24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas argues the Philippines has plenty of talented workers, but most employers use bad recruiting processes or rely on agencies that deliver mediocre hires. Direct hiring with proper vetting consistently finds excellent people.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 71, why you can't find good, talented people in the Philippines. So occasionally on Facebook, I get people. And by I, I mean my ofs who get on Facebook for me get people complaining about they can't find good talent or there aren't talented people in the Philippines. They're like, I've hired 16 people there and every one of them sucked. And this is a terrible thing. And the Filipino people are terrible, and this is bad. And yet at the same time, I see people all the time hiring virtual assistants, social media people, accountants, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers. I see all of these things getting hired on onlinejobs ph and probably a hundred other skill sets of people. In fact, every single day now, I get an email from an employer where they tell me, thank you so much for creating onlinejobs ph. I hired an amazing ofs there they are doing this and this and this for me, and my life is better because of it. I get this email every day. Which is it like, are there good people or are there not good people? So the reality is, I mean, there's 100 million people in the Philippines. Yes, there are good people there. Of course, it's just a matter of can you find them or not? Me and hundreds of thousands of others have found them. And so when I hear people complaining, I'm like, well, what did you do to find someone? Like, what was your recruiting process? And almost every time if they tell me what they've done, I see issues with it. Like, either they hired the first person they found or they went looking on onlinejobs ph and found the one that they wanted to hire and it didn't work out, or they didn't really interview people. They just kind of picked one and then assumed that what they had said on their profile was the right thing. And I just see all these. All these mistakes in the recruiting process. Things that you wouldn't do if you were hiring someone locally. Like, you just read their resume and you hired them. Well, you would like, you would never do that locally. And yet this is basically the same thing. Like, you're hiring someone overseas to bring into your company, and the recruiting process matters. Like how you interview this person and vet them. It matters. And this is what I teach with 1vaoa.com. It's my process to teach you. Here's how. How I find great people, and I find great people almost every time. I don't have the question of, oh, am I going to waste my time and not find someone good? Because I know, yes, I'm going to find someone good. And I know that the process works because I've seen thousands of people do it now. I've seen thousands of people go through one va away and successfully hire someone. And I offer a money back guarantee on it. And occasionally I give the money back because someone didn't find someone great. It happens. It's just not that often. So here's the other problem that I see with people who complain is either they did a crappy job of recruiting or often they weren't the ones doing the hiring. Like they went through an agency or through a service of like finding someone else finding the person for you, which it's just less effective if you're the one doing the recruiting. You're way more likely to find someone good for you. And an agency or a recruiting company, they know, like, they know that they're not going to succeed with this most of the time. So their goal isn't to find the best person. They just need to find someone who's good enough to put a warm body in the chair so that you can try it. Because some employers are going to suck. Like some employers are going to say no to everybody they find. So they just have to put someone there and see if you're the right employer. And if you're the right employer, then you get a mediocre person and you deal with it and that's fine. Or you do it yourself and you find someone great and you're the right employer and you have a great experience with it like hundreds of thousands of other people have done. So the whole process starts with posting a job. Just get the ball rolling. It makes finding someone so easy. If you just get the ball rolling at onlinejobs, PH or I will get the ball rolling for you really quickly at 1vaoa.com.
