Ep: 387: Afraid of making mistakes hiring an OFS
24 Nov 2025 · 6 min
John Jonas explains why hiring Filipino staff online doesn't have to be risky. Most mistakes come from underpaying, skipping vetting, or using sketchy platforms. Start with Onlinejobs.ph, require applicants to follow specific instructions, and ask detailed questions about their skills and background.
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 387, afraid of making mistakes when hiring an OFS. So I don't get negative comments very often about the Philippines, but I do get them. Sometimes someone will say, like, oh, you can't hire any good people in the Philippines, or everybody in the Philippines is a scammer. Or they're lazy and they can only follow directions. They're dumb. I mean, like I said, I don't get these comments very often. But it does happen, you know, when I get. I probably get 50 to one of, like, wow, this is amazing. Versus one negative. And so when I get that one negative, I'm interested. Like, what happened here? What did you do that caused such a terrible experience for you? And so when I ask, I usually see a bunch of mistakes from people. They didn't pay nearly enough. They were offering like $1.50 an hour, which is like, you know, like, that's not. That's not going to work right. Or you expected too much. You expected to hire a CEO for $1.50 an hour, something like that. Something silly. Or you took forever hiring someone. You just strung them along and tried to get them to do task after task after task without hiring them, without offering to pay them. Or you hired the very first person that you saw and never really vetted them well. Or you went to like, Craigslist or something silly like that, which, yeah, of course it's a bunch of scammers. Here's something interesting that we. That we found out really early on that I guess I didn't intend to talk about this today, but we don't offer a free trial@onlinejobs.ph. because we tried it. It was a disaster of scammers, which is why I never hear. Never really have heard of people successfully hiring from, like, Craigslist, something like that. Because free promotes scams. So, so early on, we tried to have a free account for employers. And what we found was workers were scamming employers because employers were scamming workers. And it was this vicious cycle of terrible. As soon as we forced all employers to pay before they could contact people, scams went away. And the employers were forced to be honest because you've just paid. And if you don't, if you're scamming people, then we're not going to give your money back. And if you are a worker and you're finding that all the employers are honest, well, you don't have a reason to scam people anymore because you can get a job, you can get a good job. Since we made that change, everything changed. @onlinejobs ph those who can't find a great worker are really the exception and not the norm. Onlinejobs had about 600,000 employers use the site and I would say about half of those have returned over and over and over again to hire again and again to hire their second, their fifth, their 20th person. That's about 300,000 people returning because it was good for them. It's a pretty high success rate. And we've been around since about 2008, although in the early years we were very, very little. But the evidence points towards people in the Philippines want to work hard, they want to do good. When they're not faced with scammers trying to get free work out of them, they're very, very good about trying to do good work for you. The evidence also points towards Onlinejobs ph being a really good place to find these people. That's why people return over and over again. That's why if at our real results page on onlinejobs ph you will see hundreds of testimonials from people. And I only put the good ones on there. I don't put the ones where it was like, oh, there were a couple words in there that were mixed in with other random things. But you're clearly having a good experience and you know, we've had thousands and thousands and thousands of people successfully hire from onlinejobs ph you can find really great people for your business. You can find rock stars. You can find highly talented people. You can find really high level people. You can find really low level people to do really easy tasks for you. It's all not that hard at onlinejobs ph if you want my help, check out one VAOA.com so now back to the original title. If you're afraid of making mistakes, well, there's a couple things you can do to prevent that right off the bat. One is start at a platform where you're not dealing with a bunch of scammers. That's at Onlinejobs ph anywhere where you're not paying to hire, you're dealing with scammers because employers are scamming workers. Workers are scamming employers. That's the first step to not making a mistake in doing this. Next, you're hiring in the Philippines and obviously you can find good people anywhere in the world, but your chances are just higher in the Philippines and that's a big deal. One more. When you go to post your job, make sure that you include something that requires them to think. So for me, that typically involves asking them to make the subject line a specific subject line when they apply. Otherwise you just get a whole bunch of looky loos. I guess people that are applying to all kinds of jobs, whether they're qualified or not, they just think that throwing a whole bunch of crap against the wall is what's going to get them the result they want, which is not. But no matter how many times we tell them that, it's still not going to change that. Some people are desperate and they're just going to apply to everything they possibly can, regardless of the quality. So put something in there so that you can easily filter people out who didn't read it, didn't follow directions that'll make your make this whole process so much easier. Then ask lots and lots of questions. Ask them tons of questions. Ask them questions about everything. Questions about their skills, questions about their background. Questions about their life. Questions about their family. Ask them questions about everything. You're so much more likely to hire an amazing person and make fewer mistakes when you ask tons and tons of questions. So again, onlinejobs ph really great easy place to start.
