John Jonas (Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast, ep. 412) explains why many Filipino applicants avoid or ‘ghost’ video interviews: cultural shyness, fear of embarrassment, intimidation by strong English speakers, and time-zone coordination concerns. He reports a poll and personal experience suggesting roughly half of Filipino candidates decline to schedule and additional no-shows occur; those who do attend tend to be experienced freelancers who use video interviews to vet clients. Jonas recommends reserving video interviews for the final stage after email screening or skipping them entirely, noting pros (seeing client, spotting red flags, detecting live-AI use) and cons (loss of skilled-but-shy applicants).
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Episode 412
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 412, what ofs think of video Interviews. So I don't like doing video interviews. I've talked about this a lot over the years. I don't do them when I'm hiring. I don't like to do them. Filipinos don't like to do them. Most Filipinos are shy and it makes them self conscious and they worry about being embarrassed in front of you. And now not all these things are bad. A video interview makes them uncomfortable, which. Okay, fine. My team recently did a poll about video interviews in the Facebook group. They asked, what do you think about video interviews? And the overwhelming response said, oh, I hate them now. It wasn't like it wasn't a no go on video interviews. Some people said, yeah, sure, I'll do them. Or some people said, meh, if I have to, fine. And when I posted about this poll that my team did, I got a number of responses from people saying, oh, well, people everywhere hate video interviews. Yeah, it's just not the same though. Like, if you have a job, if you have an interview, a video interview in the US For a job, you're probably going to show up to that video interview. Where in the Philippines, if you try and schedule a video interview with people for a job, you'll lose half the people. Half the people will not schedule the interview because they don't want to do it. Of the. If you get 10 people, five of them won't schedule. Of the five who do schedule, three of them won't show up because they don't like it so much. Now, if you scheduled 10 interviews in the US you probably have 10 people schedule and nine of them would show up. So yeah, it's. Nobody likes video interviews, but it's just not the same in the Philippines. So when my team asked for why don't you like them? There was some interesting responses. Let me. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you one of them. Here's what they said. I often fail at interviews because I'm intimidated by the people who are really good at English. I noticed that applicants with better English are more likely to get hired. I prefer showing off my skills and being hired based on the output. So for something that's not an English writing thing, maybe they don't speak great English, but they're a really good designer. Well, you're unlikely to hire that person based off of a video interview because you're Going to hire someone who has better English, even though the designer without great English might be a better designer, then this person is intimidated by others, so they feel like they fail. And so what's the point of doing the video interview? It's going to take a bunch of time. Then there's the piece of time zones. So in the Philippines, it's all in one time zone. They don't deal with other time zones. They've never had to deal with other time zones. And so when you ask them to coordinate with the time zone that's on the other side of the world now, they're dealing with like the international date line. And yes, you can use Google to say, what time is it there? They still worry about it. So now the other side of it, those who in the poll who said, yeah, I'll do a video, or I even like it, here was their common response. They said, yes, so we can see and hear who we're dealing with. You get to know the client when you see them and see how they talk at the same time. So that's a comfortable OFS who knows what they're doing. And they're probably working for multiple people. And that's why they want to know about their client. They want to know. They want to make sure that you're reasonable so that when they start, when they take you on as a client, well, then it's going to be okay. And they've done this video interview with you. So that, just so you know what you're getting when you do video interviews, you're getting someone who's experienced in this process. They are likely working for multiple people. Not always, but that's. It's a very common thing. People who show up to video interviews show up because they know, oh, if I want to get another job, I got to do a video interview, and so I'm going to do these. And then they figure out, oh, I can get jobs all the time because I'm good on a camera. And so I just, I'll just get multiple jobs. That's a pretty common scenario when, when the video interview is such a heavy part of your, of your interview process. So can you do video interviews? Yes. Should you do them? Well, if you're going to do it, the best time to do it is at the end of the interview process after you've asked them a whole bunch of email questions. At that point, you will have weeded out those who are not interested in going through a long interview process, which would be most people who are looking for an easy job, right? Either they're good at video interviewing and they know they're going to get a job and they're going to do the little work they can to get paid. That's not the person you want. So when I ask lots of questions that'll weed out most people, then at the end of that process, you've gained enough trust that most people will show up to the video interview. Now, like I said before, I don't do this. I don't do video interviews. I've never found them necessary. But a lot of people do find it is a good way to do a final weed out of Is there, are there any red flags? You get to talk to the person, have they used AI and their responses with you? Because you can't use AI in the video, in a live video. So there are some advantages to doing it. And maybe if I had used it recently when I hired a writer, I wouldn't have had to let them go because I was duped into their using AI. But after that, I hired a really amazing writer who's way, way, way better. And I followed my interview process to find her. Actually, she wrote and created a social media post, our first viral post ever. And that happened within like two months of hiring her. So all that without a video interview. So it's not necessary, but you can do it if you want. Just be aware of what you're getting into.
