John Jonas explains why January is prime hiring season for virtual assistants in the Philippines. Candidate activity on OnlineJobs.ph doubles after the holidays, and posting a job takes just four fields: title, description, salary, and contact. Most VAs onboard quickly, so hiring now gets you help fast.
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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 237. Now's the best time to hire someone. I run a newsletter. Obviously you're listening to this as a podcast. I run a newsletter that I send out multiple times a week and I usually try and align my podcast episodes with my newsletter episodes. We found a while back that it's really, really difficult to release them at the same time. And so typically the podcast is delayed from when the newsletter goes out. I always try and talk about the same things. However, as of recording this, the newsletter that I'm supposed to send out is about Christmas and New Year's and the holidays. But this podcast isn't going to get published until after January 1st. And so it's not really relevant to talk about how a bunch of holidays around Christmas and New Year and how. Although let me give you a little bit of culture. So Christmas in the Philippines starts like in September and it's a really, really big deal. But, and I'm pretty sure about this, I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that New Year's is even bigger in the Philippines where people look forward to New Year's and the New Year celebrations even more than Christmas. So however, that's not the point of this. The point of this podcast is about how December and like starting really December 15th to January 1st is not a great time to hire someone in the Philippines. There's a lot of cultural expectation around the holidays, especially with traveling and being with family, being at home with, you know where your family is. And so if you don't live close, then you have to travel home. And that's a long process and working is really difficult during that time. And so trying to find someone to hire someone during December 15th to January 1st is really, really difficult. Not that it's really, really difficult, it's just not the best idea because people don't want to start work because they're not sure how their employer is going to handle this. They don't want to disappoint you. But from like January 1st to February 28th is like prime time to hire someone. At Onlinejobs ph, we see a doubling of the number of profiles that are getting created, a doubling of the number of workers looking to work in January and February. It's amazing how many more people like they hold this pent up need for work through November, December, and then in January and February, everybody's looking for an online job. So now is really, really a great time to try and hire someone. You'll get a really good response. It's a really good time to look forward to the year that you have coming to bring someone into your business to help you grow. It's gonna take you a few weeks to bring someone on board and to get them working. Well, at least usually it does. Sometimes it happens instantly, but usually it's gonna take you a couple weeks to get someone going. Putting this off is like the worst thing. I never hear someone say to me, oh, John, I wish I would have put it off longer. Always just so consistently hear people telling me, I just wish I would have done this sooner. I wish I would have hired someone back in January and it's now July and I'm now hiring and I should have done it earlier. So now's a really, really great time. Take the leap. Posting a job is super simple at Onlinejobs pH, there's really just four things required. Write a job title. Write a job description, which my job descriptions that I write are super, super simple. I describe the role that you're gonna do. I may give you a couple specific tasks and then I'm just going to say I want you to apply and tell me what you can do. Tell me what, what value you can add to my business. You're going to add the salary, which you can figure out the salary super easily by searching the skills that you're looking for on OnlineJobs ph, and looking at 10 or 20 or 30 profiles, you'll get a really good idea of what salary people are asking for. And then you can set your salary accordingly and then your contact information. That's the fourth field. So super, super simple to post a job. And it really just gets the ball rolling. And you'll start getting applicants, you'll start seeing people, oh, I don't like that one. That's not good at all. And you don't need to respond to that one. You'll start getting ones that are really, really exciting, like, oh my gosh, this person's amazingly talented and I really, really like this and I want to interview this person. So you start, you just reply to them simple in an email and ask them some questions. And over time you're going to see, oh yeah, this person I thought was good isn't so good. This person is really amazing. I'm really excited about this person. It really just posting the job gets the ball rolling and then hiring someone is really, really easy. If you have questions, check out ofsguide.com it is the top nine questions that I get asked. But now is a really great time to take the leap.
