24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas explains why business owners rarely recommend their contractors or employees to others: they risk losing trained talent. Recruiting yourself takes only 2-3 hours with a good process and leads to better fit and retention than recommendation-based marketplaces like Upwork.
Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast. The podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 53. Can you recommend someone for me? So I get this email a couple weeks ago that says, hey, can you recommend to me someone to run my Facebook ads? Like, no, sorry, I can't, I don't really know anybody. And he replied and said, well, I'd really feel more comfortable if I could hire someone that you or your team could recommend to me. Like, well, yeah, I'm sure you would, but I can't give you that recommendation. I do have someone running my Facebook ads and they said that, like, hey, I see your ads all the time, they're really great. Can you give me the person that's running your ads? No, I'm not. No, they work for me. They work for me full time. I did recruiting, I've trained them, I've added to their knowledge. No. And if you ask other business owners hiring ofs, they're not giving out recommendations either. Like, it just doesn't make sense if I'm gonna do recruiting, if I'm gonna recruit someone and have them work with me and spend the time working with them and bring them into my business and vet that they are good and talented, it just doesn't make sense for me to hand out that name of that person. Because then you wanna hire them and then they're really good for you and then you wanna hire em full time and then you wanna just pay them more to keep them away from me. And like this just, it doesn't work. And that's why other business owners won't give you a recommendation either. Cause it just doesn't work like that. So if you want a recommendation, what I suggest you do is people are giving recommendations because upwork is built around turnover. Like that's the whole purpose. There is someone does some work for you, you give them a recommendation so that they can not work for you anymore and go work for someone else making more money so that person can give them a recommendation so they can not work for them anymore and go work for someone else making more money. It's a vicious, endless cycle of recommendations. They call it reviews. And so you get someone who another employer has reviewed, but you guarantee yourself 100% turnover in your business. And that sucks. So if you don't want 100% turnover, look, here's the solution. Number one, it's not that hard to find someone. And in fact it'll take you about the same amount of time to find someone permanent long term and vet them on your own as it will to do it through upwork. I've done this dozens of times and you're gonna have this about the same amount of work finding them on upwork, even though they're recommended there as you will on onlinejobs ph where you vet them yourself. It'll take you two to three hours. If you follow a good recruiting process, which at my 1vaoa.com program where I will walk you through my recruiting process, like how I find good VAs, it'll take you two to three hours max, total, all in. And then you're more likely to find someone good and keep that person, which means you're two to three hours total, not two to three hours once and then two to three hours again and two to three hours again because you keep losing people because that's how the system is built. Also, this is even better. Like once you hire this person, you know them like you're familiar with them, you know their personality, you know their personality is going to work for you. It's not just a recommendation from someone, it's a I understand your personality and I hired you because yes, we communicate well together and we get along together and the recruiting process is important. It matters. And so now when you go to start working with this person, part of it is already a big part of this is already out of the way. Because hiring someone isn't just about skills. It's not just about do they know how to do Facebook ads? You have to work with them and they have to understand you and your business. And so recruiting yourself is a big deal. I answered this question along with nine other questions@ofsguide.com these are the most common questions that I get and they are how do taxes work? Or how do you deal with time zones? Or are there actually good people that I can find? Or is someone gonna jump ship? Like, I answer all these eight questions, these nine questions, and it should be take you about four minutes to read all of it and get yourself a pretty good stable footing for can I or should I hire an OFS to help me in my business?
