John Jonas shares how to screen 100+ VA applicants without drowning in resumes. He uses a short follow-up questionnaire to spot red flags, requires a specific subject line to auto-filter, and asks directly whether candidates used AI. The whole process weeds out unqualified people before you spend time on calls.
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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 340. I got 100 job applicants. What do I do? So what do you do when you get bitten by having too many applicants to your job post, which is a real problem, we had to put a limit on the number of applicants that can apply to any given job. We Limited at 200. If you get 200 applicants to a job post, it is completely overwhelming and, and non functional. In fact, once you get past 30 or so applicants, it becomes really too much to manage. And onlinejobs. Ph we have so many applicants that depending on what you're posting for, you'll get a lot of. You'll get a really big response. Now there are some things you can do to lessen that and some things you can do if it does happen. So the first thing to do is pause your job, stop getting applicants inside of your account. You can, there's, there's a little toggle to make your job post inactive. Then you don't lose the job post. You can repost it again if you want. Just change the toggle from active to inactive. Then the next step is to start, start whittling down people. And what I will do typically is say, I will say thanks for applying and then I will ask three or four questions. One of those questions right now that I find myself asking over and over again is did you use AI in your response? Now I'm not opposed to someone using AI in their, in their application. I just want to know if they're going to be honest about it. And it's super easy to check for AI using like AI content detection. There's lots of, lots of tools online and so I can see if you did or didn't. Now if I got a lot of applicants, I'm certainly not going to check any of them against an AI detector. It's not worth my time. But it is worth asking them did you use AI to see what they did, what they say? Then the other questions might be tell me more about yourself or tell me how you would solve this problem or how many years experience do you have with this? The point is just to get a conversation going. The questions change depending on the position I'm hiring for. But I just want to start them talking again outside of just a form application that they just sent me probably. And then I don't actually send that to everybody. I send it to everybody who looks reasonable at first glance. So I do not spend a bunch of time weeding out. At first glance, I will send this set of questions to a lot of people, but not to everybody. Anybody who looks reasonable. In all of my job posts, I always ask for them to create a specific subject line when they're applying. And recently I've been asking them to use a certain number of apply points when applying. And so if they can't do those two things well, then I'm probably not going to look at their application. And that's a really easy way to weed out a lot of people. And then if they're clearly not qualified, I'm not going to respond from here. This is where the weed out process really starts. I'm going to drop people out as I get responses from them because I can see like you're just not as qualified as I want, or your attitude is not the right attitude that I want, or you don't have the experience that I want, or the I can just tell. And you can tell based off of responses from people. Some people aren't going to respond to you. They're not going to respond to the question about did you use AI, they're too concerned, or they just won't respond at all because they're worried they did use AI and they're going to be embarrassed and so they're just going to drop themselves out. And they're going to drop themselves out based off of all kinds of questions that you ask. And you'll find you drop people out. They drop out. Some people won't do a test. Some people will do the test task poorly. Some people just will not be a good fit. And you'll know that. And pretty soon you've weeded it down very quickly without ever having to get on the phone, without having to talk to people, and by spending very little time just copying pasting the same email over and over and over again. That's how I start my recruiting process, which I cover in a lot of detail@1vaoa.com. This is why I created it, so I can show you exactly how I go through this process very quickly, how I find really great people every time without spending a bunch of time, without fearing that I'm going to fail or going to get scammed. It's very easy. Get through all of the resumes, find the right person, know that they're the right person because of what I've done on the way leading up to it, and then hire that person and get them started really quickly. So if you've gotten too many applicants to your job post, go check out 1vaoa.com where I will walk you through how to narrow that down to a really, really great person that you can hire.
