VA Agencies vs. OnlineJobs.ph… Why I Built My OWN Hiring Solution

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with virtual assistants from the Philippines. OFS. This is episode 375, the Pros and Cons of Using a VA Agency. So I recently got this email from customer who said, I know you are presenting work from home jobs. We were also approached by a firm who provides a nice office space and handles IT infrastructure, electricity, and some supervision. Can you speak to pros and cons of each model with experience? So I sent this to Julia and she wrote this really amazing response. The only problem was it was too long and so I'm splitting it up into two episodes. In this one, I'm going to talk about the pros and cons of hiring from an agency. The first thing to consider in this is I'm obviously biased. I hired from an agency in the very beginning because that was the only option there was. As soon as there was another option, I. Onlinejobs. Ph. I never went back to an agency and I would never go back to an agency. And I will. I'll talk about why. So as you listen to this, just consider that I'm biased, right? There's bias in everything. So here are the pros of hiring someone through an agency. Now, hiring through an agency seems like it's. It's everyone's dream, right? Tell me who to hire. Tell me who the best person is to hire. So here's what an agency does. They tell you who the best person is to hire. Then they have office space where they bring that person into an office and they sit them down at a computer. They provide a computer, they provide electricity and they provide Internet. And this is all really great if the person you would hire doesn't have these things at home. If you consider the change the world has gone through in the last couple years since COVID people have realized, oh yeah, working from home is actually really productive. It's probably more productive than working in the office. And so if the person you're going to hire doesn't have computer, electricity, Internet, then yeah, an agency is a really, really great solution to that. Most people in the Philippines have those things. So then I'm going to go through the perceived pros of what agencies are and actually really tell you why they're cons. And this was my experience. So, number one, they will ensure that your VA sits at a desk for eight hours a day. Sitting at a desk does not mean they are productive. They will provide some sort of management of your va, at least some sort of supervision and that supervision means they're supervising that your VA sits at a desk for eight hours a day and that they send you a report at the end of the day. I actually think this is a really big problem in agencies. It's not a benefit because so. And the reason for that is I actually lost one of my very first people that I ever hired before onlinejobs.ph I hired through an agency. And at one point, this was an amazing, amazing programmer. In fact, I would put him up against any programmer in the world for how good he was. He sends me an email one day and says, I'm quitting, sir. I can't handle the office politics here. Which meant the supervisors and the managers there were such a problem for him that he couldn't keep the job with me because they were such a problem. So, yeah, they'll provide some supervision. But if that person's working for you and you're providing instructions, those supervisors don't have anything to do other than look over the shoulder of this person and kind of micromanage nothing, right? They're not. They don't know how to do the work that the person's doing. Most agencies don't know how to do your work. So that supervision actually isn't really a plus. Then a lot of agencies will tell you they're going to train your people. And they might. They might do a good job. They might train them, they might not. So here's my experience. Agencies, actually, their incentive structure isn't to hire you the best person, which is what you think they're doing, that you think they're going to tell you who the best person is to hire. That's not. That's not actually their incentive. Their incentive is to pull a warm body off the street and to test you, the employer, to see if you're a good enough employer to handle a worker. If they spend a whole bunch of time finding you the best person, and then it turns out that you as an employer suck, which sucky employers is probably 80% of their problems. Then they wasted a whole bunch of time finding a really great person only to provide them to a sucky employer, and the whole thing doesn't work. And it's their fault because they found a crappy person, or at least that's what the employer will say. And the employer is the one paying, so that's all that matters. So rather than provide you the best person, their incentive is to provide you a warm body and see if you make it work. Because if you make it work okay, then you're actually a reasonable employer. And I know this well because they did it to me twice the first times I hired people. And look, Jovan turned out to be amazing over the years because I was a reasonable employer. But when they pulled him in, he was just a warm body off the street. He didn't know anything. And then I know this because we've done tons of recruiting over the years. And while we try and find really great people, we know that 80% of the problems we're going to have are with the employer, not the worker. And whether we find a great, super talented, amazing worker or not, the problem is still usually with the employer. So yes, an agency will give you someone, they will tell you who to hire without you having to do anything. That person is not likely to be the best person. But if you're a good employer, it doesn't really matter because you're going to make it work either way. That agency will provide Internet and computer and power. They will provide supervision to make sure your person is sitting there for eight hours a day. Whether they're productive or not, that's up to you. They can also help get benefits set up if you want to do that. SSS and Poggibig and hmo, whatever those are, those things are all really simple and we have really simple instructions for them. So those are the pros of using an agency, which actually a lot of it I really think are cons. You can tell I don't have a really high opinion of VA agencies. People that provide you people. Let me give you a couple cons. So number one, the people that they're hiring are not the best for your business. They don't know your personality or what your business requires or the personality that business requires. And the reality is you're hiring a personality, you're not hiring a robot. And that agency is hiring. And that person at the agency who's hiring has a bias towards their personality, not your personality. And that is a really, really big deal, especially if you intend to have someone long term. Now, if you're an amazing employer and you're going to make any personality work, then, well, it doesn't really matter, right? Next, you don't actually have control over the people that work for you, which is really a problem for a small business. If there's a middleman, it adds complexity to it. It also adds another point of failure, which happened to me with this super duper amazing programmer where I lost him because of this other point of failure and that was so incredibly painful to me. Then you have the salary markup where, okay, so they're gonna triple the cost of this person. So Instead of paying $500 a month or $700 a month, you're gonna pay $1,500 or $2,100 or $3,000 or whatever it is? Yeah, they're gonna triple, quadruple the salary. Not the worst thing in the world, but it just didn't sit well with me and it doesn't sit well with most of you. And the feedback I get off all the time is I try and get people away from this as quickly as I can. Well, that's against the contract that you signed. It's not really honest and it's really kind of sucky. I mean, it's super sucky for the agency. It's good for you and it's good for the person that you hired because they're going to get paid more and you're going to pay less and the agency just gets screwed. And if that's the case, why not just do it the right way from the beginning? Rather than having a middleman who's hiring someone mediocre for you, why not find someone right in the first place who's the correct person for your business, fits your personality in the first place? The whole thing just. It just doesn't make sense. And then the last piece of this is the commute. Man, commute times in the Philippines are huge. It is common for someone to have a two hour commute. And if they're going to work in an agency in Manila or in Cebu or downtown, whatever, well, they probably don't live downtown. And then they're going to have a two hour commute each way, four hours a day out of their life just to have a job with a middleman. It just doesn't make sense. So I don't have any people working for me that are at an agency. I have one person who works for me who came from an agency. That's Joven. He was the very first person I ever hired again. After some time, he quit and I hired him away because otherwise I was going to lose my second person from the agency. Other than that, I would never go back to an agency. It just does not make sense to me in any way. So there's the answer to your question about can I speak to this from experience? Yes, I can. Here are the pros and cons of an agency. And to me, really, there's not really many pros to it. So in the next episode, I'll talk about a better way and you probably know this already from onlinejobs ph, which obviously is my website, and I told you in the beginning that I'm biased, but the reason I started Online Jobs was to solve the problem of the agency. And it really does a good job of solving these problems. And it's really, really easy to find a better fit of a more talented person that fits your personality at onlinejobs ph than it ever will be to get that same thing from an agency.