Onlinejobs.ph Reviews: Cheap Virtual Assistants from the Philippines

If you’re looking for Onlinejobs.ph reviews, you’ve hit the point in your business journey where you realized you can’t do everything by yourself.

You need help.

Sure, it’s tempting to brush this feeling off, act tough, and continue doing everything on your own.

After all, you got this far, didn’t you?

However, most business owners eventually realize that the “lone ranger” form of entrepreneurship just isn’t sustainable.

There is only a limited amount of time you have available to work on your business. That means there’s only a limited amount of work you’ll ever be able to do by yourself.

If you want to scale up, avoid burnout, and take your business to the next level, you need employees.

“But employees are too expensive! How can I afford them?”

For many, the answer to this is simple: Hire a Virtual Assistant. More specifically: Hire a Virtual Assistant from the Philippines. And even more specifically? Hire a Virtual Assistant from the Philippines using Onlinejobs.ph.

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A Virtual Assistant is an employee who will work for you remotely – usually from a different country.

These Virtual Assistants can do pretty much anything you need for your business. Here are some examples:

• Writing
• Growing your email list
• Administrative Assistant duties
• Processing e-commerce orders
• Social Media
• PPC Advertising
• Data Entry
• Marketing
• Real Estate research
• Programming
• Sales
• Customer Service duties
• Bookkeeping
• Graphic Design
• Web Development
• SEO
• And so much more

Seems like a lot? That’s because it is!

Virtual Assistants, when used correctly, can help free up your time immensely, and allow your business to reach new heights that wouldn’t be possible if you were working alone.

Why hire Virtual Assistants from the Philippines?

By taking advantage of Geoarbitrage – i.e. the fact that different countries across the world have vastly different earning and living standards – you can hire a Virtual Assistant for an amount that might not seem like much in the U.S, but would represent a great salary in a country like the Philippines.

Each country’s economy is different, and the internet has made it possible for people in countries such as the Philippines to do almost all required work remotely.

This means that by outsourcing to the Philippines instead of hiring a local worker, you can get the same work done for a fraction of the cost.

In addition, the Philippines has a strong culture of hard work and honesty, which are the best traits to have as a Virtual Assistant. Most Filipinos also speak English, so the language barrier shouldn’t be a significant issue. While there are obviously some exceptions, you can usually expect to find good employees fairly quickly and easily when hiring Virtual Assistants from the Philippines.

Geoarbitrage is one of the most important concepts to take advantage up if you want to live your best life.

Should I hire a Virtual Assistant?

Click here for a complete guide to help you determine whether you should hire a Virtual Assistant, but if you’re in a rush, here are the main points:

• Virtual Assistants services are extremely broad – they can do almost any service you need for your business.
• Virtual Assistants usually cost around $400/month (or $2/hour), so wait until your business makes at LEAST that much before hiring one (unless you’re ok with losing money).
• If you’re finding you don’t have time to do things you know will make you money, or are constantly on the edge of burnout, a Virtual Assistant is one of the best available options to fix that.
• Even if you don’t hire one now, if you plan on taking your business seriously you’ll have to hire people at some point. Very few 1 person businesses last more than a year or 2, and hiring a virtual staff is often the best way to expand initially.
• The pros of a Virtual Assistant over a regular employee are obvious – EXTREMELY low costs, you aren’t required to send them 1099s or offer benefits since they’re working remotely from the Philippines, and you can hire them to do pretty much anything within your business, no matter how simple or complex the task is. The only criteria is that the task must be possible to be done remotely, for obvious reasons.

So, if a few of those bullet points are speaking to you, it’s likely time to give Onlinejobs.ph a shot.

In short: No matter how big or small a service you need to be done, you’ll likely be able to find a remote Virtual Assistant able and willing to do it for you.

How do you train a Virtual Assistant?

The most important part of training a Virtual Assistant is to first make sure you’re comfortable doing the task yourself.

Virtual Assistants are great, and will generally do what they’re told. However, if your instructions aren’t clear, they may be afraid of doing something wrong and upsetting you.

So, make sure you’re comfortable doing the task yourself, then get on Zoom and let your Virtual Assistant watch you do the task. They’ll ask questions, and learn what it is you need them to do.

Then, let them do it for a bit while you watch. You can point out any mistakes they make, but make sure to be nice and supportive while doing this.

Next, let them do the task themselves without your supervision. Check over their work carefully for a few days, and as you gain confidence in them you can give them more freedom.

Those are the basics. For more detail, check out this full guide to using Virtual Assistants effectively.

Why Hire Virtual Assistants from Onlinejobs.ph?

Since you’re looking for Onlinejobs.ph reviews, you’ve likely heard that Onlinejobs.ph is the best way to find great Virtual Assistants.

And that is absolutely correct! Onlinejobs.ph has a HUGE supply of quality Virtual Assistants from the Philippines that can be hired for rates as low as $2/hour.

Founded in 2008 by John Jonas, Onlinejobs.ph is the largest marketplace for Filipino Virtual Assistants in the world.

Whether you plan on hiring a single Virtual Assistant or an entire Virtual staff, hiring Filipino freelancers from Onlinejobs.ph is a fantastic option.

In the rest of this review, I’m going to show you how to best use Onlinejobs.ph’s platform to your advantage, go through the pros and cons of the service, and talk about how they stack up to the competition.

I’ll also provide tips for hiring Filipinos as Virtual Assistants, and show you how to decide whether you need a Virtual Assistant in the first place.

By the end of this review, you should have all the information you need to take your business to the next level.

Ease of Use

Using Onlinejobs.ph to find a Virtual Assistant is a breeze.

After making an account, you will see a big blue button at the top of the page that says “Post a Job”.

Once you click that button, you’ll be taken to a page where you can fill out the information about the job you’re posting.

Let’s discuss some of these fields in greater depth.

Job Description

For your Job description, make sure it’s as detailed as possible. Explain all the services that your Virtual Assistant will be doing in as much detail as possible so that there aren’t any misunderstandings.

There are a few questions you’ll want to include in your job description so that you attract the best Virtual Assistants. How your applicants respond to these questions can help you decide which ones to consider:

Question 1: Ask what their internet speed is. Onlinejobs.Ph’s Virtual Assistants are based out of the Philippines, and many people in the Philippines have very slow internet. This can cause them to take longer to complete certain tasks than you would like.

For remote workers, fast and reliable internet is key, as they can’t work without it. I wouldn’t consider anyone with less than 10 Mbps.

Question 2: What is their plan for if there is a blackout? Blackouts are common in the Philippines, often due to severe weather. Make sure they have a plan (a generator,  backup place to work, etc.) if blackouts become an issue.

Question 3: What is their previous experience in this field? Most will likely include this in their response regardless, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

The best candidates will have had previous jobs where they did services similar to what you need them to do – this will lessen the training needed significantly.

Question 4: This one isn’t really a specific question, but you should ask for details on if they’ve used important tools related to what you’re hiring them for. For example, if Excel is important for the job, get details on how they’ve used Excel in the past, and ask for specific examples of some complex formulas they’ve used.

Question 5 – Find out how much time they can afford to put in per week. Full-time workers should be expected to work at least 40 hours, while part-time workers should be at least 20-30.

The benefits of asking specific questions like that are twofold – it allows you to find out important information, while also making it easy to weed out those who didn’t bother to read the application/ have poor English skills.

If they ignored the questions or answered them in an incomprehensible way, you can stop considering them.

ID Proof

-Required ID Proof is a feature Onlinejobs.ph offers that help confirms the employee’s identity is real, and that they aren’t under a fake profile. If they’re lying about their name, it’s likely because they have something to hide.

To determine this score, Onlinejobs.ph reviews all identity proof offered by the Virtual Assistant, such as uploaded ID’s, Passports, and Drivers Licenses, social media accounts, Cell Phone numbers, Utility Bills, and more. The more information offered, the higher the ID score is (assuming all the info they offer checks out).

The higher the ID proof you require, the fewer candidates you’ll find. How high a requirement you require depends mostly on you, but I’d personally start at around 50, and adjust from there if you’re having trouble getting applicants (which I don’t expect will happen).

Once the application is complete, you may have to wait a couple of days before it’s approved (assuming you haven’t paid for the Pro version yet – the Pro version is necessary to hire someone, but it’s possible to test out the site for free first. However, that will cause your account approval to be delayed).

Once it is, responses will start coming in, which you can view by clicking “Messages” at the top of the screen.

Picking the Best Applicant

In the “Messages” section, you can hit the star button on the applications that look promising, and delete the ones that you won’t consider.

I strongly recommend copying the information for all intriguing candidates into an Excel spreadsheet. That way, even if you decide not to hire them at the moment, you can contact them in the future when you need more Virtual Assistants, and not have to pay for another month of Onlinejobs.ph.

Once you’ve selected the best 10 or so candidates, you can start scheduling Zoom interviews, and eventually pick your desired candidate.

The entire process can be done in under a week.

As you’re probably starting to see, the process of hiring a Virtual Assistant on Onlinejobs.ph is MUCH simpler than you would expect.

Outsource Recruiting to OnlineJobs.ph

If you don’t want to go through the work of finding a Virtual Assistant on your own, Onlinejobs.ph can help with that.

If you’re looking to hire a Virtual Assistant from the Philippines, it likely means you’re a busy person. In many cases, you might even be too busy to find a Virtual Assistant.

In situations like this, you can outsource the recruiting process to Onlinejobs.ph. You tell them what you’re looking for, and OnlineJobs will look through the skills and resumes of thousands of workers to find someone who will be a good match for your open position.

If you do this, make sure your expectations are reasonable. Onlinejobs.ph isn’t going to be able to magically find you a perfect Virtual Assistant, and you’ll still have to train the candidate.

Therefore, it is recommended that you go through the hiring process on your own if you’re able. Outsourcing the recruiting process should only be done as a last resort.

Onlinejobs.ph Vs Upwork

Upwork is Onlinejobs.ph’s largest competitor and represents the way that most people go about hiring Virtual Assistants.

Personally, I remember being very nervous before hiring my first Virtual Assistant.

This was not helped by the fact that I had first tried using Upwork, which was much more confusing to use than Onlinejobs.ph. This is likely because Upwork is designed for contract work of ANY kind, while Onlinejobs.ph is specifically designed for Virtual Assistants.

The emphasis on full-time Virtual Assistants instead of short term, contract-based work means you have much more freedom with how to manage your workers from Onlinejobs.ph than you do with a site like Upwork.

For instance, on Upwork:

• You have to pay your workers through Upwork so that they can take a cut from their salary
• You have to communicate with them only through Upwork
• The types of contracts you can set up are limited

That is true for most freelancing websites. However, none of that is true of Onlinejobs.ph. When comparing Onlinejobs.ph vs Upwork, these differences really start to stand out and explain why Onlinejobs.ph is the better overall platform for finding Virtual Assistants.

So, after switching over from Upwork, I was blown away by how easy Onlinejobs.ph was to use. While the messages could use a few additional organization features, everything about the process is pretty much perfect.

The only way to really understand what I mean is to dive in and try it!

Number of Available Virtual Assistants on Onlinejobs.ph

I have posted many job ads onto Onlinejobs.ph – for many different job titles –  and have usually gotten over a hundred responses within a day.

Some of these responses will be thrown out quickly, but at least half will likely pass your initial filtering process.

From there, you can start getting picky and really focusing on which applicants might be special so that you can find the best of the best.

In short, you shouldn’t expect to have any trouble finding qualified candidates.

If you’re posting about a highly specialized job, such as advanced programming, the applicant pool may be somewhat smaller. This makes sense, since fewer people have those skills in general, and you’ll find that highly skilled jobs have fewer applicants regardless of where you look.

However, even for jobs like that, there are usually a satisfactory number of applicants. If you don’t find anyone good, simply reword your ad and place it again – you can post up to 3-10 job posts per month, depending on which plan you select.

Onlinejobs.ph says they have over 500,000 active profiles, compared to 12 million for Upwork and 830,000 for Fiverr.

However, sites like Upwork and Fiverr also have many more buyers/hirers than Onlinejobs.ph – Upwork has 5 Million buyers, and Fiverr has 5.5 Million buyers. This leads to oversaturation – the workers have so many options to choose from – and results in less interest in your ad.

Additionally, many workers on other sites are only interested in the short term, freelance type contract work, while most Virtual Assistants from Onlinejobs.ph are interested in long term work. So, I’ve found that you tend to get more responses on Onlinejobs.ph than you do from any other sites.

Quality of Virtual Assistants on Onlinejobs.ph

This one is much harder to quantify, so we’ll have to go with mostly anecdotal evidence.

In my personal experience, and in the experience of most people I’ve spoken to, Onlinejobs.ph Virtual Assistants are the BEST Virtual Assistants out there and are vastly superior in quality to Virtual Assistants from most other sites.

This makes sense – since Onlinejobs.ph focuses specifically on Virtual Assistants instead of all types of remote workers, it stands to reason that they would tend to be of a higher quality.

Onlinejobs.ph themselves highlights this fact:

The site does a lot of work on their end to ensure quality as well. Onlinejobs.ph reviews tons of information about all their potential Virtual Assistants. They make sure their identities are real, offer tests for specific skills, and do everything in their power to make sure the overall quality is high.

That doesn’t mean that all the Virtual Assistants are perfect. No background check is 100% accurate, and there are definitely low-quality Virtual Assistants on the site.

Luckily, many of them can be filtered out by using the hiring plan I outlined above. And, if you DO get stuck with a low-quality Virtual Assistant, you can always let them go and hire a new one – though I recommend working with them first to try and fix any issues.

Overall, most people have good experiences with Onlinejobs – in my experience, more so than with competitors Upwork and Fiverr.

5/5

Try Onlinejobs.ph Now!

Largest Market for Virtual Assistants in the Philippines

Quality Virtual Assistants for $2/Hour

Simple, Streamlined Website

Customer Service and Refund Options Available

FAQ

There are a few common issues that people worry about when hiring their first Virtual Assistants. Let’s go through them now.

Won’t the Virtual Assistant steal my business idea and do it for themselves?

Onlinejobs.ph reviews each of their candidates before accepting them onto the site. This alone eliminates a lot of the bad apples.

Additionally, the Virtual Assistants you’ll find on this site aren’t the type to steal your business idea. Most aren’t entrepreneurial in the first place, and would rather a steady paycheck over the risk of a business.

As stated earlier, people from the Philippines have a strong sense of hard work, loyalty, and honesty.

Most importantly, many businesses are impossible to run remotely from the Philippines in the first place – so even if your Virtual Assistant had bad intentions, there is a limited amount they can do.

If your business requires a physical presence in your country, then being in the Philippines disqualifies them (unless you happen to live in the Philippines as well).

In addition, most businesses require startup capital, often thousands of dollars. Very few Filipinos have that amount of money available, and if they do, they aren’t likely at all to risk it all on a single business venture.

Will my Virtual Assistant steal money from me?

In most cases they won’t have access to any sensitive information – You can pay them through Paypal, and if you need them to have access to your Paypal or Credit Cards to make purchases for you, you can usually limit their access to only certain functions.

If necessary, you can give your Virtual Assistant full access to your credit cards, and rely on your credit provider’s warranty on any purchases not made by you – but this is extremely unlikely to ever become an issue.

Are there any customer support options for me to discuss issues with?

There’s an email address you can use to reach out. They are helpful, but most of what happens after you hire a Virtual Assistant falls outside of their jurisdiction.

However, if you have any questions before or during the hiring process, feel free to reach out to them.

Price

When hiring a Virtual Assistant, you’re paying for 2 things:

1) The cost of whatever site you use to do the hiring

2) The Virtual Assistant’s Salary/Rate

In this section, I’ll discuss both of those categories.

Onlinejobs.ph costs

Onlinejobs.ph has 3 pricing tiers – Free, Pro, and Premium.

Let’s dive into each of those tiers:

Onlinejobs.ph Free Tier

The Free tier is, well, free. Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, not so much – You won’t be able to hire anyone with this tier. The free tier allows you to get a sense of how the job posting process works, see how many people apply to your ad, and what types of skills they have.

However, you can’t contact anyone unless you move up a tier. That makes the free tier a good way to test the waters, but only as an initial step before paying a monthly fee.

Onlinejobs.ph Pro Tier

The Pro tier costs $69/month, and is the best tier for most people.

The most important thing to understand is that even though Onlinejobs.ph charges a monthly fee, you really only need to pay the fee a single time.

The best way to handle paying for Onlinejobs.ph is to simply pay for a month, go through the hiring process, set up a spreadsheet of interesting candidates, then cancel.

You can then hire one of your candidates, and also have a pool of candidates to choose from in the future. Doing this allows most people to only have to pay for a single month of Onlinejobs.ph.

In the Pro tier, you can post up to 3 job ads, get instant approval for your ads, communicate with your applicants, read reviews on your applicants, and even contact up to 75 Virtual Assistants who HAVEN’T applied to your ad (you can contact EVERYONE who applies, without restrictions).

You also get access to 2 optional features to help the Virtual Assistant, Timeproof and Easy Pay.

Timeproof

Timeproof is a software that tracks which hours your Virtual Assistant works. This can ensure they’re working as much as they say they are, but also shows some lack of trust, which could hurt morale.

Easy Pay

Easy Pay is a way to pay Filipino workers but honestly isn’t any better than Paypal in my opinion.

Whether to use these features is up to you. Personally, I tend to ignore them.

Onlinejobs.ph Premium Tier

The final pricing option is Premium, which is $99/month (again, “per month” usually ends up just being a one-time fee).

Most won’t find this tier necessary. In the Premium tier, you now get 10 Job Ads instead of 3, can contact up to 500 Virtual Assistants that didn’t apply to your job, and get more advanced background and mentoring services.

Contacting workers who haven’t applied to your job is usually a waste of time – if they were interested, available, and qualified, they likely would have simply applied.

The background information offered in the Pro Tier, such as IDProof, has always been sufficient for me. And, if you’ve read this guide carefully, you shouldn’t need any mentoring services in order to train your Virtual Assistant effectively.

That leaves the extra job posts as the main “Premium” feature. This can be useful to some, but in most cases, a single job post suffices. As such, the Pro tier is usually fine, with the Premium tier not being necessary.

These monthly fees are the ONLY fees you’ll be paying (other than your Virtual Assistants salary, which we’ll get to soon). While sites like Upwork and Fiverr don’t have a monthly fee, they take a percent of your Virtual Assistants salary each month instead. This ends up being FAR more than a single $69 fee.

Onlinejobs.ph Refund Policy

Finally, if you’re unhappy with your Virtual Assistant, or with the service in general for whatever reason, Onlinejobs.ph has one of the best refund policies around.

Couldn’t find a good candidate? Refund.

Forget to cancel your subscription after a month? Refund.

Upgraded to Premium by mistake? Refund.

Whatever the case, if you contact them and ask for a refund because you weren’t happy, you’ll likely get it.

Virtual Assistant Salary Cost/Rates

As stated previously, other sites such as Upwork and Fiverr take a percentage of your Virtual Assistants salary from you as payment. They do the same on the Virtual Assistant’s end, meaning they don’t receive the full amount that you pay them when hiring from one of those sites.

This leads to inflated Virtual Assistant salaries, as most Assistants tend to pass along that extra costs to you by requesting more money.

Onlinejobs.ph doesn’t do this. The ONLY way they collect revenue is from monthly fees.

This means that, as a rule, Virtual Assistant rates are lower on Onlinejobs.ph than they are in most other places since they get to keep 100% of what you’re paying them.

For a Virtual Assistant who does mostly simple tasks such as data entry, bookkeeping, writing, or social media management, you can usually hire a great Virtual Assistant from Onlinejobs.ph for around $300-$400/month, or $2/hour rates. On other sites, that same employee might charge $500-600, or $3-4/hour rates.

The standard procedure for paying Virtual Assistants is to pay them through an App like Paypal every 2 weeks. You’ll likely have to eat a small fee each time you send money since they live in the Philippines, but it shouldn’t be more than a few dollars.

Giving bonuses every few months for a job well done – even small ones like $10 or $15 – is a great way to ensure continued loyalty. This may not seem like much to you, but it makes a big difference to many of your potential employees.

As an aside, you might be shocked at these super-low prices for a full-time employee. One of the most common questions asked about Virtual Assistants is “How can they live off such a relatively small amount?”

To explain this, you have to remember that these Virtual Assistants are coming for the Phillippines. The Phillippines’ economy differs greatly from countries like America, so much so that a $400 monthly salary is actually quite competitive.

As you can see from this graphic, the Philippines are likely the country with the cheapest rates in the world to source Virtual Assistants from:

Taking advantage of the ins and outs of different economies like that is a core tenant of Tim Ferris’ The 4 Hour Work Week, which I highly recommend that everyone should read.

So, don’t let Onlinejobs.ph’s monthly fee scare you! At the end of the day, using Onlinejobs.ph saves you money on both fees and salary costs.

Final thoughts on Onlinejobs.ph

Well, this Onlinejobs.ph review is pretty much wrapped up. As I’m sure you’ve seen by now, there are TONS of advantages to using Onlinejobs.ph to hire a Virtual Assistant. Here are some of the highlights:

• Slick interface and simple process of hiring a Virtual Assistant
• A large number of Virtual Assistants available
• Overall high quality of the site’s Virtual Assistants
• Cheap fees
• Cheaper salaries and rates

In fact, I struggle to think of ANY disadvantages this site has when compared to its competitors.

Fiverr and Upwork are both bigger, but the hiring process is harder, many of their freelancers want short term instead of long term work, the fees are higher, and salary tend to end up higher as well.

Most other sites are simply too small, which makes it tough to find a reliable Virtual Assistant.

Onlinejobs.ph pretty much has it all, and hopefully, this guide has shown you why.

Max Kimmel

Max Kimmel graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S in Mathematics and Minors in Finance and Information Technology. He is a data expert and uses these skills to make sure all facts mentioned in his articles are accurate. Max has grown multiple e-commerce businesses to 6 figures in sales, invests in Index Funds, Rental Properties, and Cryptocurrency, and has been featured by HuffPost and Forbes.

Max Kimmel graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S in Mathematics and Minors in Finance and Information Technology. He is a data expert and uses these skills to make sure all facts mentioned in his articles are accurate. Max has grown multiple e-commerce businesses to 6 figures in sales, invests in Index Funds, Rental Properties, and Cryptocurrency, and has been featured by HuffPost and Forbes.