Hiring in the Philippines: Alternatives to Jobstreet
Finding the right hire is hard. On one hand, you have popular job portals such as Jobstreet and Indeed that generate a high volume of traffic, but they also tend to generate a lot of noise in terms of the relevance of the candidates that are applying to you. On then the other hand, you have social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn that have a large potential audience, but your mileage will vary widely depending on how much time or money you invest in using them.
In this article, we break down the main alternatives of where you’ll be able to find the right talent, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Job Portals
Job Portals (also called Job Boards) like Jobstreet and Indeed tend to have a broad reach and are often the “easiest” way to get access to job seekers who are actively looking. Most of these job portals such as Jobstreet and Indeed are priced on a per-job post basis — this means that you have to pay every time you post (or repost!) a job post/job ad. Jobstreet, in particular, charges you separately if you want to search through their resume search database.
It is less common, but there are also some job portals aside from Jobstreet and Indeed, similar to Kalibrr, that charges a flat fee every month based on the number of job posts that you have active at any given moment. Kalibrr also comes with unlimited resume searches and tools to manage your pipeline of candidates (the applicant tracking system).
The downside of most job portals is that given their traffic and ads-type nature. It’s very common for recruiters to get swamped with tons of irrelevant or low-quality applications. This risk is generally mitigated by platforms that have built-in screening tools like Kalibrr or becomes less of a problem for more niche job boards such as StackOverflow or Dribbble
Employment Agencies
Employment Agencies come in various forms — from very specific, very high touch executive search or headhunters who will help you hire that next VP or C-suite candidate to more mass-market staffing agencies who can help you staff up 50 customer service reps in 30 days.
The main upside of employment agencies is that they take almost no effort from you. You mostly just have to tell the employment agency what your needs are, and they’ll do all the hard work for you.
The main downside is that they’re expensive. Headhunters generally take 30% — 50% of the candidate’s annual salary, while the more mass-market staffing agencies can charge up to 2x-3x of the monthly salary of an internal hire.
If you’re looking for something that’s more middle of the road, Kalibrr is offering a pay-per-hire service as well. You generally have to put a bit more work since you’ll be doing the interviews yourself, but it’s a fraction of what employment agencies would charge you.
Referrals
Referral programs are often the best way to find candidates. Referred candidates tend to have several benefits such as:
- They have a more intimate working knowledge of your organization
- The referrer and the referred tend to have a more personal stake in the organization because of each other
- The referred is likely to have been “pre-screened” by the referrer as someone who would be qualified at the job
- The referrer and the referred will probably have existing relationships that make working with each other easier, especially if they’re in the same team.
The main downside of referrals is that they’re often harder to scale and they’re very dependent on your existing network. So if you don’t have connections, relying on referrals as your primary source of candidates can be a very slow grind.
Another thing to watch out for is that your interviews can be ineffective at screening for actual fit — especially since the candidates being referred can get access to unfair insider information that they can use to their advantage.
Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Linkedin have also been emerging as alternative places to try to look for applicants. Social media generally has the largest reach, and the users are responsive. But it often requires investing a significant amount of time or money to make it effective.
For Facebook, for example, it’s possible to find communities or groups where posting a job post a yield very high-quality applicants. However, these groups usually have a specific format, and you need to spend a lot of time not only looking (and participating) in these communities, but also tailoring your job post for each community.
For Linkedin, on the other hand, their audience is composed of a person’s professional network so it’s easier to find qualified applicants versus Facebook, but you won’t get very far on a free account and you’ll be forced to avail Linkedin Premium if you want to have any significant hiring done.
Your Company Page
Last but not least, having a company page similar to Monde Nissin or Katalyst.ph is always a good way to showcase who you are as a company. Having a great Employer Brand is one of the best ways to attract candidates who are not only qualified but who are already interested in working at your company!
Tools like Webflow make it easy for anyone to build a website with zero programming background. Although it does still takes a significant amount of time investment to learn the tool, and also to prepare the content.
Summary
To recap:
- Job Boards — broad reach, easy access to candidates, needs some work in terms of screening candidates
- Employment Agencies — targeted, guaranteed success, (almost) no work for you, but expensive
- Referrals — targeted, qualified, low cost, but may not be scalable
- Social Media — broadest reach, quality of candidates depends on effort level (or cost)
- Company Page — targeted, scalable, but requires significant effort to build
At the end of the day, each of these sources has its pros and cons. We’d recommend picking the one that best suits your needs. It’s also a good idea to mix and match several of these such as building up your employer brand to attract great candidates for your entry-level or fresh graduate jobs and working with an employment agency to fill your more senior roles.
