There’s something so satisfying about when the product you’ve spent the last year building just… works. Exactly as you intended it.

We recently expanded our Outhire team to the Philippines, hiring Brice and JP to our Engineering team.

With the growth of remote, async work and tools to facilitate this, companies simply now look for the best talent available, wherever it might be.

Hiring a remote development team can be a great (and more cost-effective) way to access a wider range of skills and experience. For Australian companies, the Philippines has emerged as a popular destination for hiring remote employees.

Why hire in the Philippines?

There are several reasons why the Philippines is such a popular place for Australian companies to find remote employees.

A large and growing pool of skilled workers

The Philippines has a population of over 100 million people, and a large and growing number of them are university-educated.

English proficiency

English is one of the official languages of the Philippines, and many Filipinos speak it fluently, this makes communication much simpler for both sides.

Competitive salary rates

Compared to Australia, salary rates in the Philippines are much lower. This can be a significant cost saving for businesses.

Time zone overlap

It’s not often that Australians find themselves in a convenient time zone for collaborating with other regions around the world. However, The Philippines is only 3 hours behind Australia, which makes it easy for remote employees to work in collaboration with their Australian colleagues.

The challenges of hiring in the Philippines

Traditionally, to hire in the Philippines you have to go through an employment agency. While hiring through agencies in the Philippines can offer several benefits, it also comes with its own set of challenges. Here are some of the key issues to consider:

Fees and Transparency

Recruitment agencies in the Philippines are often known for charging high fees, which can be a significant burden for both employers and job seekers. These fees often go beyond the legal limit set by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). Further, Agencies may not always be transparent about their fees and how they are calculated. This can make it difficult for employers to budget for the cost of hiring and for job seekers to compare different agencies.

Ethical Concerns

Unfortunately, some agencies engage in illegal recruitment practices, like charging excessive fees, providing false or misleading information, and confiscating passports. This can put both employers and job seekers at risk. Some agencies alter contracts after they have been approved by the POEA, often to the disadvantage of the worker. This can lead to disputes and legal issues.

Quality of Candidates

No one knows your business like you do. Agencies may not have a strong understanding of the specific skills and experience required for a particular role, or the unique way that role will fit into your organization. This can result in employers being presented with candidates who are not a good fit for the job. In addition, the Philippines has a high rate of job hopping. This can make it difficult for employers to find and retain qualified employees.

Hiring employees directly with Outhire

For Outhire, we decided to go the route of hiring our employees directly. 

In previous roles, I’ve had the joy of working directly with a team based in the Philippines and employed directly with our company. We found the benefits of having a team that was truly part of our organization were significant.

Our remote team was as much a part of the company as every other employee and you saw this unified team coming together to collaborate and support each other across the globe. In turn, those remote employees were heavily bought in to the mission of what we were building, they took true ownership of their role in the way we would have any member of our team do so, and we saw fantastic retention rates among this team as they grew and built their careers with us.

With so many platforms now available like Deel, Rippling, and Remote to manage the administrative side of hiring overseas employees, the only challenge left was how we’d find candidates.

If only there was a platform that solved this very problem…

As it turns out, we’ve built that very platform here at Outhire and it was a great opportunity for us to put our tech to the test!

How we found candidates in the Philippines

As a foreign business, finding local candidates is often one of the main reasons teams will look to an employment agency. Luckily, with Outhire, this was the easiest part of the process for us!

I created the Full-Stack Developer role in Outhire, ensuring the job description checked all the boxes in our insights panel, including essential details and using inclusive language. 

Then, I created a new campaign.

In minutes, I had a text ad ready to be pushed out to a range of professional communities across Slack, Discord, and Facebook. Our AI-powered talent-matching engine quickly identified professional communities as the best channel to reach developers in the Philippines and targeted the campaign to go out to a variety of communities from our network of 400+ professional communities and more than 4 million professionals.

Within hours, we had applications coming in. A range of highly qualified candidates that I was able to review and easily manage using the stages built into Outhire. For those progressing, I could move their applications to ‘In Progress’.

Using Outhire, it was easy to find a strong pool of applicants to interview. With all the time we saved on sourcing candidates, we were able to focus on our interview process to ensure we had the best candidates for the roles. 

After a short trip over to Manila to meet JP and Brice in person and get them onboarded with Outhire, we’re now set up and already pushing out new releases!

If you’re looking to build a remote team, book a demo today to see how Outhire can take the headaches out of finding great global talent.