24 Nov 2025 · 5 min
John Jonas on building trust when hiring remote workers in the Philippines. Start with low-risk tasks, use contracts and remote desktop access limits, and vet candidates through extended email interviews and references. Theft is rare but possible, so gradual access increases reduce risk.
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 six. Let's talk about trust. So how can I trust this person? Or how do I know who I can trust? Is a really hard question to answer. And the first answer is, you can't. You don't. So when you first hire someone, you don't know if you can trust that person. And an interesting thing about the Philippines is when you go into this, if you go into it with the attitude of, I don't know if I can trust this person. Filipino people generally have the same fear. They're thinking, I don't know if I can trust this boss. And their feeling is stronger than your feeling of, I don't know if I can trust this person. So when you go into this, that's the first thing to recognize is you need to gain their trust. If you don't gain their trust, you'll never be able to trust them. So second, what I always recommend is to start off with something small and inconsequential, that if they were to steal it from you, it wouldn't be the end of the world. So when I first hired someone, I wanted him to do a whole bunch of web work for me, but I didn't want to give him access to my hosting account, and it really handicapped me. So I would give him workarounds for like, you do this and this, and then I'll do this and this and this and this and this with it. And after a couple weeks of that, I was like, I'm done with this. Like, he seems trustworthy enough. I've seen a couple signs of it. You know, here's my hosting account, and that was the end of it. That was the last time I did something, and that was amazing. And I haven't really had an issue since. So how do you deal with compliance? And, you know, they're not in your office, so people always want to know, in your office here, you can have some safeguards in place. So if you want them to have the same safeguards in place, you can have them remote desktop into your computer so they're on your network. Rules can be the same. Like, they're not allowed to take anything off. And in the Philippines, really, their incentive structure for stealing some of your data is really low. But it's the same risk as someone here stealing your data. Obviously, if they steal it in the Philippines, you have a hard time prosecuting them because you don't really want to go to the Philippines and track them down and prosecute them in court. But, but it is doable. Contracts also go a long way in the Philippines towards keeping people honest. So the Philippines, they want to have a formal contract. They want to have a formal offer in place, and they're likely to abide by that contract. Now, obviously, if you do things like you must show up at this time for this many hours every single day and they have a problem, then you know they're not going to abide the contract. But otherwise, if you're reasonable with it, they really want to stick to the contract. I've seen hundreds of thousands of employers from around the world hire people in the Philippines, and I've definitely seen theft, but it's rare. It is few and far between because they don't want to steal from you and they really just want a job. So in knowing how do I trust this person? You kind of just have to start giving small things and start gaining trust and you'll see signs of whether they're trustworthy or not. How do you know if you can trust someone? Like, how do you find someone you can trust? Is a different question. So to me, this starts in the recruiting process. And it's the reason I don't just jump straight to a Skype interview. I do a whole big long email interview process ahead of time where I get to see their responses over a long period of time. And what I find is if I do a bunch of questions in the interview process via email, number one, it shortens the amount of time that I have to spend interviewing people. Number two, I get a really good feeling for how trustworthy this person is up front. And I've rarely, rarely had a problem if I do this, if I do this well. So when you start asking questions, if something's wrong, you'll start to see little red flags coming out in the interview process. And if I see any red flags at all, I pass. I'm not going to hire that person. And so that's, that's one of the ways you, like, from the beginning, you ensure that you're hiring someone that you can trust by doing a whole bunch of questions over a bunch of emails and then paying attention to their answers and looking for, looking for details in their answers. Outside of that, there's just not a whole lot that you can do. It's not really that different than in the US you can contact their former employers. That's super reasonable to do. And if you ask for references they'll probably give you references. Most people I know don't want to spend that much time recruiting because it's easy to find someone else if it doesn't work out. But for me, I want to recruit once and then have someone great and have them work for me for a long time. And we do Enough on OnlineJobs ph to prevent scammers that you're unlikely to be dealing with a scammer and that person, if they find a job, it's hard to get a job. They really just want to keep their job so they're going to try and be honest with you. So how do you trust someone? It's hard. You have to gain that trust over time. But it's super reasonable to have them be fully, fully trustworthy to you and work in your business in like great, great detail. So my name is John Jonas. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I'll see you in the next one.
