John Jonas explains why traditional background checks don't work in the Philippines and what to do instead when hiring a VA. Use local documents like NBI clearance, start with careful interviews, give staged access to your systems, and build trust gradually rather than relying on checks that aren't available.
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Background checks in the Philippines. The other day I sent something to Julia, my office, who writes my newsletter, and said, hey, will you write something about background checks in the Philippines? I get asked this question all the time. People want to know, like, should I do a background check? Or how do I do a background check? Or what service can I use? There is no such thing. And Julia knows that. But I had to explain to her why people expect this. And the first line she wrote when I opened up this newsletter, and I laughed and. And she wrote, no background check beats doing the work yourself. And I laughed because, like, she gets it. The background check would be really cool if you could do it, but dang, just hire someone. Because hiring someone without a background check is so much better than doing the work yourself, right? And even my OFS gets it better than a lot of people who are like, oh, I want to hire someone. But what about. But what about, like, sorry, all of your excuses. Dang. Okay, so let's talk about background checks then. So in the US we're so used to it because we do background checks for everything. We do background checks for a bank account or for volunteering or for renting an apartment or doing business with some people or to establish credit. We do a background check for everything. We have this Social Security number that follows us around our whole lives, and companies aggregate all the data around us and they sell it to other companies. And we're just so used to that that we expect other places do it and other places don't do it is really kind of nice for them. In the Philippines, we've talked to our. We've talked to our team multiple times, like, how could we do a background check? And their answer is, you can't. There's no such thing. In the Philippines, the closest thing that they have is an NBI clearance. It is a. Basically a clearance saying you don't have a criminal record from. I don't know if it's from the local police station, but maybe the National Bureau of Investigation. I don't know. It's called an NBI clearance. You can ask that from your ofs. But in the Philippines, it's also, like, super easy to get a ticket for, like, jaywalk or littering or something. Silly, right? Even though I think littering is really, really horrible. That's the closest thing that they have. You could also ask for a barangay clearance, which I talked about recently. Similar things, slightly different. So NBI clearance and barangay clearance, that's really it. The Philippines started rolling out a national ID system similar to our Social Security numbers. But it's gonna take a long time before it becomes usable towards background checks of any sort. While doing a background check seems really appealing, just doing the interviewing yourself and doing a thorough job in your interviewing process is as effective as anything that I've seen. You really get to know someone when you interview them well, and then you start working with them. And when you start working with someone, don't give them access to everything. Give them access. Over time, you'll find pretty quickly, oh, yeah, this person's really trying to be trustworthy. So right now I'm working with someone locally here who's not quite homeless, but really close to being homeless. And they're. He's a really good dude. If I hired people in the US to do stuff, I'd probably hire him. Like, he's. He's nice and he's helpful and he's smart. He's just struggling, right? But I'm pretty sure that if I looked at his background, it would be a disaster. He had a lot of years of really dark life, and he has changed. Like, he's a different person. I often feel like we use background checks as a crutch to, like, let me be lazy. Let someone else tell me a little bit about what's gone on for this person in the past, because I'm not willing to figure it out right now. So NBI clearance, barangay clearance, and then do the interview yourself. Do your interviewing yourself. You'll find you're so much more likely to find someone. And in fact, if you do it yourself, you and use one VA away, I guarantee you'll find someone good or I'll give you your money back. One VA away is $49 one time. You can use it forever. And onlinejobs ph is $69 or $99. And if you don't find someone good, get your money back there too. We'll give you your money back for everything. I guarantee you find someone good if you follow a good recruiting process.
