MBA2357 Q&A Wednesday: Hiring in the Philippines: What are the pros and cons?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday. On Q &A Wednesdays, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from John and John asks, I'm thinking about hiring from the Philippines. I know that you've hired from the Philippines before, can you share what are the pros and cons?

0:45Solid question, John. And yes, I have been hiring and working with people that are from the Philippines for the past nine years. And a good portion of our team is based in the Philippines. In fact, our last team retreat was in the Philippines because of that. In today's episode, I'm going to share the transparent, honest truth about the pros and cons of hiring out of the Philippines. There is incredible opportunity. And overall, I would recommend going after talent in the Philippines. I wouldn't be doing it myself if I didn't think it's a good idea. But with my experience, I do know what some of the pros and cons are.

1:23And I want to give you a heads up so that you know what you're getting into so you can navigate recruiting talent in the Philippines properly. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Now, a lot of people look to hire out of the Philippines for a lot of reasons. But mainly people think it's really good value. Like the cost of hiring somebody to be a VA, for example, could start at$600. Some even at$500 US a month for full-time work. So many people think, hey, this is amazing. I can hire an army of people doing all kinds of things for me at that kind of rate. And yes, that's true. And yes, you can hire talent for less money, but that's not the end all and be all, it's kind of where the conversation starts.

2:06I want to start with all the pros of hiring out of the Philippines, and then I'll go through, I would say, the cons, but more like the challenges, the things that you have to work towards to improve as well as to look out for. Yes, you are going to get a lot of value for your dollar in the Philippines because the economy there and the cost of living there when you talk about US dollars. But I wouldn't say that is the number one reason why you should hire out of the Philippines. Generally, I have found that the people that we hire out of the Philippines, culturally, they're hard workers, but they're like anybody else.

2:41They're going to need structure. They're going to need discipline. We'll talk about that later. But generally, if you have a good system, they will work hard for you if they're properly motivated. And that goes hand in hand with another pro where I found that the Filipino team members we hire are pretty loyal or very loyal. We have team members that have been with us seven years, eight years, if you give them a good work environment, if you give them good challenging work, if you create a great structure for them, they're content in their job. And this is what I love about it. They see the business or the employee relationship as a transaction.

3:12They see it like, hey, I have to show my loyalty. If these people are showing their loyalty, they're consistently paying me, they're making sure that I'm taken care of. If they're compensating me fairly, then I should be loyal. And I love this mentality out of the Filipino culture. Next big pro is that the English language is pretty solid in the Philippines. The education level in the Philippines is quite good. Most of our team members are college graduates. Their English language level is very good. I would say most of them are better in written language than verbal. So if you're in an interview and they're speaking to you, of course, they'll have an accent because English is not their second language.

3:49You wouldn't expect them to have no accent. but I found that their written communication is very solid and then their verbal communication is not bad either. It's probably one of the best I found generally, and I'm speaking in generalities here, than any other non-native English-speaking country. A lot of the Filipino culture is infused with the Western culture and music and movies, so they understand a lot of the idioms and some of the inside jokes or some of the cultural references that you might have in your writing or even just in your general day-to-day communication. And that kind of leads me to the next thing is that, yes, they have their solid Filipino culture that they love and respect, but they're very much in touch with Western culture, whether it's the latest movie on Netflix or music that's really popular today.

4:35So if this is kind of important for you to have creative writers or somebody who can communicate with customers and understand pop culture references, they know. They know what's going on. And it generally approximates the same cultural or pop knowledge that people have in the West. Another big one I found is that Filipino team members, in my experience, are highly trainable, meaning they might come into my organization with a set of skills, with a set of experience, and maybe start in a role and then end up in a different role completely. as the years start to evolve, as your needs evolve in your business and you can kind of move them in departments, you can move them around and train them up and they're quite flexible and they actually pick up things very quickly.

5:19For example, I have a team member that started out as a customer service agent. He was excellent as an agent, wonderful worker, great teammate. And then there was an opening for a QA engineer, a quality assurance engineer over at Webinar Ninja. And he moved into that role and is doing brilliant there. And it's a great QA. He had to learn new skills. He had to get trained up, but he picked it up quickly and was able to make the transition pretty seamlessly. Now, this is kind of a pro for me because I live in Australia, but the time zone difference is quite good. It's only two hours in the winter and in the summer eight months, it's three hour difference.

5:56So our working hours overlap quite well. If you're in the US, the time difference actually works well as well because the time difference is so great that it just becomes like the next day. A little trickier in Europe, again, South America, if you're in the Americas, it works quite well. And then if your work is asynchronous, meaning that they don't need to be on a call every day, and they can work by sending messages on your project management system and go back and forth that way or with recorded video, then the time zone really doesn't matter too much. There's so many more pros I can go on and on about our great Filipino team.

6:34Generally, they're happy people, they're good people, they have a rich and diverse culture. I just really enjoy working with them because of their sense of loyalty, their sense of hard work, and they don't take things way too seriously. That's what I like about the kind of lighthearted. When we're on our team retreat, we had some fun times together, karaoke, banana boating. They're down for a good time. And I like to work with people that I like to have a good time, people I'd like to enjoy their company. We spend so much time at work, we might as well enjoy the time with the people that we're with.

7:04Okay. Now, John asked also the cons. So I would actually label this as more of a challenges, things you have to look out for. From a work culture, you're going to have to train and build the culture that it's okay to ask questions, to say, I don't know, to say, I can't, to say, I need help. It's hard for them as a culture to say no to you because you're their boss to say, I can't do this, or I don't know. So you got to make sure that you highly encourage them to ask questions all the time, to get them to speak up if they need help, encourage them that it's okay to make mistakes and ask for help or to say, I don't know, or I can't do this.

7:41This is going to take some time. It's going to take some repetition. It's going to take a few moments or experiences where they realize, okay, I'm not going to get fired if I say, I don't know. In fact, they're going to be okay with it. They're going to encourage me. They're going to show me. They're going to help me. Second challenge I would say is you need to make sure you give them very good structure. I found that if you give them a good structure in terms of their workday, what's expected, their outcomes, what you expect of them, deadlines, you give them a game plan to win in their job, they're going to strive for the most part.

8:12Now, of course, there are good and bad employees in every country and every culture. And that's your job as a business owner to find great talent anywhere you hire. But if somebody is good, you're going to need to give them a little more structure. They're not as autonomous as you might think. Now, this doesn't mean they need to be micromanaged, but they need to have an outline of what they need to do, how to do it. So a bit of training in the beginning goes a long way, as well as some accountability, basically a scorecard so they know if they've ticked all the boxes and know that they've done the task or their job in general well.

8:45I mentioned their communication is good, especially RAN, but sometimes their verbal communication is a little bit slower because, again, they're not speaking in their native tongue. And now this is not everybody. Some that we have found have near native English speaking skills, but some, they take a little longer to express themselves and that's okay. Just be a little patient with them and understand this is just a trade-off of hiring somebody who English is not their first language. Now, one of the biggest challenges is actually finding these great, talented people in the Philippines. If you're not Filipino, you probably don't know where to look, probably don't understand what your options are.

9:20Now, one site, a good starting point is onlinejobs.ph. It's a good place to hire customer service agents, VAs, EAs, social media managers, people like that that do administrative work. They also have engineers and developers there as well, graphic designers, but you're gonna have to vet them. You're gonna have to go through the interview process. It's not an agency, so to speak, but more of a job board. There are agencies that you can Google and find that will vet your team members for you, train them up, get them ready, but you're going to have to experiment a little. You'd be willing to actually hire and fire quickly.

9:54Many times we'll have to hire for several positions in customer service. Let's say we wanted to hire two new agents. What we would do is usually hire four, knowing that most likely one, two, even three might not work out. And we have to be willing to fire them quickly if we feel like they don't have what it takes. So recruitment takes a little bit of effort, work, research, but at the end, when you find the great talent, it's well worth it. There you have it, guys. Those are the pros and cons of finding and hiring great talent out of the Philippines. John, thanks so much for asking this question.

10:27I have to say, after nine years of working with Filipino team members, it's been great. I love working with them. I love the process and it's been great learning how to find them, hire them and train them up. If you want to learn more practical ways to build and grow your business, make sure you subscribe and follow to this podcast right now. Whether you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher Radio or Overcast or whatever it might be that you're using to listen to podcasts, just go ahead and follow us or subscribe to get our next episode automatically and get access to over 2 ,300 business lessons in our catalog.

11:03Before I go, I want to leave you with this. wherever you decide to hire from whatever country. You're just going to have to find good people with good talent. There's good talent everywhere. And that becomes one of your most important skills as you scale your business is recruitment. Really, your job as the founder, as the CEO, as a leader of your business or somebody who is leading this mission is to find great people who can subscribe to your mission and fulfill what you need. The better you get at that, the better team you'll have, the better product and service you'll be able to deliver to your customers, the better business you'll have.

11:38So just see this as an exercise. See this as another rep to build that muscle. Thanks so much for listening. And I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

12:05Thank you.