Ep. 03 Where do you find someone good?

Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast. The podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode three. Where do you find someone good? So everybody always wants to know, like, oh, I don't know how to find someone? How do I find someone good? And the straight up answer to that is Onlinejobs ph. Now I will preface this whole episode with IOwnOnlinejobs ph. So you can take this whole thing with a grain of salt, but there's a reason I own it. So back when I started talking about this, people wanted to know, like, hey, how are you doing this? Why is this working so well? What is the deal with the Philippines? How do I find people? And it was really hard to find people back then. There weren't websites where you could go to and look at resumes of people. There was no monster.com or indeed.com for the Philippines. It just didn't exist. So you either had to go through an agency or you had to go there, which was not an option. And agencies frankly don't do a very good job of finding people for you. And they're certainly not better at it than you are. And I've seen that hundreds of times over the years. And so at one point I wanted to recruit for myself and I was frustrated with the agency. They told me, do you want a webmaster or a pro? And I was like, I don't want either of those. I want someone who can write really good content. And they were like, well, do you want a webmaster or a programmer? And I was like, ah, I'll take a webmaster. And so I end up taking this webmaster, which webmaster is what they called it. He wasn't a webmaster, he didn't know anything. And this wasn't my first person either. And so I taught him how to write better content. And we worked through it and it worked out, but it was tough. And when I was doing that, I was like, you know, I think there's a better way to find people. And so I going to start a job board where I could maybe get a couple hundred resumes of people in the Philippines and then I could use it to recruit someone myself rather than going through this agency. And so I went back to the agency and said, I want a programmer. And they brought me a programmer. And this guy ends up being one of the best programmers I ever met. And I graduated from College of Computer Science, so I recognized someone's programming skills. This Guy was amazing. So I hired him. We start building what would become onlinejobs physical. And so when it was done, it took us about six months to build the initial version of it. I sent it to my team in the Philippines, the four, five, six people that I had there, and said, hey, guys, look, I built this thing because I want to be able to recruit. And then we're gonna provide jobs to people in the Philippines. And what could you guys do to market this? And they said, oh, I could post it on my friendster. I could tell my friends about it. I could maybe put a classified ad somewhere. And that was all we ever did to market it. We had a couple hundred profiles of Filipino workers in the first month. And today, as of recording this, I think we're about at 1.5 million profiles. And it grows like crazy. So Online Jobs is a job board. It was intended to be the thing that I wanted to find when I was looking to recruit someone. I wanted to recruit on my own so I could post a job and people in the Philippines and only the Philippines would respond to it. So I wasn't having to weed through Pakistan and India and Mexico and whatever else. I just wanted someone in the Philippines because I knew the culture was good. And so we only allow people in the Philippines on the site, and they apply to your job. And then you get to interview them on your own. And you can email them, you can get them in your Gmail, you can use our messaging system at onlinejobs ph. You can do whatever you want. You can do a video interview with them. Although I don't recommend it. I'll talk about that in another episode. You can do whatever you want once you've contacted people. In fact, one of the things that I like to do with onlinejobs ph is to go on and do a search for what I'm looking for. If I'm looking for a User Interface designer, I'll search User Interface Designer and then look at the profiles of workers. Like I said, there's about 1.5 million profiles right now. And if I look at profiles, I get a really good idea of what skills are out there. And I can look at how they rate themselves in a whole bunch of different categories. I can look what they say about their experience, and I can see their age and I can see their IQ usually. And there's all kinds of things that we show. That lets me see, okay, here's the talent that's out there. And then I can contact individual people and. And message them and say, hey, are you interested in work? So just so you know, with online jobs, let me give you a couple tips. Number one, don't go out and try and find the one. Don't go on and start browsing profiles and narrow it down and then contact the one that you want to hire. It's unlikely to work for you. So like I said in another episode, Filipinos are very loyal. And if they already have a job, chances of them responding to you and your job inquiry are low. So just going out and trying to find one, the one is unlikely to work because chances are they have a job. We have thousands and thousands of employers using the site every day and people get hired from it. And so a better approach to take is to cast a wide net. Go out and contact 20 people or post your job and get 50 job applications, which is too many to weed through. But then you can at least find the best available person. That's your goal with it, is to find the best available person because there's no such thing as the best person. There's always someone better somewhere, but that doesn't mean they're available. Maybe they're working for IBM or maybe they're working for Google or whatever. On my team, I have people that have done both that have worked for IBM, for Google. So it's reasonable to find really, really high talent on online jobs. Let's talk about that for a second. You can find just about any skill that can be done online or on a computer or on the phone. You can find it on online jobs. So I have a friend that hired an investment banking analyst out of the Philippines. He said he was $1,500 a month. He said he was a $200,000 a year person in the U.S. i know another guy who hired an accounting auditor. I mean, I have hired multiple really, really talented programmers, designers, different kinds of designers, content writers, copyw media people, people to manage ad campaigns, Facebook ads, media buys, general virtual assistants, lead generators. You can find salespeople, you can find anything, anything that can be done online or on the phone. You can find someone talented in the Philippines to do that on onlinejobs Ph. So onlinejobs Ph is a. It's a monthly subscription, but you should only pay that while you're recruiting. So it's either 69 or $99 a month. As soon as you're done recruiting and you found someone, you can cancel it. Super simple. And we make it super simple to cancel. It's not like we're going to put you through a ringer like click on Your account button, click on billing. Click cancel. Super simple. And we won't bill you again. And in fact, if you want, you can go onto onlinejobs pH, pay to get contact information of workers and immediately cancel. You'll still have access for 30 days and then we won't rebuild you. So on all the jobs with the free account, you can do everything that you want to do. You can look at profiles, you can post a job. You can get people to apply to your job. You can view their applications. The only thing you can't do is respond to people. You can't contact people on their profiles. You can't respond to job applications. You don't get any contact information until you've paid. And that's how we make money and how we continue to grow the site and how we pay to filter what we do. Filter. Just so you know, we're not vetting people on onlinejobs ph. There's too many people joining for us to vet. We do force people to verify that they are who they say they are. So we do a really good address government ID verification on people. We don't catch everything or everybody, but there are very, very few scams on onlinejobs ph, and we're very aggressive with it. So having said all that, let's talk about a couple other ways you can find people. So one way I've talked about this before is an agency. You can go through an agency, they'll charge you $1,500 a month. They'll pay the worker in the Philippines $500 a month. They will come to Onlinejobs ph to try and find that person. And I only know that because I see it every single day. Agencies coming to online jobs to find people. And usually we kick them off so that they're not just taking all the good people. Another way to find people, you can try Craigslist. I've never successfully seen someone hire someone off of Craigslist. And it's littered with scams because when something is free, it just attracts scammers and it attracts scam employers. And then people on Craigslist treat it as, you're a scammer. I'm gonna scam you. But you can try Craigslist. So those are a couple other ways you can try and find people in the Philippines. I think generally if you search online, you'll find that the Internet agrees that onlinejobs ph is the best way to find people. So having said that, now you know where to go to find people. Every episode after this, I'm probably not going to go into detail on online jobs again. I will give you some more specifics about like things to include in your job post or things to look for when you're looking at profiles. So thanks for listening. My name is John Jonas. Talk to you later.