Case Study - Onlinejobs.ph Review - Good or Bad?

Hi guys. My name is Benjamin Tong, I'm from New Zealand. I've been using online jobs for the past four years and through that time I've found eight different employees to use for several of my online businesses. In this video I'll be running through a little bit about my online businesses, why I hire through online jobs, and why you probably should too. My first business was an online lead generation site in the home and commercial security niche. It was a basic content site and we allow visitors to request quotes. So we send those quotes onto local installers and that's how we make our money through that site. My second business was a pair of sites in the accommodation affiliate niche. So they also were content sites. Visitors would go on there to view information about different cities. When they booked vacation rentals through our sites, we got commissions on those. So my third business was an online dropshipping site. So we sold outdoor wear, outdoor homeware, and we handled all the marketing, the site management, the advertising and our manufacturers shipped directly to our customers. And these are all US based. So my most recent business is an Amazon FBA business. We've been doing that for the last two years and that's been our key focus. So we manufacture home and kitchenware in China and we ship that to the US and we sell on Amazon.com so in the last fourth quarter we shipped out four 40 foot floor loaded containers. That's up a huge amount from our first shipment which was in Q4 of 2016 where we shipped out three pallets. So some very good growth in our Amazon FBA business in the last two years. So online jobs ph has the largest talent pool of work from home professionals in the Philippines that I've found anywhere online. Obviously with the largest talent pool comes your highest chances of finding a hire that's going to fit your job. Now depending on the types of jobs that are posted, I've had anywhere from 30 to 100 different applicants. Obviously this depends on the type of job you're posting. If you're going to be posting for a general va, expect that. On the high side, if you're posting for a developer or a specialized designer, you can expect more of a lower end. Now, OnlineJobs charges $69 for a one month membership. That includes three different job postings. So if you are looking to post more than three postings in that one month, you'll probably be better to look at their premium plan which I haven't used before, but it's got a few different interesting upgrades. So it's got unlimited job postings for that month. It also has free worker coaching and free background checks which I believe would be pretty useful. Something I'll be looking to give a try on my next hire. Other job sites will charge you an ongoing percentage and obviously that's paid by you, the employer. I like that. Online jobs is a simple one month fee. After that you just deal direct with your new employee. Cutting out in the middle man now, hiring out of the Philippines has three main benefits. The first is that English is a native language. Obviously that makes it a lot easier to communicate daily with your va. Less chance of misunderstandings as well. Now the second is the wage savings. In the US you'd be expecting to pay about $2,500 for an average skilled employee in the Philippines. For a similarly skilled employee, you'd be looking at about $500. So you know that's 1/5 of the price that you're paying for a similarly skilled worker in the Philippines versus the us. Now also, the Philippines has an established labor force of of trained and skilled online workers. The Philippines has been very strong in the business processing or BPO industry over the last 20 years. So they've got a lot of experience, a lot of call centers set up in the Philippines. They're used to this work from home style of working. And so no matter what sort of job that you're looking to post, there's a very good chance that you'll be able to find a hire which has experience, has worked in a similar sort of industry, and who may well be able to slot into your job without much fuss at all. In the last four years I've used online jobs to fill eight part time and full time positions. So I've hired two writers, one general VA, one graphic designer, and four customer service VAs. The first content writer I worked with for just over a year, the other was part time for about four months. Now they wrote me articles on home security, on city guides for our accommodation websites, product descriptions for our e commerce store. They both turned out very good high quality work and very fast hiring writers. I found this a lot easier than hiring any other type of va really. Just need to review their past work and then give them a paid trial. Give everybody the same paid trial with the same brief and find out if their writing style matches what you're looking for in a writer. Now I've generally found that writers in the Philippines will naturally write in a much more formal tone. So great if you need sort of informative style articles. But if you need a writer with a witty and entertaining writing style that's going to be more difficult. Probably a better idea to look in the US for one of those sort of writers. But of course you expect to pay 5, 10, maybe even 15 times more than what you pay in the Philippines. So my general VA was with me for about six months full time and then shifted to part time as the work sort of slowly dried up. Vincent has been my only male hire va. The reason for that is there's just a whole lot more female VAs looking for work in the Philippines than male VAs. Vincent was great. He was hard working, reliable. He handled a lot of email outreach for me, basic image editing, blog posting layouts, and posting itself for several of our different websites. So a quick tangent. General VAs are definitely the most popular staff hires and you'll always get a ton of applications. People always like to talk about the super dream va, that VA who can handle pretty much any task you can throw at them. Unsurprisingly, I've found that super VA to be a bit of a myth too. So instead I suggest that you select two to four of your most important skills that a VA should have and then after that you're sort of looking for attitude. I always like to ask the question as to what have you done to improve your skill set in the last year. So this shows that the sort of person who's actively trying to improve their skills to get better now, with this sort of mindset, with this sort of attitude, you're going to find a lot easier to train people new tasks, things which they perhaps don't have a background in, but they're willing to learn and put the work into getting better. Now my designer, I initially hired Crystal to work on T shirt designs. She's actually now been my go to designer for well over a year on a project by project basis. So she now helps me with everything from packages design to banner ads, image editing. Pretty much anything which revolves around graphic design she helps me with. Now she hadn't had a lot of experience in some of these like packaging design for products, but again I say she's got a growth mindset and she works to actually get better at these things. So with a bit of patience on both sides, it tends to work out very well right now. Customer service VAs I've hired four customer service VAs for our Amazon FBA business and our E commerce business. We've had a much harder time finding a good match for those. The problem is for our business is that we need phone support and phone support during US hours. So that's effectively a graveyard shift in the Philippines. So phone support, graveyard shift. Two things that you'll find a lot of VAs be quite reluctant to do. So obviously our talent pool is a lot smaller and it's just been a reasonably high turnover and not an easy task to find a good VAs for this sort of job. If you're after a capable VA who perhaps only handles emails, you need a 24 hour window reply like a standard Amazon FBA VA. It's going to be 100 times easier to find than what we need in our business. So that's about all from me. I can say that I 100% recommend online jobs for anybody who's looking to make a hire out of the Philippines. As I said, I've used online jobs to fill eight different roles in my business and I'll be using them again in the future as I need to find new staff members. Also, if you're ready to make your hire, I actually have filmed another video about a year ago with 10 of my best tips for hiring virtual assistants specifically using online jobs. So I even include two of my standard hire templates. So my job description briefs that should help get you started and make life a little bit easier just drawing up that brief. So thanks for watching my video. I hope you got some value out of it. And that's all from me. Cheers.