Employing Someone From the Philippines

You might think that outsourcing a job to the Philippines is something that only much larger companies do.

This article I hope might plant a seed that it is truly possible that you, might actually go and hire someone from the Philippines after reading this article.

Why Would You Recruit Someone From the Philippines?

Firstly, the culture there is really geared towards working with us brits.

Everybody speaks the English language, and they speak it pretty well in comparison to other outsource locations where English is just a secondary language.

They’re typically, very highly educated – even for menial tasks.

And also – because labour is ridiculously affordable!

It verges on slave labour – because we’re talking around $300 – $500 per month for a full time employee!

What Kind of Work Can You Outsource?

• Office & Admin Data Entry
• Writing (Copywriting)
• Developers
• Web Development
• Marketing and Sales
• Design (Graphic / Video)
• Professional Services
• E-Commerce
• Customer Service
• Finance
• Basically – Anything!

What this meant to Tekkers, is that we could afford to pay a fantastic, very experienced and very good graphic designer, who did all of our printed newsletters, brochures, website artwork, email signatures, everything we needed – at a cost of $300 per month.

For $300, We Had Someone Working 10am Until 3pm Monday to Friday, British Time!

It was a huge game changer for our business. I couldn’t afford to employ someone full time, on a UK Salary of £30k+ for the type of experience we were after. We also didn’t have enough work to keep that person busy on full time hours, but equally couldn’t afford agency rates to get these designed each time.

I was initially paying a company £350 per month to produce just the newsletter alone. Something which our excellent Philippine did in 1 day.

There Are Some Specifics to Be Aware of When Looking to Outsource From the Philippines.

• They celebrate the 13th month, where traditionally they are paid an extra months salary on the 12th month of them working for you. Because of aforementioned culture, they will likely never ask for it. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay it.
• Culture in the Philippines is different to that of the UK.
• Ghosting can happen quite often – which is where they will simply disappear. Particularly if they are asked to do a task and cannot, because they are too embarrassed to ask for help.
• Internet connectivity is catching up. Our staff went AWOL for a whole week, only to discover that her town had a broadband outage for that entire week.
• Natural disasters can happen, and it can significantly delay or completely stop their ability to communicate with you.

What Do You Do?

• Tell them that it is 100%, completely OK for them to ask for help. If anything you respect them more when they do ask for help.
• Pay them the 13th month
• Don’t expect everything for nothing, you still should be paying a fair wage to the workers, even though it is significantly less than the UK.

We’ll have some more tips on the full process – but I’d love for you to get in touch if you had any success (or failures!) with hiring someone from the Philippines. I think they are truly a great source of affordable, skilled staff.