John Jonas (Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast, Ep. 266) explains that job titles carry strong social and psychological importance in the Philippines: impressive titles signal status and increase workers' sense of ownership and responsibility. He illustrates this with a listener anecdote where changing a posting’s title to “Chief of Staff” produced rapid, high-quality applicants, and he recommends three practical recruiting moves: use an appropriate title, repost listings if initial applicants are poor, and proactively search/invite suitable candidates (e.g., via OnlineJobs.ph).
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with online Filipino specialists. OFS. This is episode 266. Job titles are important in the Philippines. So this is an interesting, interesting topic. Job titles where job titles aren't important to me, they just don't matter. I don't care what your job title is at work, it doesn't impress me. But in the Philippines it's a really big deal and it's actually something that I've seen solve quite a few problems at work. So in the Philippines, an impressive job title is a source of pride. It's like a night a nice sounding job title announces to their family and friends that they how good they are at their job and how much money they're making. Without openly saying it, it announces how important they are. Which is not super dissimilar from here in the us but in the Philippines it, it's even more so. And I've even found that job titles are important towards giving people the willingness to do the work that they're assigned to do. Where without a job title they don't necessarily feel the responsibility to get the work done correctly with a title, they feel ownership over something. So another important side of this is in actually recruiting. So Lucas sent me this email recently. This was kind of interesting. I was looking for somewhat of a general va, but with more experience and strong communication skills. I got plenty of applications, but very few qualified candidates. A couple of awesome candidates, but none that felt like a home run. I tried changing the job title to cos. Chief of Staff. Reached out to a handful of people and had completed applications, test projects and interviews within 12 hours. With two all caps. Stellar candidates. Interviewing one more leader today and hiring someone tomorrow. Amazing talent. Just had to look for and advertise the right job title role. The job title mattered and it matters in the Philippines. So in addition to the job title mattering, here are two more things that I want to talk about based off of what Luca said. So number one, he posted the job but he also reposted the job. And to me, whenever you're not getting the right candidates@onlinejobs ph if you post a job and you don't get the right things, which sometimes happens, repost the job. And I have always found at almost every case for me, if I don't get the right applicants, if I repost the job, I will. I don't know why this happens. We're trying to figure it out, but reposting the job very often will cause you to get more applicants and better applicants. I don't understand. The second piece of this is that when Lucas went back, he didn't just post a job. He also went on and searched and found some people and invited them to apply. And my guess is he either sent them the job post URL or he said, hey, are you interested? I'm looking and I'm hiring. Can you send me whatever these things are? So as he reached out to them by their OnlineJobs ph profile, which is super simple. You click on someone's profile and there's a contact button and it's super easy to send a message. So then he gets not only the people who apply to his job, the people who see it, but he also gets to reach out to people proactively based on their resumes of what they've said they can do. Now, just so you know, when you do this, you should check and see, do you already have a job or how many jobs do you have or what, what are your working hours right now? Because very often they'll already have a job. That's why they're not applying to jobs. That's why they didn't apply to your job, because they have a job. But I've also found some really, really great people. In fact, last week I hired someone who he had a job, but he was looking to leave that job. He wanted to leave that job. And he said, look, I need two more weeks at my current job. Great, let's do it. And so he, I mean, he's, he started with us slowly, been really, really amazing. I'm super excited about it. So job title matters. Post your job again and invite people to apply to your job. Three really good ways to get some really good candidates.
