Why Your OFS Could Be the Best Recruiter Ever!

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 433. Should you have your OFS recruit for you? So you already have someone in the Philippines working for you, you're ready to hire someone else, and you're wondering, should I have this person in the Philippines recruit for me? Or maybe you're wondering, I need a team of people. Should I hire an HR person or a recruiter to have them recruit people for me? And I say yes, but it depends. So I totally get wanting to delegate the recruiting process. One less thing on your plate, it's someone who's already familiar with the culture. They may already know people that are relevant for the job. If they're going to be working together afterward, do you want them to get along? There's all kinds of reasons that you might want them to do the recruiting for you. And I've done this a number of times over the years. Not necessarily had my team do the recruiting for me, but I've had them suggest people for me, which this goes down a different path. Should you ask your current team members for suggestions of other people who can work for you? So here are a couple things that I've noticed when I have someone recommend someone. So number one, they're almost hesitant to recommend someone because they know that if they recommend someone, that person's work reflects on them. So if the person that they're recommending doesn't work out well, it reflects on them. They know that. And so they want to make sure they're recommending someone who's good, someone who will be good for your business. I've also seen after hiring someone new that was recommended, that they'll take responsibility with each other. They'll work to solve problems together. They'll communicate with each other and help each other out. Now, this can be really good if the person doing the recruiting or if the person recommending someone has a really good knowledge of what they're recommending for. So if they already understand the role that they're recommending someone for, well, that's a lot easier for them. Then if they have a really wide network, this can be good. However, let me talk about some drawbacks here. This goes for regardless of whether you have you're asking your team to recommend someone, or if you're asking them to recruit someone, or if you're hiring a recruiter to recruit someone, here's the thing. So in the Philippines, finding a job online is quickly becoming the Filipino Dream. In the past, the Filipino dream was to work overseas. They have an acronym for it, OFW Overseas Filipino Worker. Well, when I started calling people OFS, I wanted to say OFWorld Online Filipino Worker wasn't an option because OFW Overseas Filipino Worker is so prevalent and so rampant. There are divisions of the government to support ofw. So that was the dream for most Filipinos for a lot of years. Well, right now, that dream is changing. That dream is to find work online. If you can work online, you make similar amount to working overseas. But you stay at home, you don't travel, you get to stay with your kids, you get to be with your wife. It's such a better situation for them. So if you're going to ask someone to do the recruiting for you, this is something you have to be aware of. The draw to them recommending someone who is a family member is really, really strong because it's really going to help that family member out. It's probably also going to help them out because now they're not supporting this other family member, the other family, because your OFS is likely supporting other people with their wages. So if they can recommend someone that they're supporting or someone that they know, or someone who may not be quite as qualified as they would want, but if there's a chance that person gets a job working online, that's a really. There's a really big draw to this. I'm not saying this is what's going to happen if you have your OFS recruit for you. Just letting you know this is something you need to be aware of. At the same time, they also have a lot of people asking them for work. So I had one of my team members tell me recently that they get asked to help someone find a job almost every day. So people know that she works online. And actually, a lot of people know that she works for online jobs. And so she gets asked almost every day to help someone else find a job. That's a lot of pressure. And if they're asked to recommend someone or if they're. If they're told there's an opening, do you have someone to recommend? Well, I mean, there's two things they may know. A lot of people who have asked for jobs and they can say, hey, yeah, actually, I do. Or they may say, hey, yeah, my aunt needs a job really badly. And I know because she's asked me to help her find a job, and so I'm going to recommend her. Now, I'll go back to the first thing I said about this which was they recognize that the person they recommend reflects on them. So I did this recently. I asked my team, I didn't ask them to recruit for me, but I asked them if they had someone to recommend. Two different people recommended people for us. Those two people that they recommended, I hired both of them. I interviewed them well and hired them. They're both fantastic. And it's going to be really, really great. It's a really great situation. Now, let me cover one more, one more option. Should you hire a recruiter to recruit someone for you? So, number one, there are a lot of people with recruiting experience in the Philippines, so hiring a recruiter is not hard. The caveat that I, that I always come back to with this is, is that person they're recruiting for you going to be working for you or are they going to be working for them? Because if they're working or let me, Let me rephrase that. Are they going to be working with you or they're going to be working with them? Because if they're going to be working with you, it's important that you get along with them. You're not hiring a skill. You're hiring a person with a personality. And one of the purposes to the first task that I give or the test task that I tell you to give isn't to see who does it the best. The purpose is to see who you work with. And so by having someone else do the whole recruiting process for you, you don't find out, can I work well with this person? You don't find out, do I like communicating with this person? So that's a really big drawback that you need to overcome if you're going to have a recruiter recruit someone for you. Now I have a recruiter on my team. I've only had a recruit for me a couple times and I didn't like the way it turned out. Now that she's not good at it, she's really good at it. She's not me. And I was going to be working with these people and she's recruiting for her personality, not for mine. So that's something to be aware of. Now, maybe you have a whole bunch of recruiting experience already and can you find someone in the Philippines who's a recruiter? Absolutely. Super reasonable to do that. Otherwise, my suggestion is if you already have someone in the Philippines working for you, it's perfectly acceptable to ask them, do you know someone who can fill this role? If that role is for someone to be working with them, like as a support for them, like you have a content team and the person you're asking is a content writer and you're asking them for another writer, then I think it's acceptable to say, hey, will you. If you don't know someone, will you recruit someone? You can use my online jobs account. You're going to find someone that you're going to work with because they're going to be communicating with them in doing this. Recognize they're probably very inexperienced at doing this. They don't know what they're doing. They, they're scared. They're scared of hiring the wrong person. They're scared of making the wrong choice. So that's just something to be aware of. And I've asked my team to do that in the past with. With mixed results. I'll just be honest. With mixed results in the end. So as we do this, I just finished posting a job for a programmer that I'm hiring and I did. I posted it despite having a recruiter on my team, despite having a bunch of programmers on my team, I posted a job because I'm looking for someone very specialized and I want to find, you know, I'm going to be working with them and I know that I need to be involved in that process. Yep. That is not, not something I'm excited about is the recruiting. Nobody likes. Well, maybe not nobody, but I don't love recruiting someone new. Even though I'm pretty, pretty good at it and it doesn't take me very long. It doesn't mean I like it. I didn't give a definitive answer here because there's not a definitive answer of should you have them recruit for you. You can. You just need to be aware of the pitfalls and the advantages which I hope I've. I hope I've described here. It.