We know there’s a lot of work that goes into managing a short-term rental, and if we’re trying to do it all of ourselves, well, we’re gonna get a little bit exhausted, we’re gonna get frustrated sometimes, we’re really gonna prevent ourselves from scaling.

And so what is the natural progression?

That is to hire people to help us out.

So my team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests across multiple, multiple states, and we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve also hired a lot of people.

And so this week, I wanted to give you some of my favorite questions that we ask anyone that joins our team.

This might be really helpful for you out there.

If you’re looking to hire maybe your first virtual assistant.

So stay tuned.

Let’s jump right in.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the show, I’m really glad that you’re here again.

Today we’re talking about something I think is really exciting because it’s the power to build a team and to build something bigger than we can individually, right?

And with our short term rentals, it definitely helps to have a team.

And so one of the first team members that someone might hire is a virtual receptionist, or someone to help you, a virtual assistant, to help you with so many tasks.

We’ve talked about them a lot on this show before, and this week, I wanted to break down some of the questions that we ask our potential candidates.

So we’re in the hiring mode again, and if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you know that our team works all over the world, really.

So we have people in Mexico, in Europe, in the Philippines, and then, of course, in the US as well.

And I’m down here in Brazil at the moment, although that’s only about half the year.

I’ll be back in Colombia soon enough.

So just a few notes on hiring.

The first thing is, when we get a resume from someone, what is a resume?

A resume is basically a list of the best achievements that that person has made in their whole career, excluding all of their biggest failures and challenges and blemishes.

It’s just the best image of them that they could think of, right?

Because they created it themselves.

So a resume doesn’t really help us much, but questions can help us a lot.

If we’re asking the right questions, that is, and as long as we’re giving them the opportunity to explain and talk, and we get to know them, right?

That’s really how we can uncover if someone could be a good fit.

Now, there’s lots and lots of resources out there on hiring.

You can obviously have your candidates take personality tests, which I really recommend.

The DISC, that’s a very common one.

But we can save personality tests for another episode.

We’re just going to jump into some of these interview questions.

I think I’ve got 13, around 13 for you today.

And the first thing is when you’re doing an interview, a live interview, especially if you’re hiring someone that’s from another country, maybe English isn’t their first language, well, sometimes they’re nervous, right?

Everyone gets nervous.

And the same goes for virtual interviews.

So just remember that.

And you kind of want to break the ice, right?

And ask some questions that aren’t so harsh.

And I do have some, not harsh questions, but some deep diving questions that you’re going to like, that I’ll share here in a second.

So I like to ask just some basic questions like, hey, what do you do for fun?

Or, hey, I noticed that you’re in Albania, or you are in the Philippines.

And then I ask them about where they actually live.

And I’ve traveled a ton, over 80 countries now, I think, and a lot of them I’ve gone back to.

That’s kind of how I got back into short term rentals.

So if you’re new to the channel, I still stay in a whole lot of short term rentals.

But I always kind of start with that because I have that in common.

I can say, oh, yeah, most of the time I’ve been to these places, and it’s kind of fun to bring up those memories.

So I always like to start off easy so that they’re feeling comfortable.

And then I start to get into the questions.

So mind you, we don’t get to the interview stage until we’ve already asked a lot of questions via email.

And we even ask our candidates to send us a video before we get to the live interview.

And the video allows us to really see their English level.

Again, this is if you’re hiring someone that’s in a foreign country where English isn’t their first language.

But I know a lot of you are out there.

So I like to start off just with the background.

Can you tell me again about your work background?

And I know that you already answered a lot of these questions in our emails.

Luckily, we have some really great people on our team now that are doing a lot of the filtering out before I get to the interview.

But I still am interviewing everyone that joins our team.

And I do find it exciting.

We do about like three or four series of emails to see if people can follow directions, to see how serious they are about the position.

So that weeds out a lot of people.

And then there’s some other basic generic questions.

I don’t really like to ask these basic generic ones, but I’m just going to put them in here.

We’ll start off and then we’ll get into some of the juicy questions here in a second.

So what qualities make you a team player?

So we have our core values laid out on our job postings all the time.

If you’ve never thought about your core values or maybe you’re just getting started and you just have one property, it’s important to think about these things.

So these could be things like honesty, really big for us, accountability, really big for us, and teamwork, really big for us as well.

These are this is a team team sport here with short term rentals.

So we also have continuous improvement.

And our last core value, our fifth core value is positive guest experience.

Always, because if our guests don’t have a positive experience, you know what happens?

They don’t leave positive reviews.

And you know what that does to your short term rental?

It really hurts your revenue.

So those are our core values.

Maybe think that through.

If this is your first time hiring someone, what’s really important to you?

And you know, there’s a lot of discussion out there.

Do we hire someone based off the experience they have, or do we hire them based off their values?

And that’s a tough one.

I would say a lot of the things we do in the short-term rental world are much more procedural, right?

So most people can learn them without too much challenge.

So you may want to look at the core values, but that’s up for debate.

So okay, what qualities make a team player?

What do you look for in an employer?

So these are pretty basic questions you’ve heard.

Another really generic question you’re going to hear, tell me about when you had a problem and how you handled it, right?

These are questions that people pretty much prepare for before an interview because they know they get asked all the time.

So let’s get into some more important questions and dig a little bit deeper.

First of all, you’re hiring someone virtually.

You want to ask about their experience working virtually.

What experience do you have working virtually?

How long have you worked virtually?

Do you have distractions at home?

Do you have family members?

You can ask these things, right?

How was their communication at their last position where they worked virtually?

Just keep digging and remember to give them some time to respond, right?

A lot of times we find ourselves, if we see that the other person’s maybe a little uncomfortable, they don’t know quite how to respond or they’re not quite prepared, then we sort of just answer for them or we keep talking.

But you don’t want to do that in an interview.

You want to give them the chance to tell you what’s on their mind.

Here’s another good one.

What benefit of remote work do you value the most?

So a lot of times we hear, well, I don’t have to commute anymore.

And yeah, that’s a great one.

That’s why so many people are working remote now.

Let them explain to you, and this will also get them a little more excited about the position as you go on.

Here’s a good one.

What would your last boss or manager say about you?

Remember to leave that silence in there.

Another good one you’ll want to ask, especially hiring virtually, what tools are you familiar with?

What tools have you used before?

If someone does have short-term rental experience, well, you want to ask them, have you used Price Labs?

Have you used property management programs?

Are you familiar with Airbnb?

I mean, all these things, hopefully, you got out of the way before you even get to the interview.

But give them a chance to let them tell you what tools they’ve used over their career.

If this is a virtual position, then they have to be a little techie, right?

Because everything’s happening online.

Remember to keep digging.

So if they talk about one tool, ask them what their favorite feature was about it.

Ask them if it helped improve their efficiency.

If so, in what way?

Okay, so we want to know about their work background.

We want to know what they’re looking for in this virtual position.

We want to know about the tools.

We want to know about challenges they’ve had.

Here’s another question that probably doesn’t get asked very often.

It’s asking them, who is the most ambitious or driven person you know?

So this isn’t one that’s very common, and they’re going to have to think about it, unless they’re tuning in to this podcast, which we do have people tuning in, and gosh, I don’t know the exact number anymore, but I want to say like over 80 countries.

So thank you for all of you tuning in.

And if you haven’t left us a review yet, well, I would really appreciate that.

It is amazing getting the feedback, and I always love hearing from you.

I read every email, so go to strriches.com, submit a request for a topic, or just let us know what you think, and I will read it, I promise.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know that I’ve been managing my properties virtually for years and years.

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

We’ve learned a ton, and I’m really happy with the progress and the growth we’ve made.

In fact, we’re now big enough to help manage your properties as well.

Our team has a ton of experience from the inner city apartment to the large lakeside retreat.

We’ve worked with all types of properties across the nation.

We’ll help to take the management workload off your plate while earning top revenue and excellent guest reviews, all while charging an industry low fee.

If you’d like to find out if your property fits with our program, just head to strriches.com.

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

Just click on the property management button, and we look forward to chatting with you soon.

Here’s another question.

When was your last passionate debate?

Who was it with?

And what was it about?

How did it turn out?

So we want to pause after all these questions, but this is one that really they’re going to have to think about, and they’re going to pull something up.

It might not be good what they pull up, but hopefully it allows you to uncover just a little bit more kind of what they value and the type of person that they are.

Here’s another one, and this one I haven’t heard very often at all, and this one’s a little harsh, but why shouldn’t I hire you?

What are your biggest weaknesses?

So we hear that one all the time, and someone will turn a weakness into a positive, like I always show up too early.

So yes, we hear that one all the time, but why shouldn’t I hire you?

That’s a pretty good one.

Give it a try if you’re out there looking to bring on a new team member.

Another one that I really like, what motivates you the most?

So I think most people when they respond, they know not to say things like, oh, I’m really motivated to make more and more money or things like that.

And they sort of search for something that’s going to help fulfill the company.

You would hope, believe me, it’s not always that way.

But hopefully, there’s something there that is a little bit outside of money.

Obviously, we all need to make money.

That’s why we get a job.

But maybe someone’s interested in investing in real estate, or maybe someone that loves to travel and they’d love to host guests.

If there’s some sort of underlying attributes to your job or your position or the way you posted it that really has them excited, well, it’s going to be a lot easier to keep them excited and sort of keep that momentum going as you bring them on to your team.

Another question I like to ask, and this one gets asked all the time, but it’s a good one, is tell me where you see yourself in three years.

And sometimes you’ll see people say, you know, well, I plan to become a doctor and have something that has nothing to do with the actual job that we’re posting.

So we know that not everyone maybe wants to stay a guest receptionist or wants to work on support tickets or something like that.

But a good answer is still going to incorporate your business, right?

You know, maybe they say, I want to start an entry level position, but I want to move up.

I want to have people working underneath me.

I want to be part of a company or working with an owner that has plans to grow their portfolio.

Everyone likes to have a sense of direction, right?

So you need to be able to provide that for them, what your future plans are, and hopefully the two of yours match up at least a little bit.

The last one here is also a good one.

It’s just, what questions do you have for me?

And so if you’ve had a series of email questions going back and forth, sometimes people don’t always have a question.

It depends on how good your job posting was, but usually it’s nice for them to have something, right?

It shows that they care.

So that’s it.

That wasn’t in any particular order, and those were some generic questions, but I guarantee there’s some in there that you haven’t asked before.

And if you haven’t hired your first assistant or your first team member to help you with your short term rental or your short term rentals, I highly suggest it.

Luckily, we live in a world that’s super virtual these days.

We can do things from thousands of miles away.

All we need is a good internet connection.

And so if you’re right on the fence, I hope you take the leap, and I hope these questions and I hope our podcast and all of our prior episodes, we’ve talked about this before, including places where you can post your position.

We’ve talked about those in prior episodes.

You can check them all out at strriches.com.

And we also have a really cool tool now that you can use for free on strriches.com that will help you find all these episodes without having to search them.

It’s actually a clone of myself.

I know that sounds crazy, but we’ve been producing content for years and years, tons and tons of hours, and we’re also on YouTube video if you’re listening to the audio version.

And sometimes it’s hard to remember exactly when we talked about a certain thing, but we’ve talked about most things now.

I forget the episode numbers too.

And so this is a way just to go back and really ask it anything.

You can ask it what bed mattress we like to use in our properties.

You can ask it if you should work with an independent housekeeper or a housekeeping company.

Really, sky’s the limit.

It’s trained on all of the content that we’ve produced for years and years.

And it’s got a good sense of humor too.

So go to strriches.com.

Check it out.

There’s a little bot button in the bottom right.

I think you’ll like it.

Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, well, then you know that I love technology, and we can save a ton of time implementing AI, artificial intelligence, in the right ways.

My team and I have been playing around with this for months, and we’ve written the perfect prompts that you can just plug in to your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT to help you uncover exactly who your guest avatar is, help you write your listing descriptions, help you write your photo captions, and so much more.

It’s a living, breathing document that we’re consistently working on, and I’d love to give it to you for free for being one of our loyal listeners.

You can head over to restmethods.com forward slash AI and get your copy for free.

I hope it helps you along your short-term rental journey.