AI hasn't replaced virtual assistants—it's made them more productive and in higher demand, especially from the Philippines. The speaker's team uses AI daily for social media, content, design, and video editing, doing more work with fewer people. Since most cover letters are now AI-generated, he built an AI scoring system that rates candidates on skill, instruction-following, and personality fit to find top applicants instantly.
Chapters
Actually, we've seen an increase in demand for virtual assistants since AI came out in 2022, 2023, and this month was the biggest month online jobs has ever seen from employers. And last month was bigger than the previous month, which was bigger than the previous month. We're still seeing an increase in demand for virtual assistants. All we're seeing now is that they're better. They're better at doing their jobs because of AI. AI is everywhere now, and everybody wants to talk about it and what they're doing and what they're learning, and it's everywhere. Let's talk about how it's affecting virtual assistants right now. So let's begin with. Is AI replacing virtual assistants? No, it's not. At least we're not seeing it. We're still seeing greater demand for hiring people in the Philippines than we ever have. We have seen no slowdown since AI was introduced. I have had a couple people tell me, oh, why would I hire someone to do that? AI can do that. Well, actually, AI probably can't do that yet. Maybe it will get there, but it's not doing the process for you. You still have to interact with the AI. Now, my team in the Philippines is definitely interacting with AI. They are using it every single day, and they are better at almost every single thing they do since AI came out than they were previously, which is super awesome for me. So that's one of the things that we do with AI is I make my team use it. They use it in our social media, they use it in our content writing, they use it in our SEO, they use it in our design, they use it in our video editing. They're using it everywhere. My programmers are better programmer because they're using AI. Now. Has there been a time where I maybe didn't hire someone because AI is helping people be better at their jobs? They're more efficient, maybe. Yeah, maybe. But we're still hiring people. I think we hired seven new people last year, and every one of them is using AI and all of their counterparts are using AI. Here's the key thing that I think is actually happening. It's not replacing people. Everybody is just doing more and doing it better. So now, rather than having to hire eight new people, you hire four new people. And those four new people are doing really, really great work. And it's allowing you to enter new markets and to create new products and to create better products and to create better marketing and to do all of these things that you previously struggled with. Now AI is allowing you to just do Things better. So how is AI affecting hiring virtual assistants? Well, the dream is tell me who to hire and have it tell you the exact person. And that's not a reality. That's not a reality anywhere in the hiring world. It is something we're working on. We're not there yet. Here is how it is affecting things. We generally assume that almost every job application has been written by AI. And we assume this because we see it so much that whether it's written by AI or not, I guess doesn't really matter unless that person has really stood out in their cover letter. And if they've really stood out in their cover letter and you know it's not AI, well that's a pretty good sign that that's a good person to hire. Most people are using AI because they feel like they have to use AI, otherwise everybody else is using AI and then maybe they're falling behind. They don't know. And this applies to most people in the us they're using AI to write custom tailored cover letters to every single job post. So are we using AI to fight back? Well, no, because now we just have computers talking to computers and we're taking the human out of the whole hiring process and that's a problem. But what we are doing is adding other hiring signals that allow you to be better at it and allowing an AI matching algorithm to consider all of these hiring signals and making it easy for you. So here's what we do. When I post a job, I'm assuming every single cover letter I get is written by AI. And so I may glance at them, I may skim through them. I'm only going to pay attention to the ones that first, use the number of apply points that I asked for. And second, I'm not going to pay attention at all to anybody who used one apply point. I don't care what they said. If they use one apply point, it tells me they're not really that interested in my job. So AI or not Apply points filters the bad people out for you. Next, what I realized was is that as the owner of online jobs and having done all kinds of hiring and seen thousands of profiles and applications over the years, I noticed a whole bunch of signals that I pay attention to that most people probably don't. You don't recognize, you don't know. And I realized these are like really, really high quality signals or some of them are low quality signals, or some of them are really frequent signals, or some of them are less frequent but really red flaggish, or some of Them are really, really green light go. Yes, this is a great person signals, but it was too much to ask someone to do. But when I started testing it with AI, I found it was capable of handling every single one of them and handling a couple other signals that I knew were real that even I couldn't handle because it was just too much work, too much data, too much time commitment, too much to consider. But when I started feeding it to the AI, it handled it perfectly well. So I started asking the AI to rate this applicant, rate this person in all of these different categories like on their skills, on their following instructions in the job post, on how relevant are they, how much experience do they have, how well do they fit my job post, how well do they fit my requirements, My are they available full time or part time like I asked for? Did they use the right number of apply points? How active are they in applying for jobs? So I started asking the AI to do all these things and found it was doing things, some things really, really well and something's poorly. So I kept refining the process and the more I refined it then it was like, okay, wow, now I'm getting a great response every single time. This person, the AI rated at 95 and this person that rated at 35 out of 100. Well, that's a really, really good filter because when I glanced at them I couldn't really tell the difference. And I started adding in other data. So we have all kinds of behavioral data from people on onlinejobs ph that is really hard for a human to synthesize and, but which a computer can really well. And I find this behavioral data to be really indicative of is this person going to be reliable? Are they going to stick around? Are they working multiple jobs? It's a really good indicator of these kinds of things. So I started feeding that to the AI and got some really, really terrible responses from it. It assumed the data meant one thing when it didn't. And it took me actually quite a while to get it to interpret it the way that I interpret this data to mean. And I guess the only reason I wanted to interpret it my way is because I've seen thousands of these and I understand the specific culture where it's interpreting it as a global phenomenon and that's not the correct interpretation in this situation. So I started tweaking it and tweaking it. Ended up finding that I was getting really, really amazing results from me giving this AI all of this data. Well, from there we started building a system around it. I still need to do the interviewing, because this person's gonna work with me. They're not working for a computer, they're not working for an AI. I need to interview this person, but I want to skip all of the difficult people and I want AI to tell me who the right people are. And so I was giving it all this data and getting all this really great stuff, and I started feeding it personalities. So here's my job post. What's the correct personality for this? And does this applicant's personality match? Because most people are taking a disc test which tells us their personality. And the results just became amazing. I have 100 applicants and now I have a list of this one scored 95, and this one scored 95, and this one Scored 93. And this one scored 92. And this one scored 90, and this one's 85 and all the way down to like 10. And it just immediately eliminated 80%. 90% of the applicants were. Depending on what my job post was and how relevant the applicants were, I could say, okay, well, I'm only going to look at Those who are 92 and above. Or I only got people that are really like 80 to 85 as a max. So I'm going to look at people who are 70 to 85 in this scoring. And that changed the way that I hire. So I still go through my whole process, which I detail@1vaaway.com where I'm going to ask lots of questions and I'm going to ask them personal questions and really odd questions, and I'm going to ask them their experience and I'm going to ask them to solve a problem, and I'm probably going to have them do a test task. I'm going to do all these things. I just do it with fewer people and I spend less time doing it, and I don't waste any time upfront. And actually, now it's even easier than that. Like, I know if I go post a job, I'm immediately at the best applicants and it takes me zero effort to get there. So AI and VAs, wow, this is changing the way that I look at my hiring. I don't fear having to hire anymore because I know I'm not going to waste my time. I'm going to post a job. And if it's a waste of my time, I'm going to know that immediately because AI is going to tell me, oh, all these applicants are 50 or below or something like that. Or it's going to tell me, oh, you have two people who scored 85 and everybody else was below 60 or it's going to tell me, oh, look, you have a whole bunch of people above 90, which means I have a crazy amount of really, really high quality applicants. And I've seen all of these situations and the amazing thing for me is I know up front that there's no more time wasting, there's no filtering. I don't have to filter. It's all done for me. I'm going to immediately jump right to the best people. I'm still going to interview, still going to ask questions, I'm still going to do a test task and see how well we work together. But the AI has taken care of the rest of it and it's exceedingly good at it. And actually maybe it's better than I was at it because of its ability to handle more data than I could handle. So AI and virtual assistants today, what's the reality? Well, the reality is it's making it better, easier, faster, higher quality. All of it is better because we're using AI in the hiring process, in working with them, in them doing their jobs. It's all just getting better. So now's a really great time to hire someone out of the Philippines. A programmer, a designer, a social media person, a virtual assistant, an executive assistant. Whatever it is, whatever you need in your business, now is a really great time to hire. Use the AI matching algorithm at onlinejobs.ph I made it publicly available to everybody on our premium account because we have cost in running this AI. It's available on a premium account and it is really spectacular.
