An Australian e-commerce brand with 80 staff wants to move its customer support and part of its finance back office to the Philippines. The plan: 25 support agents and four accounts-payable specialists within ten weeks, working Australian Eastern hours from a seat-leasing provider in Cebu IT Park.
The founders assume the hard part will be finding people. It isn’t. The JobStreet ads draw hundreds of applications in the first week, and a Facebook post in a local jobs group draws hundreds more. The hard part is the speed of everything that follows. Candidates who applied on Monday have accepted an on-the-spot offer from a large BPO by Thursday. Two AP specialists with strong Xero experience ask a question the founders can’t answer: is the 13th-month pay on top of the salary they were quoted?
Within a fortnight the founders learn two things. Filipino candidates expect a recruiter to call, not email. And the process has to be designed around a market where large operators can interview, assess and offer within a single day.
The Philippines is one of the world’s great talent markets for English-language services: customer experience, finance and accounting, healthcare support, creative and digital work, and increasingly software and analytics. It also has a young, mobile-first, socially connected workforce and a mature legal framework, with some rules (the 13th-month pay, the 30-day resignation notice and a strict anti-age-discrimination law) that foreign employers often meet only after they’ve hired.
This playbook covers where Filipino candidates look, how the public employment system works, how volume hiring differs from professional hiring, what to put in the ad, and what candidates expect from the offer onwards. It’s part of the Finding the Right Person hub. If you’re not sure yet whether to build your own entity, use an employer of record or contract through a BPO, read hiring where you have no entity first.
- JobStreet and Indeed lead for most roles, LinkedIn for professional and managerial hiring, Kalibrr for tech and early-career, and OnlineJobs.ph for remote work for foreign employers.
- The public system runs through PESO offices and DOLE’s PhilJobNet, plus very large government job fairs.
- Age requirements in ads are illegal under the Anti-Age Discrimination in Employment Act, unless age is a genuine occupational qualification.
- Employees must give 30 days’ notice to resign, and 13th-month pay (one-twelfth of basic salary earned in the year, due by 24 December) is mandatory for rank-and-file staff.
- In volume hiring, speed wins: the large BPOs can assess and offer within a day, and candidates expect a call, a clear salary and a start date.
Metro Manila first, but the talent map is spreading
Metro Manila remains the centre of gravity. Makati and Bonifacio Global City (BGC) in Taguig host head offices, finance, shared services and multinational regional hubs. Ortigas, Quezon City’s Eastwood and Vertis North, and Alabang in the south are dense with IT-BPM centres. Cebu, the second city, has the Cebu IT Park and Cebu Business Park clusters and a strong reputation for customer experience, accounting and software development. Davao is the largest hub in Mindanao, with growing contact-centre and shared-services operations and often lower attrition. The industry body IBPAP also points to Iloilo, Bacolod, Cagayan de Oro and Clark as hubs drawing new projects.
The scale of the services sector is the defining fact. The IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) reported roughly 1.9 million IT-BPM workers and about $40 billion in revenue in 2025, and forecast close to 2 million jobs in 2026. That creates a huge pool of people who know client-facing work, metrics-driven teams and night shifts aligned to US or Australian hours. It also creates fierce competition and job-hopping, because the next employer is often in the same building.
Shortages sit at the experienced end: team leads and operations managers, workforce-management analysts, CPAs with international standards experience, nurses and allied-health professionals (many of whom work overseas), software engineers with several years of hands-on experience, cybersecurity specialists, and anyone combining technical depth with polished client communication. Pay is low by Western standards but rising. The daily minimum wage for non-agricultural workers in Metro Manila rose to ₱755 under Wage Order NCR-28 from 26 September 2026, and provinces have their own, lower rates set by regional wage boards. Competitive salaries for skilled roles sit far above the minimum, and HMO health cover is expected as standard.
Where Filipino candidates actually look
JobStreet, part of SEEK, is the most widely used local board for white-collar and BPO roles, and its brand is strong across age groups. Indeed is a close peer with very broad reach, including outside Metro Manila. LinkedIn is the main channel for managers, finance professionals, tech roles and anyone already working for a multinational. Kalibrr, a Philippine-founded platform, is well regarded for tech, startup and early-career hiring and offers assessment tools on top of postings. Remote-only employers have their own world: OnlineJobs.ph connects foreign businesses directly with Filipino remote workers and charges employers a monthly subscription rather than a placement fee.
Then there’s Facebook. Jobs groups organised by city, industry or role carry an extraordinary share of BPO and frontline hiring, and many candidates first see an opening through a friend’s share. Messenger and Viber are where follow-ups happen. If you hire at volume, plan to run Facebook as a channel, with clear posts, a link to apply and someone answering comments. Referrals are just as important. Referral bonuses are standard in BPOs, often tiered by how long the referred hire stays. For a broader comparison of boards across the region, see our job boards by country directory.
PESO, PhilJobNet and the job-fair machine
The public employment system is decentralised. Every province, city and many municipalities run a Public Employment Service Office (PESO), coordinated by the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). PESOs register job seekers, refer them to employers, and co-organise job fairs. DOLE reported in October 2026 that PESOs had placed more than 1.4 million job seekers in 2026. PhilJobNet is DOLE’s online job-matching portal, managed by its Bureau of Local Employment. It’s free and connects to the national skills registry.
Job fairs are a genuine channel here, not a formality. DOLE and local governments hold them around Labor Day (1 May), Independence Day (12 June) and throughout the year, often in shopping malls, and employers can interview and hire on the spot. If you need volume, especially outside Metro Manila, partnering with a city PESO on a dedicated hiring day can fill a training class faster than any board. Bring assessors, laptops for online tests and offer letters.
There are also formal hiring steps that feel bureaucratic to newcomers. New hires must be registered with the SSS (social security), PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG, and employees need a TIN for tax. Candidates will often need time to gather pre-employment requirements: NBI clearance, birth certificate, medical exam and previous employers’ certificates of employment. Build that time into your start-date plan.
Volume hiring the BPO way, professional hiring your way
The Philippine BPO industry has turned volume recruitment into a science, and you should borrow the playbook even if you only need 20 people. Large operators run continuous intake with walk-in or online applications, same-day assessments (English proficiency, typing, chat or call simulations), an operations interview, and an offer on the spot or within 48 hours. Training classes start on fixed dates. Candidates who wait a week to hear back are usually gone. Think about the funnel the way the illustrative chart below does: if you need 100 people in seats, you need many times that in applications, and every day between stages loses some of them.
Professional hiring is slower and more relationship-based. Finance, engineering and management candidates expect two or three interview rounds, a case or technical test, and a conversation about career growth and the company’s long-term plans in the Philippines. Many have options with multinationals that offer hybrid work, HMO coverage for dependants and clear promotion paths. A small foreign employer wins by being specific about the work, flexible on schedule, and generous on the things Filipino professionals value most: health cover, training budgets and stability.
Recruitment agencies range from large staffing and RPO firms to specialist headhunters in finance and tech. Contingency fees for professional roles are commonly around 15–25% of annual salary, while volume and staffing arrangements are priced per hire or as a mark-up. Private recruitment and placement agencies for local employment must be licensed by DOLE. Overseas placement is a separate, more tightly regulated regime under the Department of Migrant Workers, so don’t confuse the two. The guide to agency fees by country covers contract terms worth negotiating.
Writing the ad: age, gender and data privacy
The Anti-Age Discrimination in Employment Act (RA 10911) makes it unlawful to print or publish a job notice that suggests age preferences, limits or specifications, including online, and it bars employers from requiring applicants to state their age or birth date during the application process. Exceptions exist where age is a genuine occupational qualification, but they are narrow. Penalties run from ₱50,000 to ₱500,000 in fines, three months to two years in prison, or both, and for companies they fall on the responsible officers. Ads that still carry ’22–35 years old’ or ‘fresh graduates only, not older than 25’ are a real legal risk, not just bad practice.
Other habits to drop: gender preferences without a genuine occupational reason, height and appearance requirements for roles where they don’t matter, and marital-status questions. The Magna Carta of Women and related laws protect against sex discrimination in employment. ‘Pleasing personality’ is a Philippine job-ad cliché that reads as a coded appearance requirement; describe the client-facing skills you actually need. For a side-by-side view of wording rules, see the job ad legal check by country.
Candidate data falls under the Data Privacy Act of 2012, enforced by the National Privacy Commission. Collect only what you need at each stage, tell candidates how long you’ll keep their information, and secure the IDs and clearances gathered at the pre-employment stage, which are a frequent source of data leaks in high-volume operations.
From offer to day one: notice, 13th month and regularisation
Under the Labor Code, an employee may resign without just cause by giving the employer written notice at least one month in advance, so plan for a 30-day gap for anyone currently employed. Employers sometimes waive part of it. Final pay and the certificate of employment from the previous employer follow afterwards, and candidates often ask you to wait until they’ve been released properly. Counter-offers are common for team leads and specialists, and in BPO hubs a competitor’s offer can arrive mid-notice. Stay in touch, confirm the start date in writing and make day one feel organised.
Pay structure has two features that surprise foreign employers. 13th-month pay under Presidential Decree 851 is mandatory for rank-and-file employees: at least one-twelfth of the basic salary earned during the calendar year, paid no later than 24 December, and pro-rated for people who join or leave mid-year. Make clear in the offer that it’s on top of the monthly salary. Many employers also pay performance bonuses, rice or meal allowances and, for night work, the statutory night-shift differential.
New hires usually start on probationary employment of up to six months, after which they become regular employees with security of tenure. Standards for regularisation must be communicated at the start of employment, or the employee may be treated as regular from day one. Write the performance criteria into the offer pack and review them before the six months are up. For screening tools that work at volume, see our pre-employment assessment software comparison.
Hiring in the Philippines without your own entity
Most foreign SMEs start in one of three ways: an employer of record that employs staff on their behalf, a BPO or seat-leasing provider that supplies facilities and sometimes staff, or a direct contractor relationship through a remote-work platform. Each makes sense at a different scale. An employer of record is usually the cleanest route for a handful of full-time professionals. A managed BPO suits volume operations with defined metrics. Setting up your own corporation, or a PEZA-registered entity for export-oriented services, starts to make sense once the team is large and permanent.
Bringing foreign staff into the Philippines is the exception rather than the rule: most foreign employers hire Filipino talent locally or remotely. Foreign nationals who do work in the Philippines need an Alien Employment Permit from DOLE, which includes a publication period so that qualified Filipinos can come forward, and the right visa. That rule shapes recruiting in its own way: if a Filipino can do the job, plan to hire one.
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