The Reality of Scaling an Outsourced Team in the Philippines
Offshore outsourcing is often promoted as an easy way to scale up or down. You can add staff easily for a large project, and then release them at its conclusion, or if there is a business downturn.
Does it really work this way? Yes, and no. The job market is tight in the Philippines; low unemployment in the skilled sectors makes it a job-seekers’ paradise and they can pick and choose the roles that offer the best salaries, career advancement, and security. Local laws also offer extensive protection for workers to ensure they aren’t exploited. So, can you easily add burst capacity to your team? Here’s some examples, gathered from our decades of experience as an outsourcing provider.
The Realities of Scaling Up a Team
If you’ve won a huge piece of work and suddenly need to add a dozen front-end developers to revamp your IOS app, let’s look at your options.
How easy would it be to add those twelve resources in your own country? Do you have very specific requirements and technologies and typically you would interview a lot of candidates before finding the right fit? The same is likely to happen offshore. Unless your resource requirements are generic, or have common, commodity skill sets, you won’t be able to find great talent much faster than you could in your country. The talent pool in the Philippines is massive, but most talented workers are already engaged in full-time employment. Staff with specialized skills are not sitting around waiting for work. Realistically, it will take 6 to 12 weeks to onboard a complete team.
‘’We carried out seven interviews and were able to hire five people. They are some of the most amazing staff we’ve got. Yempo has an affinity for the tech space and quickly understands our needs.’’ – Aran F, CTO, Prezzee
If you need very technical additions to your team super-fast, you can still consider looking offshore, but you might want to consider a freelancer site – such as upwork.com or freelancer.com. You can get someone with the right skills immediately, but don’t expect them to be available full-time, or for a long-term, and you’ll pay a premium for their time.
Another example of Yempo clients who have needed to add resources quickly are finance firms planning for tax time. They know they will need additional resources at certain times of the year, so are able to engage with us well in advance so we have time to find staff who are a perfect fit.
Winding Down: Understanding the Challenges of Short-Term Contracts
It often surprises Yempo clients that contract-based staff aren’t an option in the Philippines. Due to the country’s employee-centric labour code, contract employment is seen to have little upside to local workers, so the concept of fixed-term hires was outlawed some years ago.
It’s possible to avert this restriction in a perfectly legal way; roles are advertised as full-time, the candidates are briefed that the role may not be ongoing, and when the project is completed, the staff are released with their full severance entitlements. While this is a viable option to replicate a fixed-term worker, in reality, few Filipinos would be prepared to take a short-term gig, so the candidate pool would be small.
This means that some service providers in the Philippines will not be transparent about the short-term nature of an advertised role, and workers are blind-sided when they are released a few months later. If you need short-term capacity, make sure you understand how your offshore service provider will be handling their release in the future. This is a poor strategy for offshore firms; our ability to attract top talent depends on our reputation, and this type of conduct will quickly spread among job seekers.
A common scenario, particularly with our finance clients, is that they add additional resources for tax time, but when the rush is over, they realise they do have sufficient ongoing work to retain the staff for the long-term.
Conversely, sometimes a client may genuinely onboard staff intending them to be long-term, but circumstances change. In this case your service provider should be able to release the workers with their full entitlements without impacting their reputation.
‘’Yempo is a place where staff want to be so time invested in the hiring process wins quality resources.’’ – Warwick M, Director, Compliance Data Lab
If you need to scale up quickly and the future of any hired staff is uncertain, chat to your service provider to get the full picture of how this can be handled. With proper expectations set for all parties, resourcing needs can typically be filled without negative impact.
Yempo has helped many companies grow their business sustainably through offshore outsourcing in the Philippines. Please check out our Outsourcing Solutions Case Studies.
Book a quick chat with Michelle today, to know more about our best practices in providing offshore accounting and IT staff from the Philippines – or shoot us an email at [email protected]. We are happy to answer your questions!
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