Podcast episode (Secret Sauce of Outsourcing, ep.239) in which John Jonas recounts founding Onlinejobs.ph to solve his own hiring problems. He describes starting the site with minimal resources (one programmer), grassroots marketing in the Philippines, early growth driven by worker profiles and word-of-mouth, and later focusing on the business as it scaled to thousands of users and a favorable worker-to-employer balance.
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 239, the story behind onlinejobs ph. So I was recently interviewed by Starter Story and they. They wanted me to talk about starting onlinejobs ph, and if you want to, I'll link to that, the published story and in the description here. But I wanted to talk about starting onlinejobs ph because there's a lot of stuff that people don't know that I haven't talked about. So onlyjobs ph is a figure business right now. I work on it about 17 hours a week. I have for like 10 or 12 years. I have 40 people in the Philippines that. That help run the business. I have a business partner in Idaho. That's basically our whole team. So when I started onlinejobs ph, it was with very little money and with kind of an idea to solve a problem for myself where the only. The only option at the time was to hire through an agency because there was there. Well, actually there was a job board that was specific for the Philippines, but the owners of it thought that it wasn't acceptable for foreigners to hire Filipinos. And so they would just kick you off their job board. And after using the agency a few times and trying to use this, this other site where I was getting kicked off and I was just so frustrated, I decided one day, like, I think. I think there's a better way to hire people. And I want to recruit someone myself. I want to interview someone myself. I don't. I don't want to just go to an agency and have them pull someone off the street, which is typically what agencies. They're not finding great people for you because the incentive structure for an agency. Okay, so let me, Let me take a step back. So most employers who hire someone suck. It's not the worker that sucks, it's the employer that sucks. Employers often don't want anything to do with the worker. They just want someone to do the work. And don't ever talk to me. And I don't want to talk to you. And I don't want to give you feedback or instructions. I just want you to deal with it. Right. And so with agencies, when they hire someone, their incentive structure isn't to, like, find the best person for you because you as an employer are crappy or you might be. And if you're crappy, then it doesn't matter what they see because. And I know I've. Because we've been through this, it doesn't matter how talented the person you find is. If the employer sucks, it's just not going to work out. Their incentive is to just find someone and see if you're a good employer who they can work with. And so I was just like so frustrated with them finding crappy people, even though I would make it work with these crappy people. Like I wanted to find someone who's really, really talented at writing content. And they were saying, oh, do you want a webmaster or a programmer? And that's my only option. And I decided I want, I really kind of want to recruit someone on my own and I don't want to pay the three times markup on salary that the agency is giving me. And that was the case anywhere I went. And really today that's still the case where you have like a three times markup on the salary. So I went back to the agency and I hired this programmer and really this is all I had. I had an idea of a website, a job board that I wanted to build which was onlinejobs ph. I didn't have a designer, I didn't have a project manager. I just had this programmer and I described what I wanted to him and gave him some examples of this. He was like $750 a month for full time work and he was a pretty good programmer. And that was how I started. And realistically it took us like eight months to get the website to where we could launch it, including like very basic profile creations where workers were going to create their own profiles and they're going to rate themselves and their skills and I'm going to, and I'm going to be able to recruit some people and hopefully I thought maybe some of my friends could use this, some employers who I was working with could use this also. And so we kind of built it and I went to my team and said, how could you, how could we market onlinejobs PH in the Philippines? How can we get some profiles in here? And they said oh, I could go to Craigslist and post it on this. I could post it on this. Other classified ads, I could post it on my Friendster. Friendster was the social network at the time in the Philippines. And it was really big. And that's really all we did was we went to our team in the Philippines, which I think it was like six people, and asked them what could you do to market this? And so then they went out to their friends and within a couple days we started getting profiles created. I hoped to get a couple hundred profiles in there, which would be sufficient for me to maybe find like a single person in an industry or like three or four programmers on there that then I could recruit one of them who's the best one. And I thought maybe like we get a couple hundred and then that'd be great. That'd be so awesome. We had a couple hundred profiles in the first month where people just kept posting their profiles and talking about, talking with friends about it. And then at the time I was also kind of teaching how to hire in the Philippines. And so then I was telling employers, hey, like we just started this site and you could, you could try and hire someone from here. You set up an account and you go and you, you contact the workers. You're going to recruit them on your own, you're going to have to interview them. And it turned out that that was way more appealing to employers than the agency. People didn't want to go through an agency. They wanted to hire on their own. They wanted to do the recruiting on their own and find a great person on their own, someone that fits their personality and their requirements. And it just kind of blew up from there. And to be honest, I ignored it for probably six or seven years as I was, I was teaching people how to hire in the Philippines. That got bigger and it took my time. And I kind of thought that the online jobs thing was sufficient. What we had done, it was sufficient. Like, you know, there's profiles there and you can, you can look at the profiles and contact people and whatever. I didn't really care. And one day I looked at it and realized, wow, this is really big. Like, we've had thousands of employers use this and I had no idea. And it was growing every month and I just kind of ignored it. That's the start. That's the story behind how onlinejobs ph came. What it is today. I started focusing on it. This was like probably like 20 teen, maybe 15, maybe 13 when I started focusing on onlinejobs ph because it was, it was getting really big and it was like worth my time to focus on and started actually running some advertisements for employers to try and bring people in because we were getting so many people in the Philippines joining. We had so much opportunity for employers to find really talented people that we needed to bring in more employers. And so today the balance is really good of like, I would say it's like 4 to 1 of workers joining over employers, which makes it really, really great for employers to find people. So that's, that's the story of onlinejobs ph how it came to be, it was just like, it was just something that I needed for myself to be able to find workers so that I could grow my business. And then it turned out to be really great for other employers. Everybody, people wanted it. And the stories that people tell about it to their friends and that I could tell because of how, how good the work was in the Philippines was really a key to helping it grow. Creating content around what we were doing and the workforce in the Philippines. That content was a big factor contributing to the growth of onlinejobs ph over the years.
