John Jonas says you don't need to respond to every applicant on OnlineJobs.ph. Ignore one-liners, form submissions, and clearly unqualified candidates. Respond to personalized applications from reasonably qualified people, use screening questions via email, and expect to reply to about 10 to 20 candidates before narrowing your field.
Chapters
Do I have to respond to every job applicant when trying to hire a Filipino worker? Hey, my name is John Jonas. So I get asked all the time, do I need to respond to every job applicant when I post a job on onlinejobs ph and they and the workers apply to it. And my answer is no. Now let me give you a couple different examples. Number one, you're going to get a bunch of applicants that are just garbage, like people who wrote one sentence and sent you an application. And usually those workers are either new on the site because they don't know what it takes to get a job, or maybe they're just, maybe they're scamming and they're sending one sentence to a thousand different people, which we try really, really hard to prevent this. It's really, really difficult. So should you respond to that person? No, just delete it. A bunch of other people are going to send you form applications where they may have read your job post but they didn't customize what they're sending to you. So maybe they have, you know, like a five paragraph thing that they send to everybody. I don't respond to those. If it doesn't talk to me specifically, I don't respond to it and I just delete it. So then you're going to get some other applications that it's clear that they read your job post and they spent time responding to you. But often they're completely unqualified and I'm not interested or I'm hiring for a copywriter, which I did recently and they say I've never written copy before. Well, I'm sorry, you know, I'm not going to respond to that. I got 75 applicants and if you've never written copy before, but you're a fast learner, like it just doesn't work out for me and I'm not going to respond to you. Or maybe their English is really just terrible. I'm not going to respond. Even though you spent a bunch of time creating this application. I specifically said in my job I need someone whose English is perfect and you don't fit the bill. Who do you respond to? Well, I respond to almost every other person. So if they personalize their response and their skills look reasonable to me, I'm going to respond to almost all of them and I'm not going to set up Skype interviews with them. I'm just going to start, start responding via email and start asking them questions. And usually after I've asked a couple of them questions, then I get a really good idea of the questions I want to ask. And I put together a little copy and paste where I can just copy this and paste it into every single one of the next people that I want to respond to. And usually I'll respond to 10 to 20 people, depending on how many applicants I get. From there, I can start whittling it down. So do you need to respond to every single applicant? No, you don't. And they don't expect it. Often they're applying to a bunch of jobs per day, even though we limit them. So don't feel like you need to respond to every single person.
