Guest Writer

With the rise of the local startup and tech ecosystem, recruiting the right candidates has never been more essential — or more complicated. You may have an ideal recruit in mind, a rockstar developer or data scientist that’ll help catapult your business forward, but so does every other fintech, e-commerce, and on-demand company springing up all across the country.
As a business leader, how then do you distinguish your company in a crowded talent marketplace?
Traditional methods tend to be less than efficient. If your company relies on job fairs and other on-the-ground events, you are effectively competing with other firms in your space on money. Whoever has deeper pockets will get the most facetime with promising candidates looking for a new position. This is a losing game, and it’s one that astute business leaders should avoid playing.
Business leaders in the Philippines ought to look at the companies innovating the recruiting space. Just as consumer habits have been fundamentally transformed by digital companies, so too are the ways in which firms recruit and hire. One of the local pioneers in this space is Recruitday, a company founded by Joel Garcia in 2017 and recently backed by Future Now Ventures.
Recruitday’s mission is to make it easier for Philippine companies to find the best talent through what it calls social + referral recruiting. It’s easy to understand what the term means when you break it down piece by piece. The “social” part refers to existing social networks, which are incredibly extensive in the Philippines (where the average person has over 600 Facebook friends). The “referral” part refers to the act of recommending or endorsing someone for a job.
Social + referral recruiting, then, is the process of recommending people from your social network to jobs you know would be a great fit for them. Noticing this same behavior cropping up informally within comment sections and threads, Recruitday decided to formalize it by providing a dedicated, convenient platform. After signing up on their website, Filipinos can refer their Facebook friends to relevant positions as easily as they would a funny post.
From there, these “scouts” — Recruitday’s name for them — can track the status of their referrals. This is essential, as hiring companies offer cash rewards for different stages of the process, such as a candidate being successfully shortlisted or upon accepting a job offer.
Scouts can effectively earn money by simply playing tulay, or matchmaker, between Filipino firms and job-seekers.
Founder Joel Garcia believes that Recruitday addresses challenges with multiple sides of the marketplace.
“With the addition of scouts to Recruitday, employers will get a more consistent stream of qualified applicants in their recruiting pipeline no matter where they are,” Garcia said. “Job-hunters will connect with companies that they are a fit for, and the Scouts who referred them will earn money. It’s not only a win-win-win for these stakeholders — it’s improving the entire recruiting process in dire need of it.”
Like other digital companies in the Philippines that give Filipinos a chance to earn money from ride-sharing or short-term accommodation rentals, Recruitday is similarly an open platform.
Anyone can be a scout — with the current crop hailing from Manila, as far north as Ilocos, and as far south as Palawan. Some will be professionals already immersed in the corporate world, while others will be part-timers, freelancers, or even current job-seekers themselves.
That many Filipinos want to earn by referring friends from their social network to relevant jobs should serve as a key signal to local business leaders. How companies hire is changing in the Philippines. No longer will companies have to pass out flyers at job fairs and hope and pray that some candidates get back to them.
Like other industries that have been similarly upended, business leaders can now turn to the wisdom of the crowd in bringing them talent who otherwise may have been overlooked or lost in the shuffle.
For both sides, it’s a telltale sign of opportunity knocking. And if neither side is answering, their friends sure will.