How to Find RockStar Filipino Workers - Course Video 5 - John Jonas
In this tutorial John Jonas walks viewers through the evolution of hiring Filipino remote workers, starting with traditional methods like traveling to the Philippines or using leasing services such as Agents of Value, which marked up salaries and proved costly. He then describes his experience with BestJobs.ph, a site that allowed direct hiring but was later shut down for foreign employers. This led to the creation of his own platform, OnlineJobs.ph, which he positions as the largest and most efficient marketplace for Filipino talent. Jonas demonstrates the site’s interface, showing how keyword searches return thousands of resumes, and explains how to narrow results using filters, skill ratings, salary expectations, and the proprietary “ID Proof” score that gauges a candidate’s authenticity. He critiques typical Filipino resumes, explains why his platform uses self‑rated skill stars, and offers guidance on interpreting those ratings (four‑ and five‑star skills are reliable, lower stars indicate uncertainty). Throughout, he provides concrete profile examples—virtual assistants, web developers, SEO specialists—highlighting salary ranges, education, experience, and English proficiency. He warns against over‑relying on listed Photoshop skills, advises focusing on English for most roles, and stresses the importance of the ID Proof metric. Jonas also outlines the subscription model required to contact candidates, mentions alternative sites like EasyOutsource.com, and cautions against using Craigslist due to scams and low success rates. The video concludes with a recap of why OnlineJobs.ph is his preferred solution despite his ownership stake.
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Hey guys, this is John Jonas and in this video I'm going to show you how to find people in the Philippines. So when I got started, there was kind of a problem. There was only two ways of doing it. Number one, you could go to the Philippines or number two, you could use a service like Agents of Value, which is where I got started. So Agents of Value is an American company. They have offices in the Philippines. They recruit Filipino workers, bring them into the office, and they kind of mark up their salaries and lease them back to you. So the good thing about it is they're giving you a full time worker where that person only works for you. The hard part about it is when I found out that I was paying them 750amonth and they were paying my worker 250amonth, it just didn't work for me. And there are hundreds of services that will do this. This is the super popular thing to do, is to set up an office in the Philippines and mark up workers and send them and then lease them to you. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with this. I just think there's a better way, you know, and it makes. It'll make a six to $10,000 a year difference on what you're paying if you'll do it another way. So the next way that I figured out how to do it was through BestJobs ph and Best Jobs. When I found it was amazing. And that was like six or seven years ago. And they had a whole bunch of Filipino resumes where I could search through them and, and kind of recruit them on my own. And I could pick through thousands of them. And then one day. And so with Best Jobs, I could hire them and they would work from home. And so I didn't have the markup, the salary markup that Agents of Value gave me. And so I could hire the same person for $300 a month instead of 750amonth. And it was amazing. One day the ownersofbestjobs ph went crazy and they decided that it wasn't okay for foreigners to hire Filipinos anymore and they shut the site down. And since then, the site has gone way, way downhill. When I found it, there was like 29,000 resumes. And today there's like 11. It's just kind of not what it was. So when that happened, when they went and started shutting everyone's accounts down and shut the site down, that was when we started onlinejobs Ph, which currently today is the biggest, easiest way to find workers in the Philippines. And I'LL go through it. And just so you know, I own onlinejobs Ph. Try to be totally upfront and honest with you guys here. I own it, but for the last six years, I've run it specifically with the purpose of you finding Filipinos who want to work for you. And I'll show you some of, some of why it's the best. So, okay, so here is onlinejobs Ph. And just so you know, as you look at this, we're constantly testing things. We're constantly testing new layouts. So as you look at this, you may see something completely different even today, as we're running numerous tests to try and improve the user experience. So just be aware that what you see may be different than what I'm showing you. But you're going to get the general idea here. So on the homepage, I'm going to do a search here for virtual assistant and show you what we find. So first of all, just by putting in the keyword virtual Assistant, we're getting 24,000 resumes back of people who have said they're a virtual assistant. So 24,000 is too many to go through. So I want you to know that by using this, you can sort and filter it down. So you're getting a much more manageable number of resumes to look at if you want to look at resumes. So before I show you how to do that, let me show you kind of what you're seeing here. So this girl is asking for 18,000 Filipino pesos a month, which right now is about $404 a month, which is not super cheap for 20 hours a week, although I'm guessing that she's looking to make that amount full time. But she's willing to work 20 hours a week. You just contact her and ask her, how much do you want to make? She's a college graduate. Her experience is she's been a ghostwriter, virtual assistant, and ESL teacher. Her ID proof is 99. Now, I want to talk about. I'll talk about ID proof in just a minute. Just note, it's very important. Okay, so here's another guy, $337 a month. Here's another one. $337 a month. That's just coincidental. They're both asking for the same 15,000 pesos a month, 40 hours a week, associate's degree in computer technology. And that's real. She is a college graduate. Basically, everybody you find is going to be a college graduate here. So let's kind of look at a couple of these, I want you to see some of these. So here's this girl, experienced virtual assistant with excellent English skills, asking for 20,000 pesos a month, which is about $450 a month for full time work, 40 hours a week. And that's pretty normal. I mean for a virtual assistant it's a little bit high, but not a lot. Five years of experience since she's a college graduate. So as you start to look down, she has two reviews and you have to, you have to upgrade your account in order to see the reviews. She's ta, she's 28, female, with an upgraded account. You can also see their address and her website. She's taken an IQ test which she scored 141 on, which is really, really high. And you're gonna find this. I mean I've seen IQ tests from people in the 80s, I've seen them. This is one of the higher ones I've seen. But you know, really smart girl, very, very advanced English. You can see when she was last active and when she last updated or how long she's been a member at online jobs. So you know, just from the beginning, this profile looks pretty good. As you scroll down, here's what you're going to see. They've given us a skill summary. Manages existing Google Ad campaigns, Social media marketing, social bookmarking, Social Media Manager, Backlinking, WordPress, Amazon, FBA, Google Location Services. So all kinds of skills here. The first thing it shows you are the top skills. Now here's what we did with onlinejobs. Ph. Every other site out there lets Filipinos write their resumes which if you've ever seen a Filipino resume, they're terrible. Like they'll tell you where they went to elementary school and what grades they got and where they went to secondary school and the grades they got and what religion they were when they were 5 and when they were 10 and when they were 17. It runs me out of breath just thinking about their resumes that I've seen. So rather than letting them write their own resumes, we had them rate themselves in a whole bunch of different skills that we know that people want. And so here are the top skills that she's rated herself in. She said she's five stars at English speaking and writing, four stars at blogging, email marketing, SEO, social media marketing and video editing. So you know, those are pretty good skills to have, especially for someone you're paying 400, $450 a month for full time work. As you scroll down you'll see that she's also rated herself in other categories. She's just not as good. Now what I recommend you do when you're looking at someone's resume is you can count on the four and five star skills. Two and one star skills means I've seen this thing, I know what it is. Three star skills says okay, I can get really good at this, but I'm not yet. So as we scroll down, you're going to see English. I have three years working experience with the BPO industry honing my English speaking skills above average English writing and speaking skills. Attended training seminars to improve English proficiency. Commended for having little to no native tongue accent and speaks fluent well versed English American accent. So you know her English isn't perfect but it's pretty good. And often when they're writing their resumes they'll slip into this third person commended for having little to no where was it anyway they'll slip into this third person where they talk about themselves as if someone else is talking about them. It's very common in Filipino resume writing or lack of skills, but very good at English speaking and writing. Also very good at blogging. She can do copywriting, marketing and sales. She knows some marketing and skills but she's good at email and SEO which is good. Great. Scrolling down you'll see a little bit of advertising. Not much Google Adwords, but she knows what it is, she knows what HTML is, she knows what WordPress is and can probably be pretty good at it. Good at video editing which is an interesting skill to have here. Just, you know, again, two and one star skills, not stuff to hire someone based off of three skill threes means they can get good at it. So you know, for $450 a month for full time work, this is, this is quite a bit of talent. So if you come back here to the homepage here, I'm going to click on this one where we've kind of put out some standard searches that people like to do for webmasters or SEO or WordPress and writers. And you can see there's a lot of people under each of these things. We have a lot of resumes. So I'm going to go to the, to the webmaster one and just kind of give you an idea of what you're going to find here. So this guy, WordPress expert webmaster, photo and video editing SEO, graphic design 18,000 pesos a month $400 ID proof of 87 oh, you know what, I forgot to tell you something. Let me go back here for a second. Okay. ID proof 79. So, you know, you saw a couple of them that were 99, 96. Here's a 79. Now, what? ID proof is a system that we developed for determining if someone is who they say they are. It does not tell you how good they are at what they've said they can do. It just tells you, do I believe this person is who they say they are? One of the problems you have in hiring people overseas is you don't know if they actually are who they say they are. Maybe there's someone from India pretending to be a Filipino, and then they're lying about all their skills. Or maybe they are a company pretending to be an individual and they're going to farm out the work that you give them to other people, you know, so I've looked at thousands and thousands of resumes, and I finally developed the ability to determine, is this person legitimate or not? And I'm pretty good at it. So we developed an algorithm where we can determine if someone is legitimate or not. It's a scale of 0 to 100. We almost never show you resumes that are below 50. ID proof. Above 50, you're getting pretty reasonable. Above 70 is where we'll show a green logo. Below 70 will show you a yellow or a red logo. And that just means be cautious. So above 70, you're pretty good. You know, someone you can kind of trust that they are who they say they are. So. And you know, again, if someone's below 50, I'm seriously, seriously questioning whether or not I would ever hire that person. So here you go. Here's one that's 87. And 99 and 99. You know, these, you can pretty much trust that this person is who they say they are. That does not mean their skills are really good. So just be aware. Okay, so for a webmaster is what I clicked on. $400 a month for 57, 80. Now, you notice that these salaries are quite a bit higher than the virtual assistant ones, and that's pretty standard. You know, you're looking for a technical person here. So let's look at one of these. I'm going to look at this guy. So this guy is actually not a webmaster, but more of a programmer, and he's really, really talented. So you can see he's asking for 35,000 pesos a month, which is $780 a month for 40 hours a week. Four years of experience, college graduate. As you scroll down, he's 31, male. He's been active for a while, so he's probably Done quite a bit of work. Scrolling down again, I'm doing a lot of web designing and developing a content management platform like WordPress. Job for a couple of years. Okay, so his English is not that great. So let me give you a piece of advice. When you're looking at these people, English is a super, super important skill. Unless you're hiring a programmer or a webmaster or a designer, something specialty. Everything else you should hire for English, social media person or a writer or a content person for the rest of these technical things. Don't worry about it. You'll never have communication problems with people in the Philippines just because of kind of their culture. They will always understand what you say. So here are this guy's top skills. Data entry, which is kind of dumb, whatever, but JavaScript, MySQL PHP, WordPress development, content management, cPanel, which is how your web hosting, CSS and HTML. So how he's going to do the layout of your sites. WordPress 5 stars. So this guy is really, really good with probably with creating WordPress themes, creating WordPress plugins, doing custom stuff in WordPress or creating a custom website. He's probably not going to do very well with design. Let's look at though. So his office and admin. Don't hire him as an admin assistant. Don't hire him for his English skills. Don't hire him to start to be a webmaster and do writing for you. It's not going to work. He's not good at that. He's not a marketer. Don't hire him to do SEO for you after he's done your website. He's not very good at it. Advertising, same thing. What he's really good at is web development and he'll show you here. Whoops. Okay, so I skipped past some of those and we've already seen them though. But JavaScript, MySQL he doesn't know Joomla Very well, but he knows what it is. MySQL PHP, WordPress Webmaster. Really, really good webmaster skills. So you know this guy. I mean he's, he's more expensive. Oh, this is an interesting thing. Graphics and multimedia. So I didn't find this out until later on after I'd hired a couple people. But basically everybody in the Philippines thinks that they're a graphic designer because every university requires every graduate to take a class in Photoshop before they graduate. It's kind of funny because you'll very, very often see a person like a VA saying oh, I have. I can also do photoshop and do not hire them and say, I made this mistake once, only once, where I hired someone and I was hiring them to be a writer. But I also thought they had Photoshop skills. And I thought, oh, that's so awesome. I can have them do some design work for me too. It turns out they were terrible at it, but they had taken a class in Photoshop, so they did know their way around Photoshop even though they couldn't really do good design work. So just something to be aware of. Okay, so if, let's go back here. So I told you about this. You know where you're seeing 25,000 results, it's too much. So if you come and click on the refined filters here, here's where you can really dig down to find, to find kind of what you're looking for. So this is our advanced search page. And on this, if you click on any of these, they will expand. So I'm going to click on marketing and sales and it expands to show us a whole bunch of categories where you can select these categories and select a group of categories. Now I Recommend Starting with 2 to 3 and then adding more to refine it. I've already refined this a little bit. So I'm going to search for SEO. I want someone who's an expert at SEO and an expert at social media marketing. Now I do not recommend you. You start with I'm the best in the world. Start with I'm good at it or I'm an expert. I also would like to find in advertising, I want to find someone who's good at Google AdWords. And under Webmaster I want someone who can do HTML and WordPress. So that's a lot of skills that I'm asking for. And then at the end you can kind of filter more. You can change their ID proof where you only want to see people with greater than 50 or if you're not getting enough, maybe you want to lower it or monthly salary or how long they've been active. So I added in a keyword of WordPress here. So if we search these resumes, here's what I'm getting. 17,000 pesos a month, 382, 18,404. 16,359. You know, I mean these are pretty dang reasonable for this skill set. So let's look at one of these guys. SEO, Rockstar, virtual assistant, web developer. 16,000 pesos a month, $360, 40 hours a week. He has two years of experience and a bachelor's degree in computer science. So that's pretty good. His ID proof is 99, so I believe that he is who he says he is. As we scroll down. My name is Joey II S Rezamilla. My friends call me Borgi. Okay, that's nice. I've been working as an online VA for the last two years. I have a deep understanding about working as an online virtual assistant. I have jobs before on odesk and easyoutsource.com etc. In two years I've had that. I've worked online, I've focused on the field. So you know pretty good English. And he has written a good description about himself. So if we look at his skills, research, speaking, good email marketing, SEO. Okay, he's good at SEO. He's good at social media marketing, he's good at AdWords, HTML, CSS, WordPress, customer support. You know, if you had this guy working for you and your business, could you make more money? That's my big question. And that's kind of how I look at this. The first guy I hired, could I make more money with him? Yes, I could. And he could do all kinds of stuff after I taught him. Now this guy already has all these skills. So if we scroll down here, as I mentioned, I've been focused on web development. I've made different kinds of sites that is WordPress based. I've been using CSS and HTML in order to modify the website that I'll be assigned to. You know, he's really good at building websites. WordPress. If you have clients, could he do this for you? Yes, he could. Graphics. Kind of funny. Here you go again. He thinks he's a graphic designer even though he's not. He probably had a class in Photoshop in college. Okay, so in order to contact these. And I just wanted to show you that one just to kind of get an idea of what you're going to find here. So in order to contact these people, you click the contact button. Online jobs costs $49 a month to be able to contact workers. You can't contact them with a free account. You can bookmark them. You can use time proof to track their time. You can look at their profiles. Actually, this is brand new. You can now post jobs for free, but you can't contact those workers until you have upgraded. And there's a couple different discounted plans here for how you can. How you can get online jobs and use it to contact the workers. So that's all my jobs. I hope that you understand why I say this is the best, even though I own it. You can take that for what it's worth. But here's a couple other things. So I have Easyoutsource.com here, which is another option of what you can use. Here's Craigslist. I say no Craigslist. Here's why. I've seen quite a few people try and use Craigslist over the years. I've never seen some someone successfully hire a Filipino worker off of Craigslist. I don't know why. I have an inkling of some things. There's a lot of scams that go on on Craigslist because it's basically unmoderated. So the workers there are free to do anything they want. Also, workers are very leery of Craigslist because they've been scammed by employers before because there's nothing to prevent an employer from scamming people on Craigslist. So, you know, you can try it. I think you're going to spend a lot of time, effort and probably not get much results, but it is an option for you. So I hope you feel comfortable with that now that you can go out and find someone pretty quickly and in all kinds of different areas. There's all kinds of skills. If you look at these, all kinds of skills that workers can do. I have people that do every one of these things for me and they're really, really good at it. So that's it. Thank you.
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