John Jonas argues against "hire slow, fire fast." Quick hiring with a solid process works better for Philippine virtual assistants, he says, because slow hiring loses candidates and firing fast destroys the trust needed for high performance. Most problems come from poor training or mismatched expectations, not bad people.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 326 hire slow and fire fast is stupid. So I hear people often brag about their philosophy, which is hire slow and fire fast. I see it on Facebook, I see it in forums. I get feedback from people. And I know I'm going to make a lot of people mad with this, but I think it's stupid and I'm going to justify that. So let's start with the hire slow part of it. First of all, if you're hiring slowly, why, wow, that takes a lot of time. And that's like the most daunting thing that everybody fears about hiring someone is that it's gonna take a lot of time. I don't want something to take a lot of time. I want it to be fast. I want to hire fast. And I would imagine that's probably what you want. Also, you're listening to me. Everything I talk about is about spending as little time as possible for myself. So I wanna talk about hire fast. On the other side of that, if you're hiring so slowly in the Philippines, it's gonna send a lot of mixed messages. Like they don't know, are you actually interested? Are you just string? They're probably anxious to start working because they need the money. And if you're taking a long time, well, they're going to move on to someone else who's willing to hire them quickly. In the end, the right hiring process shouldn't take a long time. It should be pretty quick. Which is why I created 1vaoa.com after realizing that so many people struggled with their hiring processes. I had a guy email me and say, my team just spent more than 200 hours hiring and we haven't found the right person yet. I'm like, well, you're doing this wrong. That you're just doing it wrong. After realizing this, I realized I have a really, really good hiring process and I'm going to make this available to people. 1vaoa.com now, let's talk about the fire fast part of this hire slow and fire fast. I'm proud of One VA Away because I know that it works. I know the hiring process works. And so when I go through the process and find someone, I'm pretty dang confident that that person is really good. And if something is not working out, I know I have a good person. There's just something going on between us that I need to work through. And it's that working through it, that really creates rockstar workers. If you're firing fast because something isn't right with someone or something's not right between you, you're missing out on so many opportunities and you're really just setting yourself up for failure here. You're also setting your office up for failure. Like, you know how when you're super worried about doing something wrong and so you, you're really focused on like, oh, don't do this wrong, don't do this wrong, do this. You do something wrong, that's when you make a mistake. And if someone's really worried about getting fired, chances of them, especially in the Philippines, doing good work is very, very slim. Which is sometimes why it takes some time to work with someone through some problems before they really step out and start doing amazing work. It's not until they really trust you that you're not going to fire them, until they're willing to say, hey, I'm going to try this thing that you asked me and I'm going to try it this way and that way, and I'm go above and beyond because I know that if I make a mistake, it's not. I'm not going to get yelled at, I'm not going to get fired. I'm going to be fine. And almost all ofs will require this time period of like, learning to trust you, their employer, before they're willing to do really good work for you before that the firing piece is just too scary. So many people have this philosophy of fire fast. Why would I put in a bunch of really hard effort if I make a mistake and you fire me? Going to do a little bit and see what happens. Test the employer and see how do they respond to this. Not that they're purposefully going to do work incorrectly to test you, but they're probably not going to go above and beyond at the beginning. Because if they make a mistake and you fire them, which is common in their culture, then they just did a whole bunch of extra effort for no reason. In my experience is not until they have learned to trust you that they will do really amazing work. And that's where fire slow works really, really well for me. Often I've found that when someone's making mistakes, it's maybe because I didn't give them the right training or the training was incorrect, or maybe they didn't get enough training, or maybe I just. Maybe I think what I've given them is better than what it actually is. Or maybe I'm asking them to do something that isn't within their skill set, even though I thought it was. Maybe they misrepresented their skills, or maybe I misinterpreted what they said were their skills. Or maybe I've led them down the path of working mindlessly where they're just going through the motions and don't really care what the output looks like because I've led them down that path, which I've seen quite a few times. When you give an OFS a chance to correct their mistakes by working with them, you create a rock star worker. And what most of us want is that person we can rely on, a rock star who will do whatever we want. Like I talked about a couple episodes ago with Clarice, who is so amazing and I have multiple people like that on my my team where I can just rely on them. I can ask them to do whatever I want and they're going to get it done. What I found on the Internet is that people love to repeat advice that sounds correct even if they have no experience with it. To me, hire slow and fire fast is that advice. It's something that people love to repeat because it sounds cool and it makes you sound smart, even though to me it's stupid. Want to learn how to hire fast so that you don't have to fire fast so that you know you've found someone good 1vaoa.com it.
