👀 Read this before you hire in the Philippines...

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Nearly 20 years ago a book with a flashy orange title hit the top of the New York Times best-sellers list: “The Four Hour Work Week”

The book’s premise was as bold as its title: “Escape Your 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”

I’m actually a fan of the book’s author, Tim Ferris, but there’s one section in the book that kicked off a trend I am absolutely not a fan of.

“Just hire people in ultra-poor countries like the Philippines or India to do your job or run your business for you.”

If you’ve owned a marketing agency for any amount of time you’ve likely had someone pitch you on hiring from a very poor country like the Philippines or Pakistan.

And, like most agency owners, you’ve probably discovered that this advice almost never ends well…

Why you shouldn’t hire in the Philippines 

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the people in the Philippines.

But there’s at least three attributes of the job pool that makes it subprime for most agency owners.

If you’ve ever hired someone from one of these countries, you’ll understand instantly where I’m coming from on this.

1. Educational & Skills gap

For highly repetitive tasks where skill and experience aren’t required, it’s often no big deal to hire from a country like the Philippines.

However, for jobs that require more skills such as operations directors, project managers, media buyers, copywriters, and research analysts, you need an educational and occupational pipeline that trains people to do these jobs.

In Eastern Europe companies like Deloitte, NCR, Foursquare, Amazon, Honeywell and many more spend millions each year developing high-level talent.

Outside of the US, it’s the most robust talent development network I’ve seen.

You want to piggyback off of all the money these companies dump into training talent– not spend your weekends drafting endless training guides for unskilled workers.

2. The Culture

Different countries have different cultures. This is not controversial.

But someone in the discussion of off-shore hiring this little fact is almost entirely forgotten.

Your company runs on written and unwritten rules of social interaction and cultural understanding.

If you want to provide “great customer service” you need someone who understands these nuances.

The further a country is from the “culturally Western” countries, the harder it will be for them to intuitively understand the rules of the “customer service” or “American business” game.

That’s not to say it’s impossible, just more difficult.

3. The Geography

Long-term remote work requires uninterrupted access to wifi and electricity, full stop.

Because many poor countries are located in geographic areas prone to typhoons, tropical storms, or other natural disasters.

In some countries, folks have to rely on generators and other nongrid solutions to provide power.

This just isn’t a recipe for the reliability we need.

South Africa & Ukraine both have amazing talent pools, but because of poor governance or war, they have similar connectivity issues.

It’s not impossible to hire out of these regions, just something else to be aware of.

“Goldilocks” conditions for hiring overseas

No location, not even the US has the “perfect” hiring pool for your business.

You’ll have to make some tradeoffs, and at the end of the day the individual you hire is far more important than where they live.

But in business, we need to think in terms of systems and repeatability.

We don’t just want to hire one really good person, we want to hire many people over and over again with a high probability that it’s going to work out.

For me, (and my clients) the right mixture of price and value for that price is found in Eastern Europe.

It’s not so cheap that they lack basic infrastructure to support remote work or the occupational pipeline to develop skilled talent.

But not too expensive that it will eat into your margins. (Which kinda defeats the whole point of looking overseas in the first place.)

—> Interested in a free quote on some of your open roles? Click here to book a free consultation with one of my recruiting specialists < —

Until next time, 

Nathan

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