Ep. 302: Let's Talk About Failure With OFS
24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas shares hiring failures with Online Filipino Specialists, including workers who faked skills with ChatGPT. Listener Tatiana had the same problem but found good hires after multiple tries. The lesson: failures happen, but persistence and better vetting work.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online. Filipino specialists. This is episode 302. Let's talk about failure with OFS. So every day I get emails from employers, people who have used onlinejobs pH, people are looking to use it, people who have failed, people have succeeded. I so often get people telling me my OFS are amazing. I have two or I have 10, or I just hired one this week and it's been so great. Or I get people saying, I wish I would have done this sooner. And then occasionally I get someone that says, oh, I hired someone from onlinejobs Ph, and they disappeared. It didn't work. The worker was terrible. Or I posted my job and I didn't get very many applicants and this didn't work. Or I didn't find the person that I needed. Nobody had any skills, which is completely unreasonable. There's 2 million people and there's so many skills. Or I didn't get very many applicants and this isn't, this isn't working for me. And I get that maybe this doesn't work out the first time for you. Maybe it's frustrating to fail at something. And my first hire that I ever made just wasn't successful. In fact, I made quite a few hires before I finally had a successful hire, which happened to be in the Philippines. The other ones were not. But if I, if I let that stop me, man, who knows where I'd be? Who knows where you'd be today? You wouldn't be listening to this podcast, that's for sure. And I always think back to all of the quotes of so many people over the years, like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell or Albert Einstein. Einstein says failure is success in progress. And I just think back to that every time I hear someone say, oh, this doesn't work. Like, yeah, well, I mean, it's really hard to argue with the thousands and thousands of people that say this does work and it's amazing, but you tried once and it didn't work. And wow, like, you have to come back to it. So let me read this email from Tatiana and then I'm going to tell a follow up story. So Tatiana says, I hope this message finds you well. I've recently encountered a series of challenges in hiring and retaining suitable team members and I would like to share my experiences and seek your valuable insights. Unfortunately, I've come across candidates who misrepresented their skills and experience during the interview process, including using AI tools like ChatGPT for responses and test projects. This has led to hiring individuals who ultimately failed to perform their duties. While these experiences can be frustrating, I believe they serve as learning opportunities. People around the globe have diverse work ethics and it's crucial to conduct thorough due diligence to find the right fit. Your feedback and insights are much appreciated. Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you, she says. By the way, I've shared this previously with you, but I want to reiterate that I have hired and retained three awesome team members from your site for three to nine months. So Tatiana came across some bad workers. She had some people use ChatGPT, which is becoming more and more common. And frankly to me, here's what I see in ChatGPT. If someone can use ChatGPT to fool you in the interview process, then they can certainly use it in the work that they're doing to provide good, quality work to your business. Now, I'm not condoning using chatgpt to fool someone cause I don't think it's right and and it'll only go so far. The reality is she had some people that were trying to deceive her and she figured it out, which was good for her. But she did learn from her mistakes. And after sending me this email, I actually just got a follow up from her recently saying that she worked it out. She hired two amazing people, they've been with her for a couple weeks and it's been really, really good for her, which is the whole point here. Tatiana failed. I failed. You failed. She didn't let it stop her. She, she went back to it. She hired people. It's working out really great for her. Not all hires are perfect. Not I'm not perfect in my hiring. I still make mistakes occasionally, but I've seen thousands or really hundreds of thousands of people change their lives by finding an OFS and working with them through problems and getting it going. And your business starts to grow. So how about you? Are you pushing through your failures both with OFS and in your business? When you fail, do you learn from that failure and push through it? But that's what I hope for. That's what I hope from this podcast as you learn from mistakes that you've made and you push through and you go back and do it right the next time. Do you have a story to share? I would love to hear it. Send me an email. Johnlinejobs PH or do you want my help in hiring someone great? Despite my failures occasionally, I'm actually really really good at it. And I can walk you through at one Vaaway.
