Hiring is a very crucial process in any organisation–it can make or break your business! So, it pays to hire the right people in safeguarding not only your business' productivity but also its reputation, right? But how to hire the right people?
In today's video, I'll be giving my recommendations on how to hire the right people into your business, specifically from the Philippines.
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Transcription:
If you're a business owner, or HR manager and you're looking to hire in the Philippines, well this video is for you with some traps for new players. Having worked with businesses all over the world and hired hundreds of employees in the Philippines for our growing business, I'm going to share some of the things you need to know if you're getting started expanding your international team. My name is Peter Moriarty, and I'm the founder of it genius. We're a business consultancy that help businesses get the right technology in place to scale their teams and grow a more successful business. Now, we work primarily with the Google workspace ecosystem. But we help with pretty much anything to do with small and medium sized business technology. And we also have options for larger organizations who want to engage with a hand holding team who can help them make sure tech is a central driver of success in your business.
Now, we've been hiring teams in the Philippines for many years, probably close to a decade now. And we've learned a lot along the journey of growing international teams, I'm going to share with you some of the tips for new players and making sure that you can have a success in hiring. And before we get into some of the bits and pieces of hiring specifically for the Philippines, I want to kind of share my golden rule of hiring and Golden Rule of interviews. And that is that for anyone that I'm sitting down with, and I'm interested in hiring, rather than sitting with, is this person going to be a right candidate or fit for the role? Am I going to find a way for this person to fit within the business? The frame that I use when I'm hiring someone, or when we bring someone into the organization is this interview is starting with a no, I'm not going to hire you. And during the course of the interview or during the course of the interview processes, we need to be convinced that that turns into a yes. Now many business owners will go into hiring with a sales mindset and little bit of scarcity mindset comes with that as well. And that is basically their in their hunting mindset that I need to close this deal, or I need to find this person or I only have three candidates, I need to pick the best one, I want you to think about the frame of you're not going to hire anyone that is your default position. And only when you find the right candidate or someone who can grow into the right candidate, then you choose to bring that person into business. Okay, now that basic ones out of the way, let's have a talk about some of the more specific things that I recommend if you're interested in growing a team in the Philippines. Now my tip number one is to not actually use the most popular place that people go to typically for hiring. And that's that most people go straight to Upwork, formerly called oDesk. And they look for someone to hire based on the contracts that are available for VA s. Now personally, I don't like the term VA or virtual assistant. I certainly understand that for some people. It's a you know, usable term to represent people working remotely. But nowadays in the internationalized labor market that we have, and also considering the fact that after the coronavirus pandemic, everyone's been forced to work from home anyway, I think that's a little less useful as a term. Now also, the other reason I don't like the term VA is because it can kind of be used in a way where just hire a VA is a bit of a disposable throwaway, particularly for business owners in more developed countries to just hire a Filipino person. And I don't really like the vibe of that term. So why is that important? Well, there's a whole industry around VA or virtual assistants. And that whole industry is actually you know, a way of outsourcing smaller tasks. And you tend to find people who are more interested in being all rounders, rather than focusing on a particular task or a particular, you know, job role within a business. And that's useful if you're just starting out, maybe hiring one person, and you want that person to be a bit of an all rounder, but if you're a growing business, and you're interested in actually hiring a team, maybe three or five people, or you're hiring team members for different disciplines or a more scaled operation, then you don't actually want someone who's an all rounder, you probably don't someone want someone who labels themselves as a VA either, because that person is probably going to be either working multiple gigs, a little bit more like a freelancer style arrangement. Or maybe if they're quick to jump between different gigs and different employers, which is pretty common in the VA industry, then you're going to find someone who may not stick around as long as you'd like them to inside your business. So for that reason, I don't like using the website Upwork because that is really more of a gig based website recruiting. And you're going to find that people are more likely to hop around between different jobs, more likely to ask more money for what they're earning, because they've got lots of opportunity to flutter between different employers. What we recommend instead is a list of links to hiring websites that we have down below. And those are a recommended go to sites at this current point in time for you when hiring in the Philippines. Now one of the things that I would recommend is that when you have a conversation, hiring someone you haven't talked about moonlighting. Now what we call moonlighting is when someone's working more than one job at the same time. And this is pretty common in developing markets, not just in Philippines but in other markets as well where someone wants have multiple jobs are kept because they're either supporting family or they'd like to earn more money than they can earn from just one job. And so for that reason, it's really important that we have a conversation with any candidate that we're working with about moonlighting. Now, moonlighting doesn't mean having a small side gig or side hustle, that's okay, as long as it's not taking hours and hours and hours every day. But moonlighting is when someone is literally working two jobs or two gigs. Now, not only is that potentially out of integrity, if someone should be thinking about your work, and they're actually doing a little bit of work on the side for someone else. But it actually really can quickly affect the mental health of someone who is working for you, and very quickly can lead to burnout. Now we've seen it time and time again, when someone says that, or when we used to hire people who said that they had another gig, and we would let them work for us, or very quickly with the intense work that they were doing in our company. Because we're working with technology, and we're project managing, and we're working with people all day long, they're very quickly found that they were burnt out. And so we have a blanket rule. Now no, moonlighting, you work just for us, we pay a reasonable salary, we pay well above market salary, but we make sure that it is just one job that someone is working, so we can get the best productivity out of that person working for our company. But also they can have a better healthier relationship with the workplace that they are working with. Next up, I want to talk about incentives. And this is a really great one to make use of in the Philippines, because of the culture of the Philippines, typically referring friends, family members and others in one's role onto a good gig when it's available. Now for us, we've hired many team members. And what we found is we get about a mix of half of our team coming from personal referrals, and about half of our team coming from job websites or open hiring. Now, that's a really great measure of your success. If the people that are working for you are interested in referring their friends and partners and family members into working with you. Now what we do to incentivize This is we actually give a hiring bonus. And that bonus is around about the 200 US dollars per not per anything could still around about 200 US dollars, it's one time. And that is if someone successfully refers a friend or someone else in their realm into the business into a new role when we're hiring, then after three months, or after the probation period has expired for the new person in the business, will actually pay a hiring bonus to the person that joined in. And why we love doing this is it incentivizes our team to find great people who we can work with. And it's always a good measure of the culture of the business, if those are willing to refer. Now I've heard something really wacky that Zappos used to do. And they may even still do that. And that is that when someone comes into the business, they actually give them a bonus to leave the business if they feel they're not a culture fit. So after their training after their onboarding, after a couple of weeks, they issue a check for a couple of 1000 US dollars and say, Hey, if you want to leave this business, we're going to pay you to leave the business. But if you're really, really invested in being a part of this business, then you get to stay on board. And we haven't quite implemented that one. But we have kicked around the idea. Now the one caveat to asking for referrals for people to be recommended and referred into the business is we have a hard rule of not to hire couples, that's very, very important. And trust me, you may be tempted, but we've got a hard rule not to hire couples. Now there's a few reasons for that, even if you have a large enough business where you can place a couple in a romantic relationship in two different areas of the business. The downside or the risk is in every single instance where I've had couples, we've had them both leave at the same time. And that can create quite a disruption for you and your teams. And it's not ideal in the business. Sometimes we've even had gossip and things happening where the culture was impacted, because we had two people working in a business during the day, and then talking about that business during the evening. And that doesn't help your culture at all. And so a blanket rule, we don't hire couples, but really happy for anyone to hire a distant relative, or maybe someone who's within their friend circle. Now my last tip is to make sure you have a solid hiring and recruitment process. And one of those is making sure there's enough hoops to jump through for new people to come into your business. But you're also doing a good job of attracting those who are the great fit for your business and bringing them into your team and into your team culture. Now one of the things we're really good at is helping business owners with their processes. And one of the things I'm going to share with you is their actual recruitment process. If you head along to it genius.com forward slash careers, you'll see what our recruitment page looks like. And you'll see even a link to the types of ads that we put and on the websites that we use as well. And you'll see a recruitment form there where each person needs to actually fill out all of the questions that we've asked on the form. Now this is our way of triage those who are coming into our business. And if you're interested in that template, you can actually get access to that as part of our concierge program or as part of our transfer in program. I'd love to know what challenges you've had, what successes you've had, and what questions you have about hiring in the Philippines or hiring other teams internationally for your business, drop them in the comments and I look forward to catching you there.
Thanks so much for watching and I hope these tips have been useful. If you're interested in growing your team. We've got many more videos that go into the depth of all of our hiring process. As our recruitment processes, our onboarding processes, and all the things that we do to manage and grow and foster culture within our business, now they are inside our Google Classroom, which is available for any customer that transfers their Google workspace building into it genius. Now, you can get access to that offer by clicking on the link below for the transfer in. And that gives you and your team access to an amazing resource of our team with some basic support, but also access to perks, discounts, and availabilities for Google workspace that are not available to the general public. Now you don't have to pay any more you pay the same price that you would normally pay Google for your workspace subscription. But with it genius, you get access to a bunch more features. One of those is a google classroom with a whole library of training videos, backlogs of our webinars that we've run privately for our members and you get access to all of this on a complimentary basis. Now if you're interested in that, you can get signed up in just a couple of minutes. Click on the link below to get started.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
