How to Stop Wasting Time on the Wrong VA Applicants

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. Specifically, this is episode 267, a solution to poor quality applicants at Onlinejobs ph. So I'm actually really excited to make this announcement today on this podcast. Even though it's been live on online jobs for a little bit, this is super, super cool. Something we've been working on for a long time. So every day I get emails from people that say, do you have this type of worker? Do you have someone that can do data entry? Well, yeah, we do. Do you have someone that can do social media? Do you have social media, social media people? Yeah, we do. Do you have someone that could do procurement? Yes, we do. Do you have someone that could be an investment banking analyst? Yes, yes, we do. Yes. There's over 2 million profiles at onlinejobs.ph. we have people that can do basically everything. You can find someone if you have. If you have a role that can be done on a computer, there's someone on onlinejobs Ph that can do it. And if not, I'd be really shocked. Also, it's really easy to find great applicants at online jobs. So, like, if you post a job, you're gonna get a whole bunch of applicants and some of those are gonna be really top tier, but also some of those are gonna be really bottom of the barrel. Like people who did not read the job post, people who are not qualified, people who send a crappy form application, people who just don't care. You're gonna get some of that garbage. And it is frustrating and I never liked it. None of you like it. This has been eating at me for years and I've tried quite a few different solutions to try and lessen it. Nothing has really worked. But this one I'm pretty confident with. So a few months ago, we came up with a hybrid version of what upwork does. So at upwork, when someone applies to your job, they have to apply some points to your job where they have to pay for those points. And so they're very careful with what they are willing to apply to. We didn't want to force Filipino workers to pay. That doesn't make sense to me to have them paying. But what does make sense for me is to give them a finite resource that they have to apply in order to apply to your job. So I haven't really known how this would work for us until a few months ago when the concept kind of finally came together for me. We call it Apply Points So apply points is a limited resource that job seekers get, which they must use when applying to your job. Because it's limited, those who are careful with it will stand out. And that's the point, is to let them stand out versus those who don't stand out based off of how they apply to you. So here's how it works. Every time someone logs into their onlinejobs ph account, a worker, they're gonna get 10 apply points. Now this applies once a day. Every day that they log in, they'll get 10 apply points up to a maximum of 50, which will carry over to the next day. So they carry over. So the most someone can have in their account is 60 points. You get 50 that carry over from previous days. If you haven't used them, then you get 10 from today you get up to 60 points, whatever. So the point is when they apply to your job, they have to use some apply points. So in the past we just let people apply to a maximum of 10 jobs per day. Well, if someone applies to 10 jobs every day, they use one apply point per job, that's fine, but someone else is going to log in and say, I'm not as qualified for that job, I'm not as qualified for that job, but that job right there, I'm super qualified for. I'm going to use all 10 of my apply points on that one job. And you have six other applications from people who have used one apply point and one from someone who has used 10 or someone else has saved them up for a few days and someone uses 35 apply points on one job post. Now, I want to clarify that apply points isn't a measure of how qualified the person actually is. You still have to interview, you still have to ask questions, you still have to do tests. But apply points is a way of weeding out those who didn't want to pay attention enough to say, oh yeah, I'm extra qualified for this job. I'm going to use more apply points here. So someone who does use more apply points generally is saying, I feel like I'm really qualified for this job. Or they're saying, I'm really interested in this job. So the last time I recruited, which was over the last couple weeks, this was really, really interesting to watch job applications come in where a bunch of them had one and then some of them had six and then a couple of them had 15 or 20 apply points used. And it was super immediately easy for me to say, okay, I'm going to focus on these ones that have 15 or 20 or six. I'm going to focus on those. These ones with one, I'm going to read them very briefly, or maybe not, depending on how many I get. Maybe I'm just going to ignore them because you didn't care enough to say you're actually interested. And so for me, I don't really care enough to read your job application sometimes. So far I've had really good feedback on the system. It seems to be working for people, which I'm really excited about. We're constantly working on improving this. We have a whole big, long development list for how we're going to use this in the future to improve things. There's a lot of stuff coming. Super excited about it. If you have feedback on this, let me know. Johnlignjobs Physical.