Philippines Outsourcing: A Beginner's Quick Guide

The Problem: Overwhelmed Small Business Owner?

Does this situation sound familiar? You manage a small company (or you're an entrepreneur/solopreneur) and are overwhelmed with the day-to-day grind. You have to take phone calls, answer emails, and other repetitive administrative tasks. This happens so often that a huge portion of your day is just these kinds of work. You desperately want to put time into core business activities and company growth, but these little nuisances pile up and eat up all the time that could have been spent better.

The Solution: Strategic Outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant

Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Outsourcing! Never heard of it before? Well, you’re in luck because this is just the place for that. At its core, outsourcing is the strategic move of delegating specific tasks or entire processes to external specialists. Instead of stretching your internal team (or yourself) thin, you partner with experts – from dedicated virtual assistants to full-scale outsourcing companies (Business Process Outsourcing or BPO providers) – who excel at precisely the functions you need help with. These special ingredients allow you to save time and reduce costs.

Still lost? Imagine you run a small, popular café. You and your staff are fantastic at making coffee and delicious pastries – that's your specialty. Now, you need a new, beautifully crafted wooden table for your seating area, custom-made to fit your café’s theme.

You could buy wood, tools, and spend a few days (or ask one of your baristas) to try and build that table. But building tables isn't your main skill, and it would take you away from making coffee and serving customers, which is what brings in money.

Instead, you outsource the table-making. You hire a local carpenter, who is an expert at making furniture, to build the exact table you want. The carpenter isn't your employee; they're an outside specialist you pay for that specific job. You get a perfect table, and you and your team can keep focusing on what you do best: running your café.

That's outsourcing: paying someone else, outside your main business, to handle a specific task or service, often because they're more specialized, efficient, or cost-effective at it, allowing you to focus on your core activities.

Why Outsource to the Philippines? Key Benefits

The Philippines is composed of a highly skilled, English-proficient workforce and significant cost-effectiveness. Filipinos are renowned for their strong work ethic, exceptional customer service orientation, and cultural adaptability, making them easy to integrate into global teams. Reaping the benefits of outsourcing to the Philippines allows businesses to access high-quality talent for a wide range of services – from customer support and IT services to creative tasks and administrative support – all while achieving notable operational savings and improving business efficiency.

The Key Steps to Hiring a Virtual Assistant in the Philippines

So you’re ready to embark on this VA hiring journey. But you need a map. Not to worry, here are five key steps you should follow when recruiting a Virtual Assistant (VA) in the Philippines:

1. Define Your Needs: What Tasks to Outsource?

Take the time to write down all the repetitive tasks that can be outsourced to a VA. It doesn’t even have to be repetitive. It can be something that someone more skilled than you can do more efficiently. Are you not tech-savvy? You might want to look for IT outsourcing services in the Philippines. Perhaps you simply need a personal assistant or executive assistant to assist with your day-to-day tasks. Maybe the task is so trivial that even a virtual assistant with no experience will suffice for basic data entry or research tasks.

2. Choose How You Will Hire Your Filipino VA

There are various ways to go about hiring VAs from the Philippines. You can run ads on various social media sites. You could also use freelancing platforms or virtual assistant staffing agencies such as Upwork and Fiverr. (Look out for our future blogs to learn more)

3. Write a Detailed VA Job Description

Don’t be vague. Imagine if the job description was “good with computers”. That is extremely vague. If the VA candidate took this job, skilled in hardware, but you expected him to write software programs. Well, that becomes a problem. Now you have to go through all the effort of teaching him this skill from scratch, or look for another candidate.

The job description should includes shifts, tool/programs/websites the VA should be familiar with, required skill sets, hours, and pay. If it includes voice work (e.g., customer service VA), include that as well. Here are a few examples:

EXAMPLE 1: Social Media Virtual Assistant

"Seeking a Virtual Assistant for 20 hours per week (Monday-Friday, 9 AM - 1 PM EST) to manage social media engagement and basic customer inquiries.

• Responsibilities: Monitor and respond to comments/DMs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter; schedule pre-written content using Hootsuite; flag urgent customer issues for escalation.

• Skills: Excellent written English, empathetic communication, basic understanding of social media best practices.

• Tools: Must be proficient with Hootsuite, Facebook Pages Manager, Instagram, and Twitter. Familiarity with Zendesk or a similar ticketing system is a plus.

• Voice Work: No direct voice calls, but may need to transcribe short voice notes.

• Pay: $7-10 USD per hour, depending on experience."

EXAMPLE 2: E-commerce Support VA (Shopify)

• "I need a part-time Virtual Assistant (approximately 15 hours/week, flexible schedule but with a 4-hour overlap with 9 AM - 5 PM PST) to help with my Shopify store.

  • Responsibilities: Create new product listings from supplier data (images, descriptions, pricing); update existing product information; manage inventory levels in Shopify; respond to basic customer email inquiries about orders and products via Gorgias.

  • Skills: High attention to detail, experience with e-commerce platforms, good data entry skills, proficient in English.

  • Tools/Platforms: Must have demonstrable experience with Shopify (product listing, inventory). Proficiency in Gorgias (or similar helpdesk software like Zendesk/Freshdesk) is essential. Basic knowledge of Google Sheets.

  • Voice Work: None.

  • Pay: $X - $Y per hour, or $X per product listing successfully completed (if project-based)."

EXAMPLE 3: CDP Specialist VA (Segment)

"I need someone experienced with Customer Data Platforms (CDP), specifically Segment. The VA will be responsible for monitoring data ingestion, troubleshooting basic integration errors, and generating weekly reports on customer segments. Requires 10 hours/week, flexible within GMT+8 business hours. Pay is $15-20/hr."

EXAMPLE 4: AI Chatbot Developer (OpenAI)

"I need an AI chatbot developer to build and maintain a customer service chatbot powered by OpenAI's API and integrated with our knowledge base on Confluence. This is a project-based role, estimated 40-60 hours for initial build, with ongoing retainer for maintenance. Please provide portfolio and hourly rate for AI development."

4. Interview and test

So now your VA job description is good. But you don’t want to hire a Filipino virtual assistant that says he can write complex programs but all he knows is displaying basic text on the screen. You want to also make sure that the tests reflect what you need the VA to do. In other words, don’t make him end world hunger when you only need him to flip burgers.

5. Onboard and manage

VAs are not plug-and-play, almost no position in the world is. There’s company culture, and different strategies. A VA is a crew member and you’re the captain of the ship. Their job is to support you. Effective onboarding and ongoing management are key to a successful outsourcing relationship.

Co-sourcing: Outsourcing but not all the way

Outsourcing doesn’t have to mean that the service provider does all the work. Maybe you still want some of the work to still be yours. Well that’s called co-sourcing. It’s a ****hybrid approach to outsourcing where a company collaborates with a third-party service provider (like a VA) while retaining a significant level of control and responsibility over the outsourced function. Perhaps a portion of the service you outsource contains the “secret sauce” to your company and you want that part to stay in-house. Co-sourcing with Filipino talent can offer the best of both worlds.

Outsource in the Philippines effortlessly with Tasklinkr!

With Tasklinkr Virtual Assistant Services, we’ll do all the heavy lifting for you when you outsource tasks to the Philippines. We know what it’s like when you start planning on outsourcing but you’re not sure where to go. We’ve been there, and we’ll help you get on the right track. We are a small personal staffing company specializing in Filipino VAs and are looking to build one-on-one relationships with owners and people new to the VA staffing scene like YouTubers, content creators, and small office owners looking to hire their first virtual assistant from the Philippines.

Contact us now for more details!