Stop Overthinking—How to Hire Online Filipino Specialists in 5 Minutes!

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 432, removing complexity from hiring an OFS. So sometimes I feel like I oversimplify things. And maybe it's not oversimplifying, but I feel like, oh, you want to hire. You want to know how to hire someone from the Philippines? Great1vaoa.com. You need to train someone. Great. VA's made easy dot com. How do you find people onlinejobs? Ph, it's all pretty simple. At least to me it is. To thousands of others it is, but maybe to you it's not. And so let me address some of the ways we overcomplicate things. So I have this. It's an automatic email that we send out to people at onlinejobs ph 7 days after they sign up for a free account if they have not upgraded their account after those seven days. So if you've registered for a free account, you've looked at online jobs, you have decided, oh, I'm not ready to hire someone yet, or I don't like this or whatever it is. So I send this, I send this email out and it says, hey, you didn't hire someone. And I'm wondering why? And here are the reasons why. I think maybe let me know. And so I give like five or six reasons why. And. And then people respond to me all the time. Every day I get responses to this email saying why they haven't hired someone yet. Maybe if you haven't hired someone yet, some of these responses wouldn't be surprising to you because they're what you're. How you're over complicating this. If you have hired people, you'd probably be surprised at the ways that people try not to hire, even though they know they need to. So one of the most common ones is, oh, I'm just not ready yet. I need to get organized. And I'm like, you're never going to be organized. There's no situation in which you're more organized than you are right now. If you don't have help to get organized, it's just never going to happen. Right? So if you're not organized now, well, tomorrow you're not going to be organized, and next week you're not going to be organized. And then Christmas comes and you're certainly not more organized then. And then, you know, there's. It just never. It never gets there. And the only way to get there is you have to replace yourself with someone Else doing some work that you're doing. Another one that I hear often is, oh, I need to be compliant. I'm like, well, there's, there's nothing, there's nothing to be compliant about. You're overcomplicating this. Oh, what about getting an employer of record? Nope, that's completely unnecessary. And that is just some other company fear mongering to try and make you pay them for an unnecessary service that you just don't need. Well, what about them being an independent contractor? I can't make them an employee. That's such a big problem. I can't have an employee. Great. There's no situation in which they can turn into an employee for you. The Philippines government won't allow it. It's just not a thing. Right. You're just over complicating this by worrying about compliance and instead of getting the help you need, you're fear. There's just fear going on. Right. Another one that I get is, oh, I'm scared. I'm scared of hiring the wrong person. I don't know if I can find someone I can trust. I'm just worried, okay, that one, that one I get. But you have to take the leap in order to overcome that to find out, can I find someone that I can trust? I mean, it turns out that that person that you don't trust doesn't trust you even more than you don't trust them. They're more scared of you than you are of them. They have more to lose than you have to lose. Even though you don't see that right now, as soon as you hire someone and you get them working for you, then you'll see that, oh yeah, they have way more to lose in doing a bunch of work and me not paying them than I have to lose in what they're going to do. If I don't pay them, they don't eat. If they were to steal something from me, which is so, so unlikely, then I move on with my business. Yeah, that's really rough and really scary. But it's not like you're starving because they stole something from you. And I know that's not, that's not how you want to be told to go about this. It's that you don't trust someone. I mean, when I started, I didn't trust someone either, but I knew, well, it doesn't matter. I have to take this chance because otherwise I never change anything. And if I don't change what's going on, then this isn't going to work. For me, like, running a business isn't going to work for me if, if I can't change. If I can't change what's going on. Yeah, I need to, I need to find a job. So let me try and simplify this even a little bit more than that. I hope I've answered some of your questions, like how do you trust? Can you find someone? Whoa. Oh, that's another one. I don't know if I can find someone good. I mean, with three and a half million profiles of people from the Philippines who are very well educated, you can find someone at just about any skill level from beginner to really approaching like the best in the world. For any task you want, anything you have going on, you need a marketing director. Yep, you can definitely find someone with 20 years of experience leading big marketing marketing teams. You need a data entry person that is very, very affordable. Yep, you can find that person and anything in between. Run Facebook ads, write custom programming code, do your social media marketing for you, create graphics and anything in between. Yep, you can find someone beginner to full expert, super, super reasonable. So let me, let me take a step back and describe the actual process of hiring someone so that you know kind of what to expect. So the first step would be to put post a job@onlinejobs.ph. and that really is what holds most people back. Like, I don't have time to go make this job post and then deal with what's gonna come. Right. So making that job post, you're overcomplicating it. First of all, you don't have to put in all your benefits or all your paid time off or your policies or what you expect. You don't have to put in any of that. And usually when I make a job posted online jobs, which I've done a lot, it's very simple, like one paragraph, maybe two or three paragraphs. I mean, hey, I'm looking for someone to write SEO content for me. I want someone who's really experienced. Don't apply if you, if you are not really experienced. If you're a beginner, don't, don't bother applying if you are experienced and you're interested. Tell me why. Why are you the right person to hire? I mean, like, this is a really, really simple job post. I'll put how much we're going to pay. And I do that knowing that I'm gonna find some people that are looking for less and some people are looking for more and I've posted a salary and then I can change how much I want to offer people based off the salary, but not putting a salary is, you're just, people in the Philippines really want to see the number. They want to know is this a low paying job, is this a high paying job before they apply. Because if you, if it's a low paying job, then experts don't want to apply. If it's a high paying job, well then everybody wants to apply. So just putting a number in is really important. Putting TBD just kind of doesn't work. So once you've made that job post, which realistically should take you less than five minutes, I mean less than five minutes of like some really, really high ROI time, here's what's likely to happen in a few minutes. And maybe, maybe it doesn't take a few minutes, but I mean often for me it takes a few minutes. I start getting applications, you're going to start getting applicants and some of those applicants are going to be crappy and some of them are going to be really, really good. The first step is not to say, hey, let's get on a video interview. Skip the video interview. The first step is to start then asking these people a bunch of questions. And this is really simple. My point here is sending an email with four questions in it that you've already written and if you've joined one VAOA.com, then I have a list of 100 questions you can ask and I tell you which ones I ask most commonly. Copying and pasting those four questions across 10 different applicants only takes you about 5, 3 minutes total. So now you've put the onus back on them to justify why you should hire them. They're going to answer your question. They need to come up with stuff rather than you preparing for an interview and coming up with live questions and listening to them and having a 20 minute interview with six different applicants, well that just, that just takes a long time. Instead you've started to narrow it down by asking, by taking three minutes of your time, you've copied and pasted questions to the same to a whole bunch of different people. And if they don't respond well, you drop them out of your process. Super, super simple. If they respond well, now you get their email and you're going to ask them more questions. And the reason I do it this way is because it's a very time efficient process for me where I don't have to use a bunch, I don't have to do a bunch of thinking, I don't have to schedule and coordinate time zones, I'm Just going to send the same email to a bunch of people and see how they respond. And that's really relevant because after you hire someone, then you're probably going to communicate with them virtually. I mean, like over email. And so you're interviewing the same way you're hiring. It's just a really effective process. Let me add to that. I'm not, I'm not going to reply to everyone. I'm only going to reply to the ones that are really the best. And let me give you a tip that will cut out half of this up front. So go back to the job post. In simplifying this, when you, when you post your job, tell people the last sentence in the job post should say, when you apply, use 7 apply points or 9 applied points or 13 apply points. Go learn a little bit about apply points. This will cut out half the applicants or maybe, Maybe even like 70% of the applicants who you don't want to deal with. You only want to deal with those who use the number of apply points you told them to. I started doing this about a year ago. It really is a game changer in terms of how quickly you can make your job post, how few applicants you have to deal with, how high quality those applicants are that you're going to interview, and how few people you have to interview. So now, with very little effort on your part, you probably have a good idea of who to hire at this point. I mean, you've gone back and forth with a few people. You've gotten responses. Maybe a few of them haven't even responded back to you because they recognize, yeah, this isn't an easy job to get. I'm not going to go through this hard, hard process of answering all these questions. You don't want that person. So now you have a really good idea, and now it's time to negotiate. You can negotiate. You can negotiate whatever you want. You can not negotiate anything. You can just say, hey, I want to offer you a job. Here's the pay. Do you want it? You're directly in contact with all the people you've interviewed. You can make a choice. You don't have to email everyone back saying, oh, hey, I went in a different direction. You can, but you don't have to. I typically don't. I only do that with people I've communicated with multiple times. And then I'm going to say, hey, yeah, I want to offer you a job. Here's how much I'm paying. Here's how much much time I expect you to work. Are you interested? And realistically, it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. You don't have to have a contract, you don't have to have an NDA. You don't have to have a plan for benefits. You don't have. You don't have to have them sign anything. There's nothing more that you need to do to make this work. So if you're over complicating this or at least adding more complications than what I just talked about, let's simplify really quickly. This starts with posting a job which should take you a few minutes, and then interviewing. If you've posted your job, well, like saying use a certain number of apply points, then you're only going to interview a few people. And those you interview, you're not going to get on a video interview with them because you don't need to. You can do it through email, which really is only going to take you a couple minutes. And then if you really want to do a video interview after you've already emailed a bunch of people, well, now scheduling that interview with few people is really, really easy. Doing a test task is really easy with a few people where you should probably be paying for a test task. And if you're only doing it with two or three, that's really, really simple. And then actually hiring someone isn't any more than, hey, are you interested? Here's what I'm going to pay. And they respond and say, yes. And you say, great, when can you start? They say, oh, I can start tomorrow. And you say, great. Here's your first task. Here, here are some instructions. And I'll just simplify that for you too. I usually don't create instructions until after I've hired someone because I know going through and creating some really big sop, I know in, in this world everybody loves to talk about, you have to have SOPs, you have to have processes, you have to have, you have to have all these things. And I hate having all those things. It's just so much effort and energy to create these standard operating procedures. It just doesn't work for me and my business. So rather than doing that, I hire someone and then I create a video. I record a video using snagit and I will talk through, hey, here's what I want you to do. And for me that works really, really well. Here's what I want you to do. Look at my screen. Here's where I want you to go. Here's the data I want you to input. Here's how I want you to write whatever it is. I'm going to create that video. It's going to take me five minutes. It's going to take me 20 minutes. But that's the full, that's the full onboarding right there. Now, I'm almost 20 years into this, so there's more that I do, but none of that is relevant. I'll talk about it in another podcast. You don't have to do any of it in if, especially if you're overcomplicating this. Simplify it. Make it simple. Take as little time as possible in every single step. Posting a job, less than five minutes. Interviewing less than three minutes. Each time you are going to communicate with, with any, with any group of people within 30 minutes, you probably have a really good idea of who to hire. Now, maybe it takes longer than that, but realistically, I mean, I get people telling me pretty regularly it took them less than 24 hours of, of elapsed time to find someone really amazing. And less than 24 hours of elapsed time. Like you didn't spend hours and hours. In those 24 hours, you already have work to do. That's pretty high roi. Time for your business.