How to Avoid the 6 Biggest Mistakes When Hiring a Filipino VA

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 175, Six Ways to Fail. When hiring an OFS. Hiring someone in the Philippines, outsourcing your business, there's a learning curve to it, right? I mean, it doesn't have to be a huge learning curve. It can be easy. You can make it hard. I definitely see people that do both, people that make it really easy on themselves, and I see people that make it hard on themselves. And so I want to talk today about six different things that I see people commonly do that make it hard on themselves when hiring someone in the Philippines. So here we go. Number one, I see people try to hire someone to do everything. Don't try and hire someone to do everything. Listen to this email that I get. Hi, John, I'm looking for someone to help me in my business. I need a VA who can build and design my website, create a database for my products, write a weekly newsletter and blog posts, make videos for social media, and make product images for me. Is there someone like that on your website? So you want a programmer, designer, video editor, webmaster, fluent in English, likes to write, writing, sales copies, autoresponders forum, like, dude, this person doesn't exist. They don't exist in the Philippines. They don't exist in the U.S. no. Right. That person doesn't exist. And you should be realistic with what you're hiring. Trying to hire someone to do everything is not realistic. Hire someone to do a specific task. Hire someone for a role. Not even for a specific task, but for a role, a specific type of task, and then train them to be able to do all things related to that. Mistake number two, hire a project manager. So I see people all the time that they just don't want to deal with this, right? So they're going to hire a project manager and six other people to make a full team and expect the project manager is just going to manage the whole thing and they're never going to have to touch anything and it just doesn't work. Not that they're not capable of project managing. They definitely are. And I have a couple of people on my team that are really, really good at it. And it's awesome for me, but that wasn't how I started. And I've seen this too many times. Like, I had a guy come to me and say, oh man, they suck in the Philippines. I hired like 20 people to do SEO for me and had a project manager and they never did anything. I was like, dude, well, would you ever hire 20 people in the US and a project manager just say, hey, go do SEO? It's just kind of not how it works, right? You can hire a project manager, but they've got to have knowledge in the thing that you're doing and probably have to understand your processes. And then they probably need to build that team over time. It's just not a I'm going to hire six people all at once and hand it off to someone else and never deal with it kind of thing. It just doesn't work. It's a mistake I see people make. Which leads to mistake number three, which is hire someone and ignore them. So if you're the type of person that, like, you don't want to deal with people, you don't want to deal with someone, this isn't going to work for you. I see people do this. You hire someone and then you don't want. You don't want to provide feedback, you don't want to provide training. You're frustrated with any little thing that they do wrong or a time that they come to you asking for help. This is, this just isn't for you. It's not going to work for you. They're not going to pick up and run your business. They're not going to run that thing in your business without help from you. You have to train people. You have to provide feedback. If you need help with training, we have training@vasmadeeasy.com done for you. Ready to hand off to your VA. It'll make it so much easier. Mistake number four that I see people make is asking someone to do a bunch of work before you offer them a job. So this is so frustrating to me. So I get an email. I'm going to read you this email. I get this email that says, can you please tell me why I can't successfully hire someone? They all keep disappearing. Here's the email I send them. I want you to start by doing a trial task. Write 20 articles, submit them to article directories, do a bunch of directory submissions for me, build website and write all the content for it. Then I'll evaluate your work and see if it's going to work out. Yeah, right. I mean, this is not, this is not reasonable at all. Filipinos are very scared of doing a bunch of work and not getting paid. They're scared of being taken advantage of. And you're clearly taking advantage of people here. They will only do real work after you have offered them a job and started Them working for you. So if you're going to give them a test task, that's fine. It needs to be small. If it's going to be more than half an hour, you got to pay for it. That's otherwise you're just going to lose all of your recruits. They, they just, they're not interested in doing the work. They're not interested in being taken advantage of. So the number five mistake that I see is demand immediate results. So from what I've seen, this is a long term proposal. This is not a magic bullet. They're not magic people in the Philippines. And I see often people think they're magic and they expect everything perfectly the first time. And really that's not how this works. I mean, people expect to have my results. The first person you hire. I've been doing this since 2005. Like it's been a long time for me. I've spent a lot of time working with a lot of people and yeah, I get really amazing results. But I've also put the time into it and it's not immediate. The first person you hire, they're gonna make mistakes. And if you can't handle mistakes being made, then this probably isn't gonna work for you. So demanding that things be done immediately and correctly immediately and get finished immediately, just, there's not, it's not going to work. Mistake number six, search and search and search for the right person and then email them. So this is, I see, I still see this one. I don't know, a couple times a week someone emails me and says, hey, I searched and I narrowed it down. I searched for three days and I found the perfect candidate. And they said everything that, they said they could do, everything that I want them to do, which is amazing. And I emailed them and I haven't heard back from them in a week. Why haven't they responded to me? Well, they haven't responded because the Filipinos are loyal. And if they already have a job, then they're likely to not respond to your inquiry because they're loyal to their employer. So the wrong way to do this is to, is to narrow down candidates before you've talked to people. The right way to do it is to cast a really wide net and hire the best available person. Everybody wants to hire the best person, but the best person is the best available person because if they're not available, it doesn't matter how good they are. They, they're not going to work for you. Right. So what I do is I cast a wide net I will contact. If I'm going to contact people, I'm going to contact 10 or 20 people. I'm going to post a job post, I'm going to get people applying to it. And then from the pool of those who apply, including those who apply to my job post and those who reply to me, contacting them, then I'm going to start interviewing and I'm going to start asking lots of questions. But the mistake way is to narrow it down and contact one or two people and say, oh, that's the person I want to hire. And now I'm going to contact you. You're not looking at a person available. You're looking at someone's resume. And if they already have a job, well, like I said, they're probably not going to respond to you. So these aren't hard things to avoid. They're just things. In order to avoid them, you have to know which you know. I just told you six of them. I talk about all kinds of things like this@1vaoa.com where I will help you avoid the pitfalls in hiring someone. If you're putting this off because you're worried about making a mistake or you're not sure you're going to do it right, one VAOA is the way to go. I see people, I mean, people use it every day and people successfully hire every day. And I get emails from people so, so often saying, thank you so much. It was so helpful. There were things, people, even people that I've hired 10 or 15 times in the past and they say there were things that I was doing previously that were so frustrating to me, I didn't know why it wasn't working. Now I know, so I don't know everything. I'm not the best. And I'm sure you can hire someone on your own, but1vaoa.com is my way. It's me walking you through how I succeed at this almost every single time.