Ep: 288: How To Find And Qualify An OFS You Can Trust

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 288, how to find and qualify an OFS you can trust. So I've been looking forward to this episode for a while because trust is like the number one question I get asked. How do I find someone I can trust? How do I know if I can trust this person? I get this every day. And trust, to me, is really interesting. Anytime something is unfamiliar to us, we don't trust it. And the Philippines, for most of us, is very unfamiliar. And yet philosophy Filipinos generally are more trustworthy than their American counterparts. There's this culture of honesty there. With foreign employers, it's different. And you'll see it almost immediately upon hiring someone. They want to make you happy. They want you to trust them. They want to do great work for you. They want to trust you, which, that's an interesting thing. The Philippines has the same feeling of mistrust like you feel. I don't know if I can trust this person. They have that same feeling, but their feeling is stronger than yours. They feel like, oh, I don't know if I can trust this boss to pay me, to pay me on time, to not take care of me, to not scam me, to not yell at me, to not make me lose face, to not embarrass me. All these things. They really have a lot of mistrust in you in the beginning. And if you take the approach of how do I get this person to trust me? Then they will show you that you can trust them really, really quickly. So then I actually want to talk about how you find this person that you can trust. And I'm going to talk about my recruiting process, because that's how I do it. So, number one, we're going to start at onlinejobs. Ph, obviously, that's my website, and there are over 2 million Filipino profiles there. Obviously, that's part of the reason why you're maybe not trusting people, because we're not vetting these profiles. We verify them, we verify each person, but we don't vet them. We don't tell you who you can trust and who you can't. And we, with over 2 million, there's a ton of skills. But there's also something to be said about finding the right person. It's not exactly finding a needle in a haystack. I wouldn't call it that at all, because there are so many really, really good people and the number of bad people versus Good people is really kind of a lower number. So step one, we're going to start at OnlineJobs ph. Step two, go to OnlineJobs ph and search for the skills that you are looking for. So in searching you have two goals. Number one, you're going to look at a bunch of profiles and see what are the skills that exist here. Number two, you're looking for how much are people looking to make? So within your skill that you're searching for, you want to know what other skills exist? Do people actually have the skill that you're looking for? And then how much are people looking to make within this skill area? Next, step three, you're going to post your job. And this is super simple. Now that you, you know what skills exist, you know how much to pay someone, writing the job post is pretty dang easy. It's simple and free to post your job. You'll probably get a lot of applications. And if your role is more specialized, like if you're looking for a specialized piece of software or someone who has a skill that's not common, then you're probably going to need to actually contact people rather than just post a job. So on onlinejobs ph, one of the really great things is you can search profiles like you did in step one, and then you can actually contact those individual workers that you're finding rather than just posting a job and being being at the mercy of who's looking for a job right now, you can contact people. So the more specialized your job is, the more you're going to need to contact people. Now when you do this, I really highly recommend that you do not narrow it down to the one that you want to hire. Rather than doing that, you want to contact 10 to 20 people and then hire the best available person. Just because there's a profile on onlinejobs Ph does not mean that person is available to work. It's kind of like indeed.com where you might put your resume and your profile. But if you already have a job, well then you're, you're not looking for another job, you're not looking for other work. So then step four, once you have posted your job, gotten applicants, or contacted people asking them if they're interested in work, now you're going to start interviewing people and I do this via email and I ask lots of questions and that's basically all I do. It's so much faster than doing a live interview. It will prevent you from losing really good candidates who don't want to get on a live interview because they're scared. Doing a live interview is like, it's just the wrong way to go about recruiting and hiring someone in the Philippines. They're scared about doing a live interview. Skip it later on in the process. I'll tell you when you can do the live interview if you'll ask lots of questions over a bunch of emails. First of all, an email that has three or four questions and it only takes 10 seconds because you're copying and pasting those questions from the previous person you wrote those questions in. And so you get through a lot of applicants really, really quickly rather than trying to schedule interviews. Number two, this is how you're going to interact with the person once you hire them. You're probably not going to have video calls with them every day, but you are going to have communication with them every day. And that's probably through email or a project manager system or chat. And so I really like interviewing the way that I'm going to work with people. It tends to weed out people better. So when I ask 2, 3, 4 questions across 5, 10 emails. Number one, scammers don't want to do this. They want something quick and easy. Number two, I find that people will drop themselves out of the process. Number three, I find that I get to drop people out of the process super easily because either I find something wrong or something's just not right, or I don't like your skills or whatever it is, it's just not working. Through this, I also get to see their personality and that personality comes out, which is really a big factor in saying, can I trust this person? So when you interact with them lots and lots of times, scammers, I've just seen this over and over again. Scammers just don't want to do it. And you usually end up with a bunch of people that you're pretty confident you can trust at this point. It's a good time to give someone a test task. You've narrowed it down to 2, 3, 5 people. You're going to give a test. And if that test is going to take more than, let's say, 20 minutes, you probably should pay for that test task. And now if you want to do the video interview, now's the time to do it, because now you've established some trust with them where they're starting to trust you, you're starting to trust them. They're much, much more likely to be willing to show up to an interview that they schedule. Whereas in the beginning, if and schedule interviews, you're going to get two out of 10 people showing up, the other eight, they're just not going to show up. So that's the four minute version of how I find someone that I can Trust on onlinejobs. Ph. Now I cover this in really great detail at 1vaoa.com. Not too much detail, though, because I wanted it to be fast. I want you to be able to go through it fast and do the steps while watching the videos and be able to hire someone really, really quickly and easily and efficiently. Because I know that you don't have time, I know that you don't want to spend time, I know that you don't want to do this. And the burden of trying to find someone you can trust is really high. And so my process@1vaoa.com is designed to make it easy, clean, efficient, simple, and to find someone that you can Trust really quickly. 1vaoa.com.