and here in Indiana it’s not too bad but make sure that there’s not basically illegal questions on that application, so if you’re in the, let’s say if you’re in like, recruiting up in Chicago.
Bill: One of the things you can’t do up there is, you cannot ask on your application about any felony, either charges or convictions and you also cannot ask about past employment history regarding what they were paid.
Bill: You can ask them how they long they were at this place and you can ask them what place it was at where they worked and described their job. But you cannot ask about what they were paid. That cannot be part of your evaluation.
Bill: Now that’s varies from location to location. There is no federal law that says you cannot ask about salary history, but you must be aware of state and local laws.
Bill: You’re also going to get the applicants to sign some sort of background check authorization, at least a preliminary 1. And you’re also going to have some voluntary EEO forms if you’re a larger operation and could fall into that where you’re going to ask about ethnicity of the applicant.
Bill: So that you can kind of, you may need that data sometime in the future.
Bill: Once you’ve got applications coming in, they’re going to be kind of looked through, sorted. You’re going to have some keywords you’re going to look for where they’re on the application or resume, and whoever is in charge of the locating applicants with human resources or somebody who’s designated as the human resources person is going to start to call and phone and use a checklist to ask questions, get some preliminary, and I use it a lot of time, to say to make it clear, this is the compensation range for this position, are you still interested?
Bill: And you’d be surprised how many people would say well, no, I don’t want to, I’m not interested at that range, but can you? Is there more? A lot of times it was the answer No, that’s the range that we are paying for this job to start.
Bill: And if they’re not willing to accept that, we go on, they’re off the list. It’s one of my, that’s one of my better knockout questions.
Bill: In person interviews, again you’re going to go back using your notes that you had from the telephone conversations with the applicant, you’re going to keep all these, this information. We’ll go back over it again, review the application, it’s all a lot of what I like to put in quotes “Dirty work”, at that point you’re just verifying everything, verifying the person’s interested, they’re willing to accept the job as it’s structured to pay, everything that you’ve given them in the first process.
Bill: Again, it’s kind of coming around to who else are you going to bring in in the second round of interviews, or who are you going to have the hiring manager talk to, you know, to proceed down to where you eliminate, ultimately, applicants and get your selected candidates for the job. The top candidate completely.
Bill: And you’re answering all of our questions at that time to. For human resources, switching back to what I would do, not only are my notes important that are put in the file for that and attached to that application, but also the hiring managers notes, anybody else the hiring manager has or wants to have this person talk to or even if you do a panel interview, where you may have anywhere from 3 to 7 at the most, never going beyond seven.
Bill: I’ve been in ones larger than that. God, I hope your deodorant is good, ’cause it really gets to be, you know, notorious at that point.
Bill: But you also have that checklist and all those people in that panel interview basically have to follow a process so they don’t ask questions that they should not ask, like, Oh, I see here your, you have a couple of kids? Or, do you have daycare or childcare for them? You can’t ask that question.
Bill: Or do they go to school? You know a lot of different things that some used to ask. Long, long time ago you could do that, but you cannot do that today. You have to kind of use a back door question to get the answer to that or get some indicator.
Bill: All of those interview questions, all that process is captured by human resources, the business, and it has to be maintained with that with all those applications of people you talk with ’cause believe you me, sometime down the road somebody is going to get their nose out of joint and they’re going to go to some agency and that third party agency is going to now be knocking on your door and looking at what you did.
Bill: Or you’re going to have a summons into court.
Bill: The next thing you’re going to do in this process is the top candidate is going to, you’re going to do a now, a more complete background check. You’re going to find out everything you can. I’ll give you an example, in my career I did one, it was pretty standard.
Bill: This was a guy we were looking at hiring for our plant engineer. Had some impeccable resume in that and I will going through and checking his references, checking the dates. And one of his references I just asked the question, I just wanted to verify that that he went to school while he was employed at this business.
Bill: And as we talked, all of a sudden red flags started popping because the employer was saying, What school? What training? You know he couldn’t verify the training. And so I ended up calling the university to where he said he went to school, talking with the registrar’s office, fax them down a copy of the certificate or actually the diploma for a Bachelors, the Bachelor of Science, BS and Engineering.
Bill: And when they got it, they got back to me two days later and told me it was a fraud.
Bill: There was a doggone good copy. But it was a fraud. They recognized right away.
Bill: So as a result, I withdrew, Well, the job offer was out there, I withdrew it. And told him why, when I told him that the university confirmed that his diploma that he had given us, as you know, in the file, in the record was a fraud, there was a lot of silence at the other end of the phone.
Bill: What he had done was he had gone to some continuing education courses, got a certificate and turned that into a diploma. Nice photoshopping.
Bill: Uhm, so it’s important to do and check the background. Uhm, I worked for one company with certain positions, we had to have a private investigator check the backgrounds before they were hired.
Bill: Then you go down again, the next step is you discuss everything you agree on the job specifics for the candidate. This time you’re only just talking with your internal hiring manager, making sure every, everything that is going to be put in the job offer is understood by all parties and meets company policy that the hiring manager nor anyone else said anything out of turn.
Bill: You make sure everything is as it should be and you’re and then I get ready to call the candidate and I will call them and give a verbal offer. And if they accept that verbal offer, then I follow it up with a formal written offer.
Bill: And then the candidate, at that point, you know ultimately says yes or no, and everything is then started for them to come in.
Bill: And once he accepts it, then of course I send a letter to any other candidates we talked to saying we filled the position and basically try to say thank you for you know talking with us and, you know, good luck with the other opportunities you may have.
Bill: And then finally, that’s the other thing that’s on the in the chat, the onboarding process, which I’m not going to go through, that’s 5 pages long. It can be shorter, it can be longer, but that’s what I used was five, those 5 pages.
Bill: Came off of a policy procedure I had and I took the name of the company off to protect the guilty parties.
Bill: Uhm, but that onboarding schedule is set up. Day they report to work, what they need to bring with them. Uhm, everything is kind of all prepared and I get a checklist all prepared for that candidate to come in that that onboarding process so we make sure we have all the papers.
Bill: Uhm, everything gets completed and it may take, the first day may all be just doing paperwork, policies and procedures. Depends upon the job. And the other parts of the on boarding procedure may take another day where we will just basically coordinate a tour, depending upon how large the facility is, I mean, everybodys got to know where to go to the bathroom on the 1st day and so forth so.
Bill: You’re pointing that out and show them where their desk is, where their parking space is, if that’s necessary, things of this sort, we’re all doing that as well as getting all of these forms – I9s, benefits, federal, and state tax forms, anything you can just about think of that has to be prepared and set up for the employee to fill out.
Bill: Uh, and today, a lot of this stuff is not is not done by paper. A lot of it is electronic sometimes.
Bill: Uhm, you may have that set up with your payroll company, you may have something where you have a, already an HR system that has all this in there and there’s an employee sign-up part which takes care of everything electronically, including you know all the benefits, everything they make their choices online. And some companies have them set up to send the employee alerts, so that the hey, the date for where you have to turn this in is coming up. It’s needed by this date.
Bill: ‘Cause you be surprised, a lot of employees won’t know their spouses Social Security number, their kids information, birth dates included. And so that’s all done by on the computer and just turn it over.
Bill: That’s how fancy some of these systems were getting in my day. I basically just had to have a little written tickler file and myself say oh, gotta contact this employee today and get their kids birth dates on the health plan.
Bill: And then you know, walk over to where they were working at and get that information, they’ll get him on the phone if they were a salesperson or I’m working remotely. And tell them let’s get the information and I would be filling it in.
Bill: And then the last thing that is done in the hiring process, just about every state in the Union has a new hire reporting system that used to be by paper. I would have a form for the state of Indiana would have to fill it out by hand. And then I could either fax it in or would mail it in.
Bill: Now they all have it on their websites and you can just go in there and you put the employees name in and the appropriate information, the date they started work.
Bill: It’s somewhat that the state wants to be, you know, nosey, but they also want to check to see if that employee was drawing unemployment compensation. So they’re going to balance it against that if there’s any other aid they were getting from any state or local agency they’ll have that information to turn off that aid, or to reduce it.
Bill: You’d be surprised with all the things that the state agency will, the state will do to stick down through what you supply that you’ve hired this individual, and if you are actually hiring a lot of people, it can be a lot of work.
Bill: You usually will, I usually do a, turn it over to my assistant, who would go in there and, you know, take all of the information and just make sure it was all done ‘cause sometimes we were sending in, well, during seasonal hiring, we might be sending in 50 to 100 notices either through fax or by paper at that time, but electronically the same thing.
Bill: So somebody – it took time to fill it all out and get it done.
Bill: But that’s the process, it’s really, I just went through it you know, kind of, just throw it out there and saying, there it is.
Bill: Any questions about all the fun and games as far as bringing on a new employee?
Ryan: Yeah Bill, I have a question for you.
Ryan: What app or service would you recommend for conducting a background check?
Bill: There used, I personally, I like the place, they’re out in Danville. Safe Hiring Solutions. I had used him or used that company a few times out there. And they were a vendor and I would just turn over the information. You know, what he needed. This guy was a former state trooper and had a, he knew how to go through the system and find the information you know, court orders, court – you know, and then he just basically provided me with the report and it was up to me at that time in the larger corporation you know to decide whether we’re going to hire that person based on his recommendation or his report.
Bill: Because he never said one way or the other unless he found something that was a felony that was quite serious and it did happen a couple of times. But that’s who I used was out in Danville. It was called Safe Hiring Solutions.
Bill: But there’s a bunch of others around. There’s private investigators you can use. You can, and like I said, I did some background checking myself.
Bill: The other thing is when you use a third party, please remember you have to comply with the Fair Credit reporting agency rules. And they’re rather specific and using any agency, that vendor that you use to check employee background will know these rules and will give them to you and make sure that everybody is compliant.
Bill: And you do have to give some information to the applicant that you’re doing this.
Bill: Yeah, Claire. I see your hand up.
Claire: I do.
Claire : I have I have a couple questions and some that you might not know but what is the best way to find employees, in your opinion, as you can understand the market is very competitive right now. I think everyone is hiring, I know I’m looking for more high school kids and fresh out of high school kids. So what websites are, do you suggest?
Bill: Well, kids are always on social media. Probably the best one they have is Instagram and I don’t know too much about it. But I’d also put it on Facebook and probably use Twitter, I’m sure Ryan could tell you a little bit more about Instagram than I know. That would be one thing on social media.
Bill: The next would be, if Rose City Bowl belongs to the Newcastle Chamber, you might get the name of the director of the Newcastle Chamber and he could give you the name of say, the guidance counselors at the high school. Uhm, and also I don’t know if Newcastle have a vocational school up there.
Claire: I don’t know.
Bill: But they’ll be able to tell you that too. I’m sure, I know they have an Ivy Tech school and that’s the other place I would go to. And just, you know, have them put it on their job board, whether it’s electronic, someone will say, here give you access. They’ll give you a password or passcode to get into their job board, and you can place your own position.
Bill: The high school probably won’t do that. And if you’re hiring kids that are under age 17, the child Labor law changed in Indiana, where now in Indiana you don’t, the school doesn’t have to issue a work permit.
Bill: Indiana now issues 1 electronically and you go through this system, so you’ll have to take a look at what the Indiana Department of Labor has set up for hiring youth. It’s a whole new system.
Bill: It used to be you just called the administration office out for the school system. And let them know you were going to hire a high school kid and the high school kid had to go there and pick up a work permit and bring it back to you, but it’s done differently now.
Bill: High schools have been taken out of the loop.
Bill: They want to deal with this State Department, Department of Labor.
Claire : OK, uh, my next question you might not know. Because it’s the step after hiring up. Here they are still writing paper scheduling and I am needing an electronic online scheduling system and I, what do you know anything about those? What the most effective is?
Bill: I don’t know what’s the most effective is, but let me ask a question.
Bill: Does Rose City Bowl use a payroll vendor?
Claire: I’d have to ask how he does payroll, but everything is written down in paper and pencil.
Bill: OK, probably he does his own payroll or has a CPA do it, which would be kind of what I, what it sounds like. If he doesn’t, if you’re using somebody like ADP or Paychex or some of the smaller ones like ASAP Payroll Services here in Indianapolis.
Bill: They may have a system that will help you with some of the scheduling, or may have something that’s available. I’d have to do a little work to find out what kind of scheduling systems are out there that might fit you. Uhm, probably what I’d start off with is just using Google and start building a calendar from that.
Bill: That you know, put your kids names, put the employees names in it and step, get their, get it that way electronically and then you can always migrate it over to something else.
Jeannette: You might also call a couple of bowling alleys here in Indianapolis that are bigger and find out what system they use.
Bill: Yeah, there you go. Any bowling alley that’s far enough away that they don’t feel your competition might be willing to give you that information. I’d even call down towards Cincinnati. And see what they use to schedule their employees.
Claire: Well, I’ve been on the scheduling side of the world, but I have not, I don’t know the back end, so I’ve tried a couple of like free two-week trials and there’s ways to calculate revenue versus labor and all that kind of stuff and, this is new for me, so sorry.
Bill: Yeah, a lot, which you know you’re scheduling mostly would just be by shifts. You know, you hire, you know how whatever your shifts are that you’re working, you know the bowling alley is open. You’re just going to be filling in the hours and how many employees do you need in different areas of the, you know, like you know employees, you need to have to run the bowling alley and well, those you need to have keep track of the arcades.
Claire: That’s all my questions.
Bill: Yeah, well, that’s what I would, Jeanette’s answer. That’s a good thing to go to that you may also try the Chamber and ask them. They may, they may know somebody they may know, uh, they may have somebody who’s already in the chamber that does, you know helps with electronic scheduling systems.
Bill: But I’m trying to think. I’d also ask Ivy Tech. They have a, they should have an entrepreneur type class there for program, accounting for sure and somebody there even one of the professors might be somebody who could help you set up something, whether it’s yours to just fit Rose City Bowl, or whether they say, hey, there’s, here’s what, here’s what I recommend.
Ryan: Hey Claire, depending on if they’re using QuickBooks already out there, Intuit has a scheduling portal and I assume by how the way their software is normally priced, it would be an add on component, but it does reference on the page that scheduling is one of the features they have.
Ryan: It’s also a time clock, so it would connect directly into payroll a little smoother than trying to hop from manual time clock to entering payroll and Jeanette please back me up on this if you’re familiar with that feature.
Jeannette: Yeah, I’ve not done any scheduling, but I do know, for kind, for my contractors, they can actually use their build, their payroll time to flow into invoices. So there are lots of things that that system will do and if I’ve not said I’ve not used the scheduling portion of that. But if that’s there, that’s it, and your boss wants to use QuickBooks to do payroll, that makes it very seamless.
Bill: And if he does have CPA, if he does have somebody who’s doing the payroll, they may have a system they like and it may, that may have that module.
Bill: Hey Ryan, doesn’t Keith use Square at Books and Brews?
Ryan: He does, yes his entire –
Bill: And I believe that also has a scheduling module in it. Because it also keeps track of this, Keith told me one day payroll does all the – when they take an order, it gets it back to the kitchen, that this functionality to Square that needs to be looked at.
Ryan: But Bill at the same time Square still back-end plugs into QuickBooks ’cause Squares more of the business sales and getting the product out the door versus QuickBooks, which is your back office. Making sure you’re making money rather than losing it, and that you’re fairly paying everyone.
Ryan: I think Square might still just hook right into-
Bill: It might be, but that may be the other thing to look at too, is Square, and I didn’t really think about QuickBooks. There’s another one out there you can look at Peachtree if you want to do that one. That’s another out there.
Bill: What I would do also, since I belong to, you know SCORE is available to you.
Bill: Go on indianapolis.score.org.
Bill: And put up, when the website comes up, go up into the query bar and just write in their scheduling systems. Employee scheduling systems and just see what the SCORE system will throw at you.
Bill: I mean the government archives everything, and there’s probably, there’s got to be something in there that’ll show you, give you some idea of scheduling systems that are out there.
Bill: I hadn’t thought about that until just now. But yeah, that’s how, what I would do is go into SCORE and just put in there, employee scheduling systems. And see what it gives you.
Bill: Play around with that phrase and until the system gives you something.
Jeannette: OK, my turn, I have a tax client who wants to come work for me. Uhm, I’m not sure, I’m not sure I want her to come work for me. She is African, literally she’s, I don’t know how long she’s been in the country.
Jeannetter: Uhm, she’s got a couple of children, which seems to be an issue with daycare. She would have to go through the same tax classes that I did, and I’m in a position I don’t want to pay for that for her because it’s nearly $2000 for that class. And then with my license I have to buy a license for her, which is nearly $500 on top of the price of the program, my program is only set up for one person.
Bill: Yep, Yep, so I see.
Jeannette: I just and with these mandates that the government is putting out and I know I’m under 100, but what’s to stop them from going after smaller companies and making these mandates? And I’m just how do I let her down easily telling her I’m not going to hire her?
Bill: Well, the first thing would be you just, you know she doesn’t have the requisite education that she’s going to need.
Bill: She’s got to get all those classes before you can, before you can hire her to come to do any taxes at all.
Jeannette : OK.
Bill: And those, she’s going to have to go. You can give her information of where she has to go to get that.
Bill: If she’s interested in doing taxes, it’s the same thing that I have. I don’t have that big of an issue of it with Primerica, but when I recruit somebody to come on my team for Primerica. One of the first things I’m going to tell them is, you know, even though the company helps them out getting the licenses, there are at least, there’s three minimum tests they’ve got to pass.
Bill: Four, take it back. And if they can’t, if they don’t want to sit down for those or take the classes for them, even though they’re subsidized heavily by Primerica, I’ll tell them, well, find someplace else to work because it’s not going to happen.
Bill: They’re just, it’ll just, we’ll both be spinning our wheels.
Bill: So in your case.
Bill: The gal doesn’t have any, and I don’t care what ethnicity she is, she doesn’t have the preliminary information, knowledge to make it worthwhile for you to take on that responsibility of hiring someone.
Bill: So what I would do is you say, here’s what you need to even come to work for me or anybody else in the tax preparation world.
Bill: You’ve got to have these classes.
Bill: You’ve got to have these certificates, and if you don’t have them, I can’t hire you. I can’t even consider you.
Jeannette: Right, I gave her that information probably two years ago.
Bill: Well, it’s probably updated.
Jeannette : Well, I’ll give the education as well, you have to do it.
Bill: Yeah, she’s gotta come to you, your small business. She’s gotta come to you.
Jeannette: Fully prepared.
Bill: With the skills, if she doesn’t, that’s it. Primerica is so big, I can bring somebody in that doesn’t have the skills, if they’re willing to take the classes and get the skills on a schedule we set up.
Jeannette: Yeah, and then the other thing is I’m concerned that she thinks I’m just going to hand my clients to her and let her collect the full fee and I know that’s what she’s interested in is getting the full fee for herself, and that’s not going to happen either.
Bill: Yeah, but she can’t even do that without having those classes, and if she gets those classes then, then you could decide to say, OK, you want to take over the business? Here’s how much you’re going to have to pay me.
Bill: And because then you’re going to take that money and retire.
Jeannette: That’s right.
Bill: She’s gonna buy your business, and if she doesn’t have that money, it’s a mute question.
Bill: But the big thing is, she doesn’t have even a preliminary education to come with. And that’s all.
Bill: And if you gave it to her two years ago I’d update it and say, I don’t even look, I’m not, you know, somebody has to have this in this education. These certificates, this background, to work for me.
Jeannette: OK, well she’s not afraid to work. She holds three or four part time jobs, but all that being said, that concerns me that she may be overbooking herself.
Bill: Well, that could be, but I wouldn’t hire her even if she had all that stuff, I’d make her an independent contractor.
Jeannette: Well, that was the next question. I don’t want to hire an employee because I don’t want the headache.
Bill: Well you would do it just as, I would set it up as an independent contractor.
Jeannette: Yeah, OK alright, well that that tells me how to let her down easily ’cause I really don’t want, because I I’m-
Bill: And that’s it, education. That’s the easiest thing to use because you can’t even deal with the IRS or any tax stuff without having that education.
Jeannette: Right, and my concern as well would be, does she want to come here and work here with me? If that’s the case, then I’ve got to provide another computer, get another computer.
Bill: Yeah, you got all those responsibilities.
Jeannette: Yeah, and my business is finally doing really well and I’m not ready to share my profits yet. I’ve earned everything I’ve gotten so far.
Bill: And I, that’s perfectly fine, but I would just let her down on the education side. She’s got to go ahead and do all that stuff for you to even consider hiring her.
Bill: Even at making her even making her part, you know, saying, OK, I’m gonna let you do 50% of my business.
Bill: And, but without those, without that information, ’cause you’re liable for whatever she does. Even if you take her on as an independent contractor.
Speaker 2: Yes, and if she does do all of that, she just might as well do it on her own anyway, rather than working for me.
Bill: And do what you did last year when you acquired that other business. And what did you do? Raise the amount of business you had available by 30%.
Jeannette: It was about 30% yeah.
Bill: Yeah, so if she wants to, she wants to get into the tax preparing business. She’s going to have to take the classes, she can go to HR Block, she can go wherever she can go, where places you recommend, but you can’t have her work for you without that background.
Jeannette: OK, all right great. Thank you very much.
Ryan: Awesome, any other questions for Bill? Alright, well let’s give Bill a hand first presentation.
Bill: Thank you, thank you.
