OFS Hiring Advice for you - Practical Advice

How do you find a good va? What's up, guys? This is John Jonas from onlinejobs ph and 1vaaway.com and I got an email the other day from Deirdre, who asked me to contribute to her audience on a whole bunch of hiring questions. I'm going to cover that in this video. So the first thing she asks is, how do you find someone? And specifically with OnlineJobs ph. So OnlineJobs ph is my website. It is a job board for the Philippines for Vas from the Philippines. And just so you know, I'm actually not gonna call them Vas in this episode anymore or in this training anymore. I'm gonna call them ofs Online Filipino specialists. Because most people don't want to hire a virtual assistant. Most people think a virtual assistant is a secretary. And I don't think you want a secretary. Not that a secretary is bad, but you probably want to hire someone who's like, really good at lead generation or really good at social media marketing or really good at graphic design, something like that. You want a specialist rather than a va. So I'm going to talk about how do you find an ofs, an online Filipino specialist through onlinejobs Ph. Here's what I do. So first you go to onlinejobs Ph and search what you're looking for. Search for the role that you're looking for. You're looking for graphic design. Search, graphic design. Then you're going to look at 20 or 30 profiles. You don't have to spend a lot of time on this. I just want you to go and look. Start clicking on profiles from the search results. You're going to see like, oh, okay, this person is a graphic design skills. They know Photoshop and they also know a little bit of SEO or something like that, right? So you're going to see all these skills that people have. You're also looking for how much they're looking to make on a monthly basis. So they're going to have their salary listed there, what they're looking for. And just so you know, these aren't people that we've vetted. We haven't vetted any of them. They've just come onto our site and filled out a profile. We do require that they pass our identity verification process. So that's at least good. Like, you're pretty sure, you know, they are who they say they are. So the next step is to go and post a job at onlinejobs ph, so you can post your job for free. You're gonna write up what you're Looking for. It's not very complicated here. You're gonna get a whole bunch of applications. You can look at all those applications for free. The only thing you can't do is you can't contact the people. You can't reply to people's applications until you've paid. And that's how we make money. That's how we maintain the job board. If you want to contact people from their profiles, like you've seen their profile, it looks awesome. Like one of the 20 or 30 that you looked, whatever. Or 10 of them, then you can contact them after you've upgraded your account again. So when you Upgrade and it's $69 or $99 to do this and you can then reply to all the job applications that you get and you can contact proactively from their profiles a bunch of people. So that's how you get started in getting applicants for your job process. The next step for me is to start interviewing people. And I interview people through email. I don't get on a Skype interview. They're scared to get on a Skype interview with you. I'm not going to cover this here, but I do a whole bunch of emails with a whole bunch of questions. It works really well. So. And I cover this in detail in my one VA away training, which you guys can get and I guarantee that it works or I give your money back. Okay, so that's specifically how to find people. Her next question is, and I have these, I have notes here on my computer. What do you look for? And how to quickly know if they are right for you? So when I'm looking for someone, there's a couple things I'm looking for. One, attention to detail. I want to know they're detail oriented. Two, I want to know their English skills. And that applies across the board. Unless it's a technical position like a programmer or a designer or an ADS person. Like, I don't. Your English doesn't need to be perfect in these situations. But everything else, I want to know your English skills. Now for data entry, maybe I don't really care that much. Right. So that you have to judge when that's the most important thing. But I want to know attention to detail. I want to know your English. I want to know how quickly do you respond. Like if I email you during the interview process and it takes you three days to respond, well, what's the chance that it's going to take you 3 days to respond after I've hired you? And. And so for me, that doesn't work, I want to know, like, are there any red flags going off as I look at your, as I look at your profile? Like, are you saying things that kind of don't make sense to me? Do you say you have every skill on earth and you're the best at all of them? Well, you know, like that's a pretty red flag to me. Right? And then I want to know when I get an email from you, am I excited to get an email from you or am I kind of cringy? You know, like some people are cringy. And then I don't want to hire you because here's the thing, most people when they get started, they think they're just hiring a skill. Like you're just hiring someone with this specific skill and you're not, you're hiring a person with a personality and you're going to work with this person hopefully for a really long time. That's one of the great things about the Philippines is that they are super duper loyal and so you can work with them for a really long time and so you want to look at their personality also. Next question, things to ask them and how to test them from a technical perspective. So how to test is a hard thing. It completely depends on what the role is that you're giving. I've given programming tests. I've asked for design work. Like, hey, you're a designer and I want you to be design working on my website. So will you redesign this one page on my site? I want to see how you do it. Obviously I'm not going to do a complicated page. If you're asking them to do something that takes more than 30 minutes, then you ought to pay for their time. Offer them to pay for the test. I have often asked for people for a writing sample. I have asked for someone to do something like take this WordPress. Take WordPress and set it up on my domain on my hosting account. Here's my hosting account. You know, something simple. I just want to see you do something. And the goal here isn't necessarily to find the best person, but the goal is to find the best person that I can work with. And so this test might even be like, how well do we work together? Things to ask them. So things that I ask are like, what experience do you have? How would you solve this problem? Where do you live? Do you have your own computer and Internet access? Do you have another job? I have a whole list of like 50 different questions that I ask inside of one VA away. And I have, you can Find some more of them on my blog. If you search johnjonas.com for questions to ask and you're going to get a list of questions. Okay, so the next question Deidre asks is how much should they cost? So that's a super hard question because different skills require different pay scales. And so what I'm saying right now is you can find someone between $400 a month, up to $2,000 a month. And at $400 a month, you're going to hire someone maybe who's entry level. Like they're, they're a beginner. It doesn't mean they're bad, it just means they don't have a lot of experience. And so for something like data entry, that may not be an issue or maybe for some. For customer support, where you already have a customer support system, you already have, you already know how to respond to these 10 most common questions. You know, that's pretty easy to do for something like you want someone to run your Facebook ads for you. Well, that's a little bit more complicated. It's going to cost you more. Programming is going to cost more, Social media is going to cost more. Someone who's really good at Shopify is going to cost more, whatever it is. You know, like if you want someone who's really, really experienced, then you're going to get up to 800-1000-1500amonth range. Typically for someone who speaks really great English, you're going to be in a 600 to $1,000 a month range. And then for more technical things, you're going to be above that. So that's kind of the what they should cost. And just so you know, all these, what I'm talking about are full time salaries. So this is like you hire someone 40 hours a week, they're working for you, they hopefully don't have another part time job elsewhere. They might, but you can kind of dictate that or you can talk to them about it, which is one of the questions I ask in the interview process. Who else are you working for? And then from there, like you may offer them some benefits if you want. You don't have to, but this is like, this is a full time, long term, permanent job. Just so you know, the first person I ever hired in 2005 still works for me today. He's been on salary since 2005. Every month I pay him and every once in a while I give him a raise. But I have people like that since 2007 and 2010 and 2011. Every year since then, I have people that are still working for me today. Okay, so next question. What types of things are negotiable? What's non negotiable? Basically, everything's negotiable. You can pay someone hourly, you can pay someone part time, you can pay someone full time, you can pay $3 an hour, you can pay $20 an hour, you can negotiate paid time off, you can negotiate holidays, you can negotiate work hours. I'll just give you some advice on this. So, work hours. I require very, very few of my people to work specific hours. If you need someone to work during your time and you're in the usa, you probably want to find someone in your search process. Find someone who's already working the night shift. Because if they're not working the night shift, it's hard to make that transition from working days to working nights. If they're already working it, fine, that'll be easy for you. It's reasonable to find someone to do that. Next, I prefer to pay a salary, not an hourly wage. And part of that is on me because it helps me to be a better CEO. Two because they very often prefer it. A salary means it's a stable job. Hourly means it's temporary. And that's a big, big deal. In the Philippines, Filipinos almost always prefer a full time job over a part time job. This isn't always the case, but it's very, very, very often the case. Like if you're their full time gig, then they're dedicated to you. If you're their part time gig and they have a full time gig somewhere else, well, they're dedicated to someone else. That doesn't mean they won't be loyal to you, but it means their first priority is elsewhere. If you can't hire someone full time salary right now, fine, then do someone part time or do someone hourly. Whatever you need to do, just try this out and see if it works for you. And in the end, that's my advice here is try it and see if it works for you. Because if this works for you, well, you just found a really talented workforce. Let's that is very affordable. They're super loyal, they're honest, they're hardworking, they don't want to steal your business, they're not entrepreneurial, they speak American English. It's a really, really amazing setup with the Philippines when you get them working just for you and they feel like they're a part of your company and they're happy there and you treat them well and so they feel like they're contributing. It really, really makes like a full time U.S. employee at, you know, I don't know, a fifth or a tenth the cost. And they're really, really talented. You can find really, really talented people. So I hope this is a really good introduction for you guys for how to find people. Now, just so you know, you can head straight to onlinejobs ph and hire someone. And that's great. If you're ready to do that, go for it. If you feel a little bit uncomfortable in doing that, you're not sure what you're doing, you want some help through the hiring process. You want to make sure you don't make mistakes. You want to know that you're doing things right. You want to know the questions to ask in the interview. You, you want to know how to determine who the first person you should hire is, which I have some really, really good advice. It's different than almost what everybody else says on the who the first person you should hire. In fact, I'll give you that advice. The first person you should hire should be someone to do something you know how to do. You should not start by outsourcing something you don't know how to do. That's the wrong way to go about this. If you want help with all these things where I'll explain cultural things and I'll explain management things. 1vaoa.com that is where I lay out everything that I have at 1vaaway.com. It's $49 and it is 100% money back guarantee. If you don't find a great VA, I give your money back, no questions asked. It's that good. 1vaoa.com.