Pay Your VAs More Without Spending More (The Secret to Ditching Upwork Fees!)

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 397, how to move your people from upwork to onlinejobs.ph so let's talk about moving people across platforms. So I got this question from Peter recently. I'm gonna read this. Here's what he says. I have two part time VAs on my books for over five years now. I pay a small weekly retainer to do some CRM and website work. They can go for a month without doing any work, but at least I am paying them something. Originally I got them through upwork. Is there a way to move them to you so they can get more of my weekly? It's only small as we are a small business. $50 for Kimberly and $20 for Juul. Just to confirm, these are just retainers. Sometimes they give more work over and above that and they get paid too. Let me know. I love your work. Regard to Peter. Okay, so a couple thoughts from Peter's email. Number one, I love that he's paying a retainer to these people even though he's not having them do any work just to have them be available to him. I've done this in the past where I found someone, I said look, I want you to be available to me anytime I want. And so I paid him a retainer. I knew they weren't doing anything but we just paid because then sometimes when I did want the work, I wanted them to do it now. And so that amount of retainer was like enough for them to say yes, I should do this work right now. So next then about how to move people to onlinejobs. Ph so first of all, upwork takes a percentage of everything you pay them. So if you're paying them 50 bucks, Upwork is going to take $5. Of that they're going to take about 10% I think. And of that, I mean if you're getting paid $50 10%, I mean that's a big deal if you're getting paid $500 50 bucks man, that's a big deal if that's what you're making in a month, right? And obviously these people, this is a retainer for them which is a really great gig for them. But if that's all you're making, 10% is a really big deal. So I completely understand why Peter would want to move them to onlinejobs. Ph. And then when he's also giving them more work and also paying them more that 10% you know, losing that 10% at Upwork is a big deal. And now at online jobs, they'll get paid the full amount. So how do you move people? So the first step is to ask them for their online jobs profile, which last night I had someone ask me if he can move his people that he's hired in other countries to onlinejobs. Ph. And actually he didn't ask me if he could. He asked me why we don't allow it. And the simple answer why we don't allow it is because we are onlinejobs. Ph. We are just for the Philippines. And there's a reason we only stick with the Philippines. It's not because I don't like other countries. It's because employers generally have a better experience in the Philippines than they do in other places. So I've been reading this newsletter by someone who's trying to sell his big ol outsourcing course and he said 65 people buy it, whatever. And he's going to recruit people for you from anywhere in the world, which is fine and all, but his teams are in the Philippines and his big thing is, oh, there's too much of the Philippines going on. Well, there's a good reason that there's so much of the Philippines going on. It's because you're more likely to have a better experience as an employer. You're better, more likely to have a better experience as a customer. You're more likely to have a better experience if someone is, if the customer service agent is in the Philippines than if they are in Ghana or wherever. There's just a better, more service oriented culture in the Philippines than not than anywhere else in the world. But there's also all kinds of other cultural things that really make the Philippines great. So the question last night was, why don't you let me bring other people in? Well, because we kick other people off. Because if you as an employer go on expecting to find people from the Philippines and all of a sudden you're getting applications from India, well then that's a problem for you and you're not happy. And that means those people are fraudulent and you're not happy about that. And that's not a good situation. And we try as hard as we can to promote honesty on the platform. And so we are very active with kicking people off who are from other countries. Not that we don't like them or don't want them to get jobs or whatever, but it doesn't work with onlinejobs.ph.philippines. right. So we could start another job board for us where we haven't. Right. So if you want to move people to onlinejobs Ph that are from the Philippines, the first step is to get their online jobs profile URL. So, so you can just ask them, hey, send me your profile URL. And then you go to their profile URL and you just click the mark as hired button. You have to be logged in to do this. You have to have previously upgraded at onlinejobs Ph at some point. If you've never upgraded. We don't let you mark people as hired. And there's a bunch of reasons behind that. It was creating problems. And free employers are marking people as hired just to try and get their contact information and then they're creating scams. And so we don't let you mark people as hired unless you have previously upgraded at some point. Once you have previously upgraded your account and at any point you can forever then mark people as hired. You do not have to have an active subscription to mark mark them as hired. So if you have never marked as hired before and you just want to move people away from upwork because you don't want to pay the 10%, you upgrade one time, it's going to cost you $69 and then you can immediately cancel. You'll still have access to online jobs upgraded for the time that you've paid for. And so you could recruit at onlinejobs Ph during that time. But then as soon as you mark them as hired, they're gonna show up in your onlinejobs Ph account and now you can use easypay with them once they're in your account again. You don't have to have an upgraded account to use EasyPay. EasyPay is always free, so you can cancel your paid subscription if you're not moving people. You can still do this. You, you Pay to use OnlineJobs ph, you can cancel right away. You still have those 30 days to do your recruiting. Hire someone, mark them as hired, bring them into your account. You can use Easy Pay. All of that is then you're not paying any of that. You're not paying the monthly, you're not paying. You're not paying us anything to continue to use the platform to pay your people or to keep them in our system. So two things required to move people. One, they have to have an account on OnlineJobs ph which if they're Filipino, it's really easy to get an account. They just have to verify themselves, which includes driver's license and address, a utility bill. We are verifying everybody in the Philippines because we want to establish trust. We want to create an honest culture where it's really, really difficult. If you're going to scam someone, well, we're going to kick you off and then it's going to be really difficult for you to get another account. So. So you get their online jobs profile URL, you mark them as hired, you have to have upgraded previously to make that happen. Super simple. I hope that's helpful.