24 Nov 2025 · 6 min
John Jonas argues against video calls with Filipino job applicants. Many skip or miss them due to poor internet, timezone issues, or embarrassment about their surroundings. Use text-based screening instead unless the role requires real-time calls.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 309, why you should not do a phone call with a potential ofs. So when I watch people recruit people in the Philippines, the first thing that most people want to do is schedule their applicants a live zoom interview with them. I see this all the time. It's probably the most common thing that I see. The most common, common mistake that I see in recruiting is, you got an applicant. Hey, when can we schedule an interview? Don't do it. It's. This is the wrong way to approach hiring people in the Philippines. And I hear this all the time. People are like, hey, John, I'm really having a hard time recruiting someone. I've scheduled interviews with people, and they keep not showing up. Well, yeah, that's correct. Let me give you some experience and then some thoughts about this. So for me, if you have 10 applicants you're going to schedule, you want to try and schedule video interviews with them. Five of them won't schedule because they're scared. They don't want to do a video interview with you. They're too scared to do it. They're scared about figuring out the time zones. They're scared about being on time. They're scared about you hearing them. There's all kinds of things. Actually, I'm going to talk about that in a minute. The other five will schedule with you, and of those five, three of them won't show up. So now you're frustrated because you had these three interview slots. People didn't show up. Of the 10, only two people showed up to an interview. And that doesn't mean they were the best candidates for the job, because most likely your job doesn't require people doing a video interview. All it meant was these people are most comfortable doing a video interview. It doesn't mean they're the right people to work for you. So you lost 80% of your candidates because you insisted on doing a video interview with people. And it's not that you weeded out the bad ones and ended up with the two best ones. You very well may have weeded out the best one, just not the most confident ones. So then why are they doing this? Why is this the behavior that they don't want to schedule and then they don't want to show up? Well, there's a bunch of things. Number one, they're scared of being embarrassed, which is probably the primary driving factor. They're scared of being embarrassed. And if they get Embarrassed. It's like, I mean, it's so bad for them. And how can a video interview embarrass them? Well, they fear that you won't understand them. Maybe their English is perfect, flawless. They know they're going to understand you because they watch American tv. They know they're going to understand you, but they're really scared about you not understanding them. And if you don't understand them, well, that's a disaster for them. They're also scared about their Internet connection. They don't know if it's going to be sufficient because they probably haven't done a video interview before. And if it's dropping, if it's dropping them, well, they're embarrassed. They're worried that you're going to hear the chickens clucking outside or the dogs barking or that someone's going to walk through their kitchen while they're doing the interview and they're going to be embarrassed. Or they're worried that they're not going to show up at the right time because often in the Philippines, they don't use time the same way we do. They don't keep calendars at exact times of day. They don't have 3:15. They have it's too hot to work, so I'm going to stop working now, or the sun came up, it's time to start working. Which is very different than. Than the way that we work in the US Now. Not everywhere in the Philippines is like that. A lot of places they do have exact time schedules, but a lot of places they don't. And if you just found a really great candidate who lives in one of these places that doesn't, well, they're probably not going to show up to a video interview because they don't understand how the time zones work. And they're worried about not showing up on time and they're worried about disappointing you. And it really does. The video interview, the scheduled thing, the very first time really does cause a lot of problems. So when I talked to one of my ofs about this, she focused on the dogs and the chickens piece of it, which was really interesting to me. So here's what she said about dogs and chickens and interviews. So she says, do all Filipinos have dogs and chickens? No, we don't all have dogs and chickens. Some of us only have dogs. Some of us only have chickens. Joking aside, it seems like every Filipino worker out there has a loud dog or chicken in the background. It's not true, but I can understand why it seems that way. Our pets are loud There's a reason for that. Those that have chickens for pets sometimes also raise fighting cocks. Cock fighting is legal in the Philippines. If you're going to have fighting cocks, you might as well raise some chickens for meat and eggs. Roosters crow any time of the day or night. Hens cluck non stop. So the more chickens you have in your yard, the louder things will get. Now about our dogs. Like in the US we have dogs for companionship. They're part of the family, but some of us also get them for security. Burglary is a common crime in the Philippines. A guaranteed deterrent for thieves is when you have a big, loud, angry dog. People would think twice about stealing packages when they know the house has a dog ready to attack. So the bigger and louder the pet dog is, the better. That's what she writes about their chickens and dogs or chickens or dogs. And my experience is every time I've ever gotten on the phone with someone in the Philippines, I can hear chickens or dogs or both. So my advice to you is if you don't need the zoom phone call, skip it. If you don't need to do a video interview with someone, skip it. If the position you're hiring for does not require someone to be on the phone or on zoom calls or talking with clients, skip the audio video piece of this and do it through text. That's how you're going to interact with them most of the time anyway. That's how they're going to interact with your customers is through either email or chat or whatever it's going to be. And that's probably a better way to determine how good they are, how qualified they are for your job position. If you want to avoid other mistakes like this one, I cover everything that I can think of at1vaoa.com where I will walk you through my process of finding a great person. In fact, I just followed my process again last week and it took me probably 45 minutes total from start to finish to hire an amazing content writer. That includes writing the job post, interviewing people, and figuring out who to hire. Start to finish. Probably 45 minutes of my time. Yeah, that took me a couple days, but you know, maybe eight minutes a day for five days. And I hired someone super duper amazing. I can teach you how to do this too. It's not that hard. It shouldn't take you very long. 1vaoa.com.
