John Jonas explains why he skips interviews when hiring overseas Filipino staff. Time zone confusion and different scheduling norms cause candidates to miss meetings or drop out, so he evaluates people through work samples and references instead.
So when you're talking about scheduling an interview with someone in the Philippines and you're talking about 6am for them or 4am for them, and then you show up five minutes late or they show up five minutes late, and you're really upset about them showing up five minutes late because you don't realize that they don't really have a time schedule. They're just not used to this. Then I started talking with my son about time zones, and they don't have time zones in the Philippines. There's only one time zone. They've never dealt with a time zone. So when you try and schedule meetings with them, at least in the very beginning, man, this is hard for them. They don't know how time zones work. Not that they're dumb. They just have never had a reason to look at it. And so when they're trying to figure out your time zone and then they're off by an hour, well, that's frustrating for you. And it's frustrating for them and is probably enough for them to say, yeah, I don't want to be embarrassed by this whole thing, and so I'm not going to do this.
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