Luis Magalhaes: Welcome, ladies and gentleman to the DistantJob Podcast, a podcast about building and leading remote teams who win. My guest today is Maya Middlemiss. Maya is the CEO of BlockSparks. She’s a freelance writer. She has written a book on recruitment, and co written a book on remote work with Pilar Orti, and the book is called Thinking Remote. It was out this year, if I’m not mistaken.
Maya Middlemiss: Yep.
Luis Magalhaes: And yeah, I actually read that book, so thank you for that.
Maya Middlemiss: Great.
Luis Magalhaes: Thank you for that, Maya. I probably missed some stuff in your bio, so if you would like to please fill us up on that.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah, sure. First of all, thank you very much for having me. Thank you for reading our book, which is always lovely, to hear that people have, as it’s not been out for very long, so that’s great. Yeah, you pretty much got it. I work with Pilar at Virtual Not Distant as an associate. I run BlockSparks which is a small marketing communications agency specializing in blockchain and emerging tech.
Maya Middlemiss: I’m also a freelance writer. My first foray into fiction is going to be published later this month, hopefully.
Luis Magalhaes: Oh. Congratulations.
Maya Middlemiss: So, lots of diverse writing. Yes, thank you very much. That’s a bit of a departure for me, having been writing nonfiction for a very long time. You’ve got to keep mixing things up.
Luis Magalhaes: How are you publishing, if you don’t mind me asking?
Maya Middlemiss: I’m publishing independently, which has been an interesting journey. I’m currently working with an editor and cover art designer, all freelancers, all all over the place, so it’s very much the way I like to work; finding the right people to collaborate with, wherever they are, and bringing that expertise together to hopefully create something new and fun, so that should be interesting.
Luis Magalhaes: Are you doing Amazon print on demand?
Maya Middlemiss: Yes, yes. That’s the way I’ll go. I learned a great deal from working with Pilar on publishing Thinking Remote, so she’d done that before, so just set and think, “Oh, okay. That’s how that happens.”
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. I’m asking because I actually published my first fiction book a couple of years ago, and it was an absolute mess. It did very well for me, but it got me completely … it was such a traumatic experience that, although it did very well, it put me off from writing another book for like four years.
Maya Middlemiss: Oh no! Why was it traumatic?
Luis Magalhaes: Well, it’s because it wasn’t published. Self publishing wasn’t as easy at the time. I had to find the publisher, I had to go on book tours, but you know, the publisher had a lot of books to publish so I had to do all the marketing myself and all of that, and yeah. But the good news is that I’ve published my second novel this year, True Amazon, and it’s so much easier now.
Luis Magalhaes: Like, four years later, it is just so much easier. I think that you’ll enjoy the ride a lot more than I did.
Maya Middlemiss: Oh, that’s really good to hear. Yes, and this reflect what other people have told me, that they’ve really streamlined the process, and merged with create space, and made everything kind of … I know it’s Amazon eating the world, and we shouldn’t necessarily collaborate with that, but it does make life easier. As a reader, as a writer, from every other point of view. Though I will be trying to distribute through other means as well.
Maya Middlemiss: Somebody told me an interesting statistic, recently, on my own podcast, that 90 percent of the world doesn’t have an Amazon account.
Luis Magalhaes: Oh really? Wow.
Maya Middlemiss: Which is an interesting thing to remember. It’s such a first world phenomenon, even lots of parts of Europe don’t have local Amazon inventory, so it’s well worth remembering that, I guess, when we’re writing and trying to reach a global audience.
Luis Magalhaes: That’s true, though I would wonder what percentage of that is English speaking.
Maya Middlemiss: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Luis Magalhaes: Those would be the targets of our books, I assume.
Maya Middlemiss: Absolutely, yes. I don’t have the numbers on that, but it just made me pause and think something we think of as completely ubiquitous still isn’t for a lot of the world, when we’re thinking globally.
Luis Magalhaes: Absolutely, absolutely. I will definitely getting back, because I’m … so, I’m keeping my, from my experience, from the first novel I published like that, without resorting to a publisher, I’m definitely keeping my cover artist. I loved her work, but I need a new editor, so I will want to know how your editor worked out for you.
Maya Middlemiss: Oh, I very gladly recommend the lady I worked with on Readsy. She’s been absolutely fantastic, above and beyond, and I’m working through her edits now, and yeah, really constructive and helpful.
Luis Magalhaes: Nice. I want that contact later if you don’t mind.
Maya Middlemiss: You bet.
Luis Magalhaes: So, that got detoured fast.
Maya Middlemiss: Yes, yes. Well, what are we supposed to be talking about?
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, exactly. I’m interested in starting with blockchain, because I haven’t gotten so far a lot of people talking about blockchain, and in the blockchain industry on the podcast, so what’s the thing that most excites you about the blockchain world? If it’s the same thing, what lead you to start this company?
Maya Middlemiss: Right, well, I came into it from the cryptocurrency angle, as a lot of people do, because obviously my background is as a storyteller. I’m not a developer or a technical person, but I had been writing about apps, and fintech, and social media, and generally geeky stuff for a while, and it was coming up on two years ago, now, actually, that I got my first freelance writing that strayed into the crypto side of things.
Maya Middlemiss: And as with a lot of technical freelance writing, I had to research. I had to educate myself in order to be able to deliver, and that’s fine because it all adds to your picture of the world, but I found myself increasingly fascinated, and I did some more work. It was some ghostwriting investigative journalism around some of the scams in cryptocurrency at the time, and I just found myself getting deeper and deeper into it, and more and more fascinated by what I learned, and it was around the time that the market last had a significant run up, and suddenly there was a lot going on.
Maya Middlemiss: There were a lot of startup sort of launches, so there were a lot of people wanting writing and marketing communication services, so I just found myself going after that, then nicheing down … I wasn’t looking for a new niche, a new passion, at that point in my life. I thought I had a nice balance caught fairly, over interests. I’ve always been interested in the future aspects, like that’s the work with Pilar, on the future of work, and how are technological changes going to have a social impact is what has always been my passion, so how can I explain that to people? How can I try and extrapolate from what I can see on the horizon technologically to how that’s going to effect the way we live, and behave, and relate?
Maya Middlemiss: So that’s always fascinated me, and the more I learned about cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, distributed ledger technology, the more I could see the potential for staggering disruption to so many aspects of life. Not just economically, but just the way that we communicate, and share, and are accountable to one another, and I just got really fascinated by it, and I put the agency together a year or so ago because that at the time when it was the major boom in the market.
Maya Middlemiss: Lots of people were launching, and wanted quite broad marketing communication services, so I partnered with somebody who was an expert in PR, and somebody else who did social media. I’m very good at waffling on for thousands of words, but I needed someone to then distill that to a tweet, and so on, package it for traditional and new media, so it made sense to put together a little team at that point, and we’re still working together. We’re a completely distributed team.
Maya Middlemiss: We’re all Brits, but expatriated throughout Europe, so we collaborate online. We work with clients all over the world because crypto is global. There’s interesting stuff going on everywhere, and so, yes, there’s a couple of us in Spain, but different ends of Spain. One in France, and we’re constituted as an E-registered company in Estonia, and we work with clients all over the place.
Maya Middlemiss: With being in Europe, it’s quite useful. You can have an early meeting or a late meeting and hopefully have some daylight overlap with all of your clients, though we did manage to find a client last month in Hawaii, which is the first time we’ve had a full 12 hour offset.
Luis Magalhaes: Ah, yeah. Yeah. I have a couple of those. That is interesting, indeed. Luckily, I also have teammates in Mexico and Argentina, so that makes it-
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah, you got a little bit more overlap than, you know.
Luis Magalhaes: Exactly, exactly.
Maya Middlemiss: It keeps it interesting.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. So, how do you manage this team? Like, take me through your typical day.
Maya Middlemiss: Oh, a typical day. Well, as a writer, there’s not really any such thing, but we manage our day to day communications in an app called Twist, which we switched over to from the ubiquitous Slack probably about six months ago now.
Luis Magalhaes: I want to know more about that because I’ve actually had the person behind that program on the podcast.
Maya Middlemiss: Okay. Yeah, that’s the guys at Doist.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, exactly, and I promised them I would try it, but hey, guess what? I failed there. I failed there, but-
Maya Middlemiss: So many apps, so little time.
Luis Magalhaes: Exactly.
Maya Middlemiss: And such an opportunity cost with switching.
Luis Magalhaes: Tell me about your experience.
Maya Middlemiss: Sure. Well, the reason that we ended up going down that route was I’ve been a big Todoist user for years. The Todoist app, which I’d used for a long time working on my own. It’s just really simple, straight forward. Not too many bells and whistles. Quite customizable, just chuck anything. It has a ubiquitous capture aux and you can process it; that works for me. I upgraded to Todoist Teams when I started working with the other people at BlockSparks, but there always seemed to be a disconnect between the to dos and the conversation in Slack.
Maya Middlemiss: And there were a number of integrations. There were things you could do in Zapier and so on to do call to dos into Slack and vice versa, but I couldn’t quite get it working exactly the way I wanted. I even went into Upwork and tried to find somebody to dig into the APIs, because I knew what I wanted but I can’t do it once it goes outside of Zapier into API territory I’m like, “Right, I’m out. I need a developer here.”
Maya Middlemiss: So, I called this guy on Upwork to dig into all of their documentation, and he couldn’t quite make it. You know, I just wanted things to send summaries of tasks through and status of projects and things. I was trying to build a project management system out of a Todoist, really, and it was never going to work.
Maya Middlemiss: But I ended up contacting Todoist support at that point and saying, “Look, this is what I’m trying to do. Is this ever going to work?” And of course they came back and said, “Well, you don’t want to be using Slack. We’ve got our own thing.” And I thought, “Okay.” And I had a little look at it, and I think there were two things, and the first was it separates the chitchat from the project chat, so you have kind of more of an instant messenger section, which we basically use in the way that we used our general chat in Slack.
Maya Middlemiss: Just, that’s the day to day, duh duh duh duh duh. Which every online team needs, and then it has a separate section, I mean, Todoist presented us something that you can be very granular about your alerts over, and have it as much more silent, and respond when you’re ready rather than expecting an instantaneous response. Our team is basically three people with a couple of others, occasionally, so we don’t have that volume of noise, so I’ve not tested it under the big team kind of constrictions.
Maya Middlemiss: But I think it would work very well in that way to have a continual threaded conversation about each project, and you can thread within that with sub folders, which is the one thing I’ve been irritating Slack support about for about five years. “When are you going to give us folders?” Because that would’ve been transformative, if we could just have a hierarchy in Slack.
Luis Magalhaes: So, when you say that you have the conversation by projects, I’m immediately reminded of Basecamp. Have you had an experience with Basecamp?
Maya Middlemiss: I have not in my present organization. I have used Basecamp in the past. I mean, we are a team of three mainly, so to be honest-
Luis Magalhaes: It’s overkill.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah, it would just be a sledgehammer to crack a nut for us, I think, Basecamp, at the moment. And I have looked at other things like Microsoft Project and Rightgear. There are things that are out there that are phenomenally built. You could build a skyscraper, or an airline. It’s just not what we need at the moment, and I think those things often have a huge learning curve, and whilst they might be very customizable, and you could take it on and really try and build it around what you want, you’d have to take a month out of your business to do that customizing, and that research.
Maya Middlemiss: Airtable is another one that I keep bumping into.
Luis Magalhaes: Oh. I never tried that. You know, I use Basecamp because that was what the company, what DistantJob, adopted, and you know, we tried to go with the majority, but what I’m really at home with is with card based systems, so for myself I keep a private Trello board, and that’s how I self organize. I know that some people love lists. I just have some trouble. I don’t know; I have some kind of mental blockage over lists. It doesn’t flow as well, for me.
Maya Middlemiss: Well, it’s got to resonate for you, and I think I started with the list thing sort of like 20 years ago or something when Getting Things Done first came out, and my lists were on graph paper in a paper planner, so I’ve always been a list person, and Todoist, for me, is slotted into that mindset. Write it down, tick it off, or even if you do the thing, you can write it down and then tick it off so it shows it’s done.
Luis Magalhaes: So, back to your typical day. You start your workday, you open your laptop, you check your lists for … how does that go? When do you communicate with people? Do you have usual all hands on meetings?
Maya Middlemiss: We usually say hi in the mornings, yeah, whoever’s around. We’re all basically independent freelancers with different projects, so we know if someone’s not around for a day, and we try and do a team meeting once a week which we do in Zoom because it’s just nice to look each other in the eye.
Luis Magalhaes: Love it.
Maya Middlemiss: And we have our talk team meetings, or a couple of us will jump in a meeting when we need to talk about something with a client or prepare for a client meeting. Sometimes we’ll have a little pre meeting, because this is just, this is as good as it gets I think, in terms of it’s just like you and I are in the same room having a conversation.
Maya Middlemiss: You know, once we’re all on 5G, it really will be like that. We’ll have our halo rooms all over, but I think this is pretty good, I think. There’s very little to remind us that our conversation right now is happening between two different countries. It’s absolutely natural and in real time, so that’s how I’m used to collaborating with the people I work with every day, and we try and get our clients into Zoom as well. Whatever they’re using for project management, we’ll adapt to, which is why I’ve got experience with lots of different ones.
Maya Middlemiss: Because you have to plug into what the client’s doing. But for a face to face meeting, when they say, “Oh, should we do Skype?” I’m like, “No, please. Try this thing, honestly. Just try it onc, and you’ll never go back.”
Luis Magalhaes: Yes. For a Skype call, you know, I think of them almost like my mother, for whom SMS texting is a remarkably new technology that she struggles with.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. Things can be better. It’s our job to educate people one person at a time. Bring them to the light. That’s how I feel about cryptocurrency, an aspect, sort of. “Let me just show you once, and then you’ll get it, and then I know that my job is done.” And it’s the same with Zoom.
Luis Magalhaes: And you say that it was the social impact that technology had that attracted you to that. Why don’t you go a bit deeper into that? That’s because that’s the reason I got into remote work specifically. I remember a long time ago, I think it was 2004, I was reading Tim Ferris’s book the Four Hour Workweek. Was that 2004? Was that so long ago?
Maya Middlemiss: Probably was actually, yeah, because that was before I left the UK, and it was part of that whole genesis of, “Whoa, what am I doing here?” And so, then, yeah.
Luis Magalhaes: Yes. So, a concept that he developed was the concept of geo arbitrage, that you could have your United States or North American job but actually be living in countries where the cost of living isn’t so high, so your paycheck stretches a lot more, and a couple of years ago, when I was freelancing and starting to freelance about remote work, I thought, “Wait a minute. This remote work thing lets geo arbitrage work for people the other way around.”
Luis Magalhaes: You know? Instead of being a North American person with a North American job and trying to escape for lower cost of living countries, you can be a person in the lower cost of living country, and get a North American job, and I thought, “This is a way to end a lot of income equality around the world.” And that and the accessibility things, about people with accessibility problems being able to work from home, those were the two main factors that got me into remote work.
Luis Magalhaes: So, those were the factors for me. What were the factors for you to get into, I guess, both things, remote work and blockchain technology?
Maya Middlemiss: That’s interesting, because they’re very different time spans in my life. My first remote job, it was really going back two decades, now, since the last time I had a proper job. That’s because my daughter is now 19, so I just didn’t want to go back to work in somebody else’s office, and managed to persuade somebody to let me work for them based from home, so my first originally driver for wanting to work from home was having a baby, and not being happy with any of the other options.
Maya Middlemiss: This regards childcare and so on; so, but then, as she got a bit older, had acquired a sibling. We were living in London at the time and I read the Tim Ferris book, and everything else that was bubbling along in that early part of the new millennium.
Luis Magalhaes: I just love that, she acquired the sibling. This is why I love talking to other writers.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. They just came along, you know. A lot happens. Yeah. But it is interesting how you sort of go down these paths and think, “Well, this is what I’m expected to do next,” and so on, and at that point we moved from Central London out to the suburbs, because that was what you do when you have a young family. At the time, the business I was working in was still … everybody else was based in an office. I was the weird satellite person, out, home based, but I was expected to go in regularly for meetings, and so you know, things were still very centralized.
Maya Middlemiss: But what was also happening at the time was a huge technological shift. Even something as simple as moving to a cloud based server, rather than that being in a big box in Central London under somebody’s desk, that was then anywhere. That wasn’t the center anymore, and more and more people were starting to work from home, and I was finding that even in terms of client meetings I was spending less and less time going to see people.
Maya Middlemiss: I wasn’t going to see them in their offices, but we’d meet in other places and so on. Then my husband and I had a weekend in Spain. I think it was one of our first child free weekends for a long time. It was the first time we’d kind of gone to … for a city break, for a long time, rather than going to a beach family holiday thing, and we went to [inaudible 00:20:05], and we just had one of those moments where it suddenly strikes you, “Wow. We could pretty much almost do what we do from here. Why not?”
Maya Middlemiss: We had been talking about moving out of London, and trying to decide, “Do we go to the north of England?” Which was where he was from. Or somewhere more … ? There were things that we wanted, like, from a lifestyle point of view, a smaller community, and better community values, and somewhere different for our girls to grow up, and then suddenly we’d realized that everything we wanted was in Spain.
Luis Magalhaes: Yes. That’s definitely different, I mean, whenever I was in the UK for any prolonged period of time, and I got back home, I felt like, “Oh, you’re right. This is a thing, the sun.”
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. It sounds superficial when you try and tell people about it. It’s not like I’m a sun worshiper, or something, living on the beach, but it’s just something about … I definitely used to get a touch of seasonal affective disorder, and I still, I don’t like the changing of the seasons. I love this time of year when things, even in Spain, you notice the difference of the lack of light, and I really hope they don’t mess around with the time zones like they keep threatening.
Maya Middlemiss: So, I think it was … yeah, it was a lot to do with that, so within a couple of years we’d packed up and moved to Spain, so that’s what brought us out here, and we’ve been here 10 years now. I would never go back to the UK. Certainly not at the moment. In fact, very close to going down the European citizenship route. I think just working for the paperwork backlog to subside on that and that’s the way we’ll go, because there’s just so many reasons why I would never, ever want to live in the UK again at the moment.
Maya Middlemiss: And we won’t go into all of that, but I’m a European-
Luis Magalhaes: Well, I mean, now that Spain has Amazon Prime, really, what more could you like?
Maya Middlemiss: Yes, quite a bonus.
Luis Magalhaes: Let me go back to Amazon.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah, no, this is home, and a couple of years ago when I was setting up BlockSparks I applied for Estonian E-residency as well, so that I could set up the business there, because I’ve done a limited company in Spain before. Didn’t want to go there again. Very cumbersome and expensive, and but it made sense to do a UK limited company. A lot of immigrants from the UK in Spain operate UK limited companies, but again, the timing felt all wrong there.
Maya Middlemiss: But god knows what the UK is doing, and what the relationship will be, and taxation, and everything else, so nope, need to look at other options. That’s when I came across the Estonian E-residency, and it seemed a perfect fit for what we were doing with BlockSparks because it’s all digitized, basically. Their whole business administration of their government is on a blockchain, distributed ledger, so that just seemed like, yep, perfect fit.
Maya Middlemiss: So, that’s, yeah, that’s how we’ve ended up a team of Brits all over Europe living in one country and administratively based in another, and doing business with people in Australia, and Asia, and Europe, and wherever.
Luis Magalhaes: Sounds great. I mean, I realize that your team is … that you’re a small business. You’re like three people, four people?
Maya Middlemiss: We’re three regular people. We’ve got a couple of other, well, I’ve got a part time BA who, she’s also based in Spain, actually, because sometimes I need to have translation help, as well, so she does a few hours a week. We’ve got other people, like a PR guy in London, who can help us out sometimes, and things like that.
Maya Middlemiss: We’re one of those teams that, when we need something, we find the right person to do it, bring them in.
Luis Magalhaes: So, you’ve written a book on recruitment, and I couldn’t manage to read it. Sorry. I didn’t find the time. I know I should, but that’s-
Maya Middlemiss: Oh, no. That’s a long time ago, now. Don’t worry.
Luis Magalhaes: And I realize that it was for a very specific industry, but I’m wondering if there’s … I mean, I’m sure there is some overlap in the knowledge that you acquired when you were working there, so one of the things that I read in your articles that I found was very interesting is something that not a lot of people talk about, that not everybody who thinks they want the freedom and flexibility of remote work can ultimately work effectively with it.
Luis Magalhaes: So, and I’ve had … I mean, when I started this, not so much fortunately, I learned my lessons, but I had trouble with people like that in the past. People who were super excited to work remotely, but then they couldn’t really pull themselves together to do the actual work. So, what do you think are some reasons for this, and how do you explain this to people?
Luis Magalhaes: What’s the conversation like, explaining that they’re not managing to make it work?
Maya Middlemiss: It’s a really difficult one, and I’ve definitely made mistakes in hiring in the past, and learned it the hard way, because people can be very, very persuasive, and very self convinced about the things that attract them about the remote lifestyle. The idea of not having as much structure to their day, not having an alarm clock, or whatever it is that attracts people to working from home in the first place.
Maya Middlemiss: I’ve come at this round and round, lots of different angles. The most interesting insight I’ve had about it recently was reading a book by … it’s not a new book, but it was one that I’d recently picked up, called Mindset by Carol Dweck, and I think there’s a lot to do with whether somebody has a predominately fixed mindset or growth mindset to do with how they manage their time and results, and for me it might almost all boil down to that.
Maya Middlemiss: It’s whether somebody needs that structure, those boundaries in their life, or whether they’re somebody who can manage themselves and what they want to achieve. I’m sure there are people with fixed mindsets who can do very well in certain remote roles, but the people who need a job with hard edges or a role description with hard edges, and can look at something very clearly and say, “That’s my job, that isn’t. That’s my responsibility, that isn’t.” Those are people who might thrive in a very structured environment, which could be remote, but they might do better in a larger organization with more segmentation of roles.
Maya Middlemiss: Whereas people with a more flexible growth mindset are more likely to be not only self motivated but also flexible in terms of, “Right, there’s a thing that needs fixing. I’ll jump in and do it. I’ll have a go at that. No, I don’t have to do it, but I’m sure I can figure it out,” kind of mindset.
Maya Middlemiss: Those are the things I think that you can test better in recruitment, and you can also test it against their work history even if they’ve never worked remotely before. You can look at how they approach problem solving, how they approach dilemmas, how they approach challenges, that they can’t necessarily just kick up the line to some kind of supervisor or manager and say, “What do I do?”
Maya Middlemiss: What do people do when they have to make a decision for themselves?
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, that’s interesting that you mention that, because you’ve written before about how to get the most out of recruitment services, essentially, and what do you wish every recruitment service would do? You know, specifically when it comes to hiring remotely. What are some of the tests that you wish that would be standard?
Maya Middlemiss: Well, when I’m hiring somebody for a remote role, I try to … well, for any role, but I’ve only hired for remote roles in the last couple decades. Try and get them to be tested in what the work actually involves, because I think certainly hiring in the UK, and the last time I did it for a … the last time I had a proper job wasn’t actually this century, so I do hope things have moved on a bit.
Maya Middlemiss: There was definitely a trend at the time for getting everybody to do a presentation, which meant making some PowerPoints and coming and delivering them, which was just like, you know, “Well, do you actually want that?”
Luis Magalhaes: I’m already asleep.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. It’s so boring. It’s so inappropriate, and so unfair if it happens to be a role where preparation of slides is nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Luis Magalhaes: That’s crucial in every role. What do you mean? Like, come on; how do you work with someone who can’t build a PowerPoint presentation?
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. My partner went for a health and safety job managing some buildings, and he had to do a presentation. He’d never used PowerPoint in his life. He was like, “Where the hell do … ?” He knew all the stuff, but if I hadn’t helped him get it into some slides, he wouldn’t have got that job, and you know, that seems dreadfully unfair and discriminatory apart from anything else, so I think things have moved on since then.
Maya Middlemiss: And also, we have the technology. If we’re used to working remotely, we have this application we’re using now, Zoom. I could just as easily screen share with you. I could send you a document. One exercise that I’ve used and hiring administrative and VA type stuff before is to give them an inbox, just written in a spreadsheet, a Google sheet, just say, “Here’s my inbox.”
Maya Middlemiss: And give them a list of emails, and say, “Okay. Could you prioritize these and write a reply to them? Here you go. You’ve got 20 minutes. We’ll pick the call up again, then.” Because people can see that I’m in the document as well, and if they’re freaked out by that, then you know, that’s another finding, but I want to see … and I’ve actually got better things to do in that 20 minutes, usually, than sit and watch them type, so I will go away and come back.
Luis Magalhaes: Who knew?
Maya Middlemiss: And get them to do that. I’m not really interested in watching somebody’s keystrokes, but I do want to see what they’ve managed to do in 20 minutes, whether they’ve used that time, first, to prioritize which is the clients screaming for attention, which is the health and safety issue, which is the fire that needs putting out as opposed to things that are important rather than urgent, and so on, and just see how they organize that.
Maya Middlemiss: Even if they’ve only managed to sort the list in order, then that would tell me something. Then, if they’ve managed to write a couple of emails, then I can see how they write, how they would have communicated on my behalf. You learn such a lot doing that, so I think it’s really important to use the tools, use the skills that you’re going to apply in the work that they’re going to be doing for you.
Maya Middlemiss: Even things like how somebody shows up for a Zoom interview. I interviewed somebody for a senior project management role, once, who turned up at interview, and she was clearly sitting on her bed, and it was weird, because she’d done the smart top thing. I don’t know, maybe she was in a nightie and slippers underneath, but there was like a bedhead behind her, and some clothes hanging up, and I just thought, “This is weird. You’re not set up to work from home. Maybe you could be, but I think you should’ve made more effort for the interview, because if I were [inaudible 00:30:33] I don’t want you meeting them with that look.”
Luis Magalhaes: You know, and if that’s your horror story, let me tell you something; you haven’t seen the half of it.
Maya Middlemiss: God no.
Luis Magalhaes: Hey there. It’s Luis. Welcome to the intermission of the DistantJob podcast. If you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a very big chance that you’re interested in building a great remote team, and to build a great remote team you need great remote employees. That’s where DistantJob comes in. So, here’s how it works. You tell us the kind of position that you need to fill. We talk to you. We try to figure out not only what are the exact requirements that that person should have, but also we try to figure out who would be a perfect fit for your company culture?
Luis Magalhaes: Because we really believe that that matters. Then, once we have an exact picture of what we’re looking for, we’re off to the races. Our recruiters tap into their global network, and we filter people very well so that you don’t waste your time interviewing people that are never going to be of interest to you.
Luis Magalhaes: We make sure, because we are techies, and our recruiters are techies as well, so when people get to you they are already pre-selected, and you just have to decide between the cream of the crop, and once you make your selection, we handle all the paperwork. We handle HR for you. We handle payments. And you get a full-time remote employee that’s among the best in the world, and managed entirely by you, by your processes, and following your culture.
Luis Magalhaes: If this sounds good, visit us at www.distantjob.com. And without further adieu, let’s get back with the show. Thank you for listening.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. So, you talked about discrimination. You’ve actually written about this before. I’ve read a very interesting article of yours that was about people discriminating against people that weren’t necessarily as technologically savvy, and maybe because that they were born before the internet was being pumped into our eyelids like from the moment of our birth, and I thought it was very interesting because just my last podcast, the last public podcast that I published was me talking about ageism.
Luis Magalhaes: Basically, about how it looks like remote companies, and technology companies in general, are very resistant to hiring older folks. I personally love working with older folks. I love the experience. I love the maturity, and their ability to speak, to have a dialog, to have a conversation, and I think that a lot of companies are missing out. But their excuse is always the same. “Well, it’s hard to get them into the culture. The technology company has a very young centered culture. They have trouble with the technology.”
Luis Magalhaes: And I don’t see that.
Maya Middlemiss: That’s as lazy as any other discrimination.
Luis Magalhaes: Exactly. I think it’s lazy, and I wanted to ask you if you had talked about this anymore since your article, and how do you think companies could fight ageism, for lack of a better word, in tech, and in working remotely?
Maya Middlemiss: I think that we have to start by acknowledging our prejudices that all of us have. You could say, you know, everybody says, “I’m not racist, I’m not sexist, I’m not ageist.” But we actually have biologically hardwired preferences for people who are like ourselves in some way, and that’s not necessarily a good thing in business. What we need is challenge, and diversity, and people who think differently from ourselves, and certainly in hiring other people to work for you, you need to challenge all of those assumptions within yourself and say, “Okay, I’m like this in whatever way, so what’s missing in my organization?”
Maya Middlemiss: And sometimes you need to go and specifically hire for that. Now, the age thing is interesting. I know this is going out as audio rather than video, but I don’t mind admitting I am no millennial. I am no digital native, okay?
Luis Magalhaes: Well, I’m technically a millennial, but I don’t feel like one.
Maya Middlemiss: No. I’m certainly no generation Z digital native. Instead, I’ve been around the block in business. I have seen technical revolutions come and go. I’ve seen the impact of change on society, which is why I can see the way that blockchain is going to change things in much the same way as HTTPS changed things 20 years ago.
Maya Middlemiss: Society can change, and it’s never the same again afterwards. We get this an awful lot in tech, of course, that some of the people with the best and brightest ideas are incredibly young, and I have to fight my own innate prejudices if I’m dealing with somebody who’s a prospective client who’s the age of my daughters, and think, “Okay, well, actually these are people who might have a fantastic idea; maybe I can help them.”
Maya Middlemiss: And it can be difficult when people have that amazing idea but they have no clue about business, they have no clue about … often, they’re incredibly intelligent and visionary, but that can make them very much in their own heads, and because they’re so bright and so filled with amazing ideas, they actually don’t always communicate brilliantly with normal people.
Maya Middlemiss: That’s fine when you’re in the conceptual stage of building up your idea, but when you’ve actually got to build that, and then market it to a world made up of people who aren’t like that, you do need somebody who can bridge that gap, and come in and say, “Well, actually, your customers don’t see it like that,” and the motivation’s going to be very different. You need somebody who can see the vision, but then also see the normal, and I think you do need somebody who’s got some experience in business to do that, and it’s not about age.
Maya Middlemiss: I mean, I have come across people who are a lot older than me who are working in this space doing amazing, creative, and brilliant things. I’ve come across people who are a lot younger than me who have certain very specific and narrow views about technology, and what they use, and what is their comfort zone, who will never step out of that. I call out a lot of people on the age thing, particularly people of my generation and older who are like, “Oh, I’m never going to get that. That’s not for me. I can’t do that because, because.” Rubbish.
Maya Middlemiss: It’s all there. It’s all for the understanding, there’s very little that a literate, intelligent person who can follow instructions, and the other-
Luis Magalhaes: Just so interesting, and I’ve never got the clear answer to that, so since you mention, what would you say to those people? What would you tell to those people? To an older person that has doubts that they can understand the technology, that they can work as we work now. What would the curriculum be like? How would you tell them to go about learning?
Maya Middlemiss: Well, just say it’s so easy, and first of all I’d start with reminding them how easy it is to learn now, because your formal education a few decades ago, it was so different. I mean, when I did my degree, I had to go to a library which had documents in it. I had to order books. I had to order papers and get them physically delivered from once institution to another. It was hard work, researching things and finding out, so it could be that the people who were saying, “Oh, I’m never going to … that’s not for me. I missed the boat on that,” actually don’t realize how easy it is to learn.
Maya Middlemiss: And if they’ve never used Google or YouTube. You know, if you want to learn anything now, it’s one search away. It’s out there. Somebody will have put that information into the public domain for you, probably for free. Somebody will have done a walkthrough of how to do it. Somebody will have figured it out. They’ll have shared it. Even if it’s not free, then sometimes somebody will have put together a Teachable course or something, and it can be well worth paying through just to cut through all the promotional stuff and go directly to the meat of what you need to learn.
Maya Middlemiss: Even things like, you know, I’ve had to teach myself to self publish. Going back to the top of our conversation, talking about Amazon and things like that. I know how to do that, and I can look at that and think, “Oh, I don’t know how to do that.” Or when I started my podcast last year. Never done that before, but actually what I do know is that somebody knows, and that somebody will have actually screen recorded that process, and done it, and put it out there. I’ll be able to buy that knowledge from somebody else’s brain.
Luis Magalhaes: And it’s like 50 Euros. That’s what’s really amazing. It’s like hours of classes, you know, and something-
Maya Middlemiss: You don’t have to go and do a degree for three years somewhere to learn that stuff. All you need to do is Google it and it’s there, and everything, like you know, my husband fixed something on the washing machine a couple of months ago, and it’s like, “Well, we could get this guy around. He’s 50 Euros an hour.” I was like, “Well, I’ll just check on YouTube.” And, oh, actually, we need this three Euro part, and I can order it, and here’s a walkthrough of exactly how to take the thing apart, change the thing, and then put it back together, and then it works again.
Maya Middlemiss: That wasn’t there 20 years ago, so people who are afraid of learning and afraid of pushing themselves into something new might not realize how it’s just there on a plate, and so that’s the one thing I really encourage everybody to do, and I’ll do the Googling. I’ll send it to them and just say, “Look, here’s a step by step, how to do the thing that you’re afraid of, and you can do that. You can practice it at home safely. You don’t have to put yourself out there, you don’t have to go,” we used to go to evening classes to learn things.
Maya Middlemiss: You know, go to a day’s work, and then go out again to learn a subject. You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about, evening classes. Now you can learn anything.
Luis Magalhaes: You’re very kind, you’re very kind. I just use that cheeky website that’s, “Let me Google that for you.”
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah, I try to keep sarcasm out of my talk, because I don’t think that’s constructive and what we did last year with BlockSparks, because a lot of our clients are on the B2B side, and they’re creating these amazing cryptocurrency and blockchain based products, is we started a podcast aimed at a public audience, the Crypto Confidence Show, where we do an awful lot of that really first principle stuff, and just trying to create really accessible content, and the original brief we looked at for that was Cryptocurrency For My Mom: What Will She Need?
Maya Middlemiss: We did reshape that brief slightly when we realized my mom doesn’t actually do podcasts, either, so we had to start slightly different place. But, “Okay, mom. This is what,” she’s got the iPhone but she doesn’t use anything except-
Luis Magalhaes: I need that book. I need the book that’s Cryptocurrency For Stupid people. That’s the book I need.
Maya Middlemiss: No. There are no stupid people. Well, you can listen to the Crypto Confidence Podcast. Start with episode one, where we start with what you do and don’t need to know, but we’re actually talking about, once I get this novel out of the way and off the blocks, looking at more of an information product for later in the year that gives that information in a number of different media formats so people can come back to it, because I’m a wordy person, so for me I want to write or do podcasts, but if I can partner with somebody who can do something more visual on the infographic or animation side I think that’s needed.
Maya Middlemiss: Because these are difficult concepts, and also the other thing with cryptocurrency is if you mess it up you can lose your money.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Maya Middlemiss: You know, it’s not like, oh, when we’re trying to learn the internet. All I’m going to get is a weird error message. Here, if you send your crypto to the wrong address, it’s gone, so I take that responsibility very, very seriously in terms of trying to help people get started, and I also take very seriously the responsibility that I’m not responsible for anybody’s finances, and I would never advise anybody to invest in this or buy that. I’m not qualified to. We have to be very clear that that’s not what we do. What I want to do is try and empower people to make those choices for themselves, do their own research, recognize a credible source from a rubbish one, and make wise decisions.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. You know, I always try to see that. Whenever something requires an investment that I can lose, I always try to think about it as tuition fees. You know? As education budget, instead of lost money, because the best way to learn anything related to money is to put yourself in the position where you can, and often will lose it. Right?
Maya Middlemiss: Yep. And I’ve gifted people small bits of cryptocurrency before on paper wallets. Said, “There you go. You go figure that out. You’re a smart person. I’ll tell you how to get that into an electronic wallet if you want, but you know, you could Google it, figure it out. If you’ve got doubts, ask me, but that’s the best way, so you own this. This bit of paper is money, and it’s now up to you what you do with it. You can lose it, or you can spill your tea on it and then it won’t work anymore, or you can just figure it out and take it from there, but everything you need to know is on that bit of paper. Everything that you need to turn that into money, even cash it back out into Euros, is on your phone, so off you go.”
Luis Magalhaes: Right. Nice.
Maya Middlemiss: Skin in the game.
Luis Magalhaes: So, yeah, exactly. Skin in the game. So, before I get to the closing part of the interview, there was another question that I was meaning to ask. Sometimes, and I know that you’ve written about this in the past, about it happening to you. Sometimes we people who work remotely tend to start the week inside our cave, and by the time we get out head out of the laptop, it’s Thursday. And that’s not super healthy.
Maya Middlemiss: It’s not, is it?
Luis Magalhaes: So, how did you fix that? Or how do you?
Maya Middlemiss: How did I fix that? I really have fixed that this year, a lot better, I think, because it was something I had to get quite conscious about, and you have to fix it by making time for yourself, and putting that time aside, and doing something more fun with it, and really being aware of all of the different things that successful work involves, and that includes eating, and exercising, and sleeping. It includes learning, which you know, podcasts are fantastic. You can multitask with a podcast.
Maya Middlemiss: You can go for a walk. You can get outside, get out in the sun, and I have checklists in my Todoist, my daily wellbeing block includes things like learning. It includes walking, and things like that. I have reminders pop up and tell me to go and get myself outside. I have my Fitbit. I need to do my … if I don’t do my daily steps everyday, I have to do the daily active steps, so at least the Fitbit knows if I’ve got out of the office or not.
Maya Middlemiss: I can’t make that go off from being in the house, so you have to find ways of rewarding yourself, sometimes artificially. There’s a nice app called Sweatcoin which I like, which pays you virtual currency for walking.
Luis Magalhaes: Oh, nice.
Maya Middlemiss: So, that’s quite cool.
Luis Magalhaes: Nice, yeah. Yeah, my startup will go the stick route rather than the startup. I will build a Fitbit that will shock you.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. Just electrocute you, yes.
Luis Magalhaes: Exactly.
Maya Middlemiss: It does this thing where it buzzes every hour to remind you to move if you don’t.
Luis Magalhaes: That’s not enough.
Maya Middlemiss: It’s not enough, no. I think maybe if you have that going up a few volts every time, then eventually.
Luis Magalhaes: Exactly.
Maya Middlemiss: It’ll blast you out of your chair. Yeah. I think we need that sometimes. It’s very easy, when you don’t have that built into your day, and particularly if you’re going remote, and you used to work in an office, and one of the things you’re thinking, “Great, I don’t have to get up and get that train anymore. I don’t have to do that journey.”
Maya Middlemiss: But that could’ve been your most active part of your day, and if you take that out, it’s lovely to have that time back, but you do need to build that activity back in, otherwise you’re going to have health consequences. It’s absolutely inevitable, and if I have a day where I don’t leave the house, then this thing tells on me, and tells me that I’m only doing 400 steps in the day or something absolutely pathetic like that.
Maya Middlemiss: So, you need to track it. You need to set those reminders.
Luis Magalhaes: It’s the walk from the desk to the coffee machine.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. You know, sometimes I barely even go downstairs. It’s absolutely terrible, and it’s part of that discipline of being an effective remote team member, I think, is taking more responsibility for yourself, for your wellbeing needs, and you know, you’re going to burn yourself out. Particularly if you’re self employed, it’s so easy to do that thing where you just sit down. You know, even the weekends blur in and you don’t really put any hard edges on anything that you do, it’s a responsibility.
Maya Middlemiss: And it’s also something in hiring to really dig into, whether people have taught about that, how they will protect those boundaries, what responsibility they can take for themselves. Even simple things like not everybody can offer a dedicated workspace. I’m lucky, I have this room that I work in. It’s got a door I can close when I’ve … at the end of the day, I can leave it behind me. But of course, all of the alerts are there on my phone, but I can manage those, whereas if you’re working in a shared space, if you’re living in a shared house, lots of people in urban environments simply don’t have the luxury of a separate room that they can call work.
Maya Middlemiss: So, if you’re working from home, it can mean something much more blended, and it’s important to discuss that in hiring, that people have considered the impact of that on their lives. Considered the impact on their families, as well.
Luis Magalhaes: Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Maya Middlemiss: It definitely affects other people, even from your heating bills, or your electricity bills. I mean, you egg on the central heating right through to are you sharing a broadband connection? When we first came to Spain we were making do on very, very flakey shared WiMAX systems, and shout, “Right, doing the call now. Everybody stop streaming.” It’s great now. That’s all changed with the fiber optic, and of course we’ll have 5G soon.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. Looking forward to that. Looking forward to that, and I definitely feel you about the need to setting yourself goals, because I’ll admit, slightly shamefully, that sometimes I look at my Fitbit and the thought that crosses my mind is, “Oh, I sure went a lot to the coffee machine today.”
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah.
Luis Magalhaes: So, those are a lot of indoor steps, so it’s not. Okay. So, I want to be respectful of you’re time. We’re close to an hour now, so I just want to ask you some rapid fire questions.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah. Sure. I’ll try and answer rapidly.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, you don’t need to. Feel free to go as deep as you want, but the questions themselves are rapid fire. The answers don’t have to be. So, I know that you’ve started at least two companies. What’s the biggest lesson that starting a company taught you?
Maya Middlemiss: I think, well, the one thing that I’ve learned is that I better start a new company because I’d be terrible at working for anybody else, so.
Luis Magalhaes: That’s fair enough, that’s fair enough. So, what was a lesson that you learned the hard way while doing that?
Maya Middlemiss: What have I learned the hard way? I think I’ve learned that hiring is probably the most important thing. I know that I’ve made mistakes along the years in that, and I think, correlated with that, is also admitting your mistakes and moving on, whether that’s in hiring or in any other business decision. I think we all have very powerful loss aversion, and it’s difficult to, first of all, admit to yourself, “No, this isn’t working out.”
Maya Middlemiss: And secondly, to actually do something about it. Cut your losses; pivot. Let somebody go, switch direction, kill a project that’s not working. I’m still learning that one. Don’t always do it as quickly as I should.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I feel you there. So, onto a more cheerful question. If you had 100 Euros to spend with each person working for you, what would you give them? And I’m looking specifically for something that would make them more productive or happier to do their job, rather than just an out of the blue gift.
Maya Middlemiss: Okay. Well, the last gift that I bought for the BlockSparks team around that price band was hard wallets for their cryptocurrency, because I don’t pay people in cryptocurrency. I don’t encourage anyone to invest, but those who do invest I think should be doing so in the safest, most efficient way possible, and that means keeping your private keys completely offline, so just, you know, don’t rely on the security of your laptop, your phone, anything else.
Maya Middlemiss: Hardware wallets are the way to go, so I bought everybody these little USB sticks that they can keep their keys on safely, whether that’s you’ve got 50 cents on there, or 50 grand, it should be offline.
Luis Magalhaes: Sounds good. So, what about your own work life? What purchase in the past six months of your year to one year has made your work life easier or more productive?
Maya Middlemiss: I think it’s been reclaiming more time for wellbeing, actually. It’s been trying to be more respectful of my own boundaries, and it’s been making time to walk, to eat healthily. I joined a gym briefly; that didn’t work out so well. I need to do things more independently, but really making time for walking, and yoga, and not working has made me more productive at working.
Luis Magalhaes: Got it, and you do that … you ensure you do that, basically, by scheduling it as part of your day.
Maya Middlemiss: Definitely. It has to be blocked in. It’s good to involve other people, as well, particularly if you are a bit of a hermity, introverted, writery person, not only does it actually make you have conversations with human beings, not via Zoom, but it means that you’re letting other people down, so it’s easier to make that commitment and that appointment. “No, I can’t do Thursday morning. I’m walking with the girls.” I would be messing them around if I let a meeting creep into that space, where if it was just me then I’d probably be more flexible.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. I mean, I absolutely should take you up on that because I think that my cat is getting tired of my conversation topics.
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah, you need some humans, occasionally. I’m sure the cat doesn’t give you as much intellectual stimulation as you need, not all the time.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. Exactly. So, what … ? I mean, I already got the book recommendation out of hearing this podcast, Mindset, but what book or books have you gifted the most?
Maya Middlemiss: What have I gifted the most? In terms of crypto I give away Andreas Antonopoulos’s The Internet of Money.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay.
Maya Middlemiss: That is, it’s in two volumes, and it’s actually transcripts of talks that he’s given, and Andreas is one of these people that shows up at lots of different conferences. I think he’s one of the people who actually live completely in the bitcoin world, and that he only takes his fees on his Patreon … he does this work full time now, and he is the best visionary storyteller in this space of what life could be like, and it’s well worth subscribing to his YouTube channel, as well.
Maya Middlemiss: But The Internet of Money is a two volume collection of his talks over the last few years. It’s incredibly accessible. You don’t need to know anything about technology, or money, or crypto, or anything else to get a great deal out of just grasping the potential, and I think it was stumbling into his YouTube channel that was the first moment that I had my, “Aha, right. I get it now. This is going to be big, and I can write about it, and that’s lucky for me.”
Maya Middlemiss: But these people are actually creating something that’s going to be so transformative, so that’s the one that I buy a lot of people, and I recommend it a lot.
Luis Magalhaes: Nice. Okay. So, final question. Let’s say that you’re hosting a dinner for top Silicon Valley executives. CTOs, CMOs, people that are involved in operations and hiring. They are having a round table about remote work, and the dinner is in a Chinese restaurant, so you get to pick, as the host, the message that comes inside the Chinese fortune cookies. What message about remote work are these people going to crack open at the end of their dinner?
Maya Middlemiss: It’s a bit of a cliché, this one, but I keep coming back to it because a lot of people still don’t get it yet, and it might even be from the original Tim Ferris book, but work is what you, not where you do it.
Luis Magalhaes: Oh. I have never actually heard that one before, so.
Maya Middlemiss: Well, it’s just so obvious, isn’t it, when you have internalized that? But so many people haven’t. People think of work as a place or a set of circumstances, and they haven’t managed to separate that from their location, and so I think that’s the thing I would want to get, particularly in the tech world. It’s funny; the people who are building the software the enables the rest of us to be so flexible and independent often have very specific ideas about how they’re going to collaborate, and you’ve got to be in the office.
Maya Middlemiss: You’ve got to be here. “We can’t be agile if we’re in different buildings, and we’ve got to have a physical whiteboard instead of a Trello board.” And all of that, so yes, I would definitely want to say to them, “Separate your idea of work from where it takes place, and let it be about that productive collaboration, wherever and however.”
Luis Magalhaes: Sounds great. Good message; thank you. So, I mean, again, thank you for your time. It was lovely talking to you. Now, if people want to continue-
Maya Middlemiss: This subject is my favorite, so.
Luis Magalhaes: If people want to continue the conversation with you, where can they find you? Where can they reach you?
Maya Middlemiss: They can find me on all the usual places. I’m at Maya Middlemiss on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram. In fact, I think I’m on the only Maya Middlemiss on the internet at the moment except that there’s a teenager in Arizona who pops up occasionally.
Luis Magalhaes: Well, apparently you’ve killed off all the others, so that girl doesn’t know-
Maya Middlemiss: Yeah, she doesn’t have a chance. No, I hope she gets [inaudible 00:57:01] one day, but pretty much it’s going to be me if you find my name anywhere. You can find me at BlockSparks. We are blocksparks.io and @BlockSparks on Twitter, and at the Crypto Confidence Podcast is also somewhere you can find us, which is @cryptoconfpod on Twitter, and you can find all of our episodes there, also, on the BlockSparks website.
Maya Middlemiss: You’ll find all our show notes and links.
Luis Magalhaes: All right. Thank you very much, again. It was a pleasure to have this conversation with you.
Maya Middlemiss: Likewise.
Luis Magalhaes: See you around.
Maya Middlemiss: Bye, now.
Luis Magalhaes: And so we close another episode of the DistantJob Podcast, and if you enjoyed the episode, please; you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That would be great; it’s how we reach more listeners, and the more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to, as well.
Luis Magalhaes: You can also help a lot leaving reviews on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast get to more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to distantjob.com/blog/podcasts, click on your favorite episode, any episode, really, and subscribe.
Luis Magalhaes: By subscribing, you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up, and whenever we get the transcripts of the episode up, so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form.
Luis Magalhaes: And of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration, and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country. Look around the whole world, because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent.
Luis Magalhaes: And to help you with that, again, distantjob.com is the perfect place to start. You will tel us who we need and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate 40 percent faster than the industry standard. And with that, I bid you adieu.
Luis Magalhaes: See you next week on the next episode.
