John Jonas (creator) explains why many Filipinos shifted from office jobs to online work, emphasizing COVID-19’s role plus persistent Philippine bureaucratic hurdles when applying for in-country office jobs. He recounts seeing onlinejobs.ph account registrations triple in March 2020 (from ~20,000 in February to ~60,000 in March), discusses a customer-shared YouTube clip that documents days-long government red tape, and corroborates the claim with his long-time employee Julia, who experienced similar hurdles after college. Jonas describes verification requirements on onlinejobs.ph (government ID, phone/address verification, ID-like photo) intended to improve employer experience, reduce scams, encourage seriousness, and satisfy payment KYC needs. He closes by pointing employers toward his hiring guidance at 1vaoa.com.
Questions this video answers
Approximately 20,000 accounts.
Approximately 60,000 accounts.
March 2020 (tripled from February to March).
Since about 2010–2011.
Chapters
No wonder people are looking for online work. Before I get into this one, let me give you a little bit of backstory. In March of 2020, when the whole world shut down, we saw an instant tripling of the number of people applying for jobs@onlinejobs.ph. like, we had had 20,000 Filipino accounts in February, we had 60,000 accounts in March. So Covid has definitely contributed to the number of people in the Philippines looking for jobs online. However, there's more to it than that and this is an interesting part of the Filipino culture that we're going to talk about. So I get this email from customer from Bob, who replies to my newsletter and says, hey, John, your podcast reminded me of this. It's unbelievable what a person has to go through just to get a job in the Philippines. No wonder people are looking for work on onlinejobs. Ph. This video shows the process. I thought you might be interested. And he links to a YouTube video, which I will link to. In the description here, he says, I was amazed at all the red tape I saw in the Philippines, anytime you had to do anything with the government except for renewing a visa. So the video is like 20 minutes long and it's well done, it's edited, and it shows a. It's the YouTube creator along with someone who is new to getting a job. And she walks her through the whole process of getting ready to get a job. And it takes days just to go back and forth gathering government documents. And the red tape, they make you. The hoops they make you jump through. Oh, you need this thing from them. So you go there and they're like, oh, you can't get this thing until you have this thing from the people you were just at. Well, they didn't tell me that. Well, sorry. Like, you have to go back there. So you go back there and they're like, oh, yeah, here it is. Here's this thing that you need. So you go back to the next place. Oh, yeah, okay, you can get this. But you don't have this other piece yet. You need it from this other agency down the street. So now you have to. Well, why didn't you tell me that the first time? Well, we didn't. We didn't know. You didn't tell you. So you have to go back. This just goes on for days. It's terrible. So I asked. This is in this YouTube video. So I asked my OFS, Julia if this is legitimate, like if she encountered the same kind of problem when she worked for a company in the Philippines before she worked for me, she says, yes, I did go through the same process back when I was looking for work after college. It was just as infuriating back then, which, by the way, Julia has worked for me since like 2010, 2011. So it's been. It's been a long time. She says, I think it's harder now because of the COVID restrictions. They don't tell us about this in school. When we start applying for jobs, we learn about these requirements. As you can see, it can take somewhere from two days to a week to get all these documents. That's what makes the process so frustrating. So@onlinejobs.ph, when people come to get a job, first of all, they've often been referred by a YouTube video that says, oh, getting an online job is so, so easy. You can get a data entry job and make tons of money and you don't even have to really do anything for it. Which we're trying to debunk that because it's not true. Getting a job is not super easy. There's a lot of competition for the jobs that get posted. And as an employer, you usually get a lot of. Usually you usually get a lot of applicants. You get a lot of talent to pick from. Finding a job is not super simple, however, getting a job online still requires less than what people are required to do. Less than what people are required to do to get a job. Get a physical office job in the Philippines. But in the last couple years, at least a couple years ago, we started requiring quite a bit from the people in the Philippines in order to create their accounts on onlinejobs. Ph. So we require them to give us a government id. We require them to verify their phone number, we require them to verify their address. We require them to have a picture of themselves that looks like the government ID that they showed us. So we require a bunch of things. And the reason we've done this is to improve the employer experience so that we. We can say like, hey, we looked at this person, we verified this person. Could they have faked these things? Yes. It's just not very likely. So the chances of you finding someone who's dishonest or a scammer goes way, way, way down because we're requiring these documents now. Some of these documents require them to go through the runaround. If they haven't gotten them, you have to have a government ID. And if you don't have a government ID by the time you're 20 and graduating from college and applying for jobs, well, it's time to get a Government id and, and you probably need that, you know, throughout your life. Another reason we started requiring these things, not just for your sake, but also to encourage the workers to take online work seriously. A lot of times they see these YouTube videos that says that like I described, like, oh, you can make 5000 php in one hour, which is completely not true. But then they think, oh, like this is just, it's like a get rich quick scheme, right? Well, when they're required to verify their account and, and show these government documents, then they start to realize pretty quickly, oh wait, this is serious, like we should take this seriously. The last reason that we started requiring this was because in order to get paid in the Philippines, really you have to show id. Like every payment platform is going to have know your customer requirements and they're going to require government IDs from them. So we're helping them to be prepared ahead of time before they get to that point. And then they're like, oh, I, I've done this work and I can't get paid now, I can't eat. So we've cut down on that problem too. So should you ask your ofs for like proof of ID when you hire them? Well, you don't need to. We've already done that. You could. And they should have documents because we've required them to have them. The more important question though really is how well have you recruited someone? Like have you spent time, have you verified, have you asked them lots of questions? And I cover how I do that@1vaoa.com, where I'll walk you through like exactly how I find a great VA every time.
