David:    What is the best way to structure the setup of a remote working team? What are pitfalls of setting up a remote team and how can they be overcome? You’ve decided to hire a remote digital marketing team, where’s the best place to start? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask our special guest today, Liam Martin. Liam welcome to DMR.

Liam:    Thanks for having me David.

David:    Well welcome. Liam’s CMO and Co-Founder of Staff.com, a remote staffing platform that only allows to hire long-term remote labor. So Liam we’ve discussed the benefits of outsourcing in an interview that we recorded together about two years ago actually. How do you feel that outsourcing has evolved over the last couple of years?

Liam:    That’s an interesting question. In 2012 there was a huge … The space was really quite open and the space was evolving. I think about maybe 1% of all staffing was run remotely. I’m talking about staffing agencies, now we’re probably about 4-5%. We’ve seen a 400-500% jump in the space in just that amount of time. That means a huge exposure to a lot more different ecosystems. You’ve seen platforms like Fiverr as an example. That’s a recent company for $5 tasks; very interesting.

Mechanical Turk has absolutely exploded now. There are all of these companies that are connected to Mechanical Turk that really just focus that huge crowdsourcing network to figure out any other type of task that you’d absolutely want. There’s super interesting companies that now do crowdsourced translation as an example. You’ll have people that will be learning another language. They’ll have quizzes given to them to translate pieces of text and they’ll actually crowdsource that solution. Basically people are gamifying translations that you’re paying for on the other end.

Then on the higher end, platforms like us that offer full time remote labor, we’ve seen our numbers explode in that short amount of time. Really you’re seeing a labor market that is truly evolving, moving from small little projects to longer and longer-term contracts to basically full time employment. Employees that are really now working full time remotely whether it’s guys in Southeast Asia that are making one to $2,000 a month that are absolutely fantastic at their jobs. They’re making a lot of money relative to their countries, but can work wherever they want. We actually have a very interesting story connected to that too.