In the Philippines, hiring priorities have undergone a gradual but significant shift, especially in organizations that are at the leading edge of innovation. These days, landing a great job is less about the resumes you write or how you answer questions at a job interview. While those are still very important, business owners and team managers are now more and more likely to pay more attention to the values a candidate demonstrates.
It’s fair to say that the landscape of job hiring in the Philippines hasn’t just undergone a technological shift, but a cultural one as well. While the Filipino emphasis on loyalty and warmth remains, they are increasingly less important than the values below.
1.) Confidence
Most hiring managers and job owners will tend to gravitate towards candidates that display confidence in their job interviews and resumes. This is partly because Filipino culture values deference to authority, which means more confident candidates are far more likely to be noticed. Where the past, confident candidates may be rejected for seeming “arrogant” by local standards, confidence is now highly sought-after for most positions, particularly in leadership roles.
2.) Perseverance
While degrees and certificates are still valued, Filipino employers these days are more likely to be impressed with candidates that show perseverance. As far as many hiring managers are concerned, degrees, certificates, and job experience do not mean as much as the ability to persevere and adapt to different challenges head-on.
This is partly due to the fast pace at which many technologies and techniques become outdated, rendering most types of certification a temporary benefit to businesses. Instead, more business owners find it far more useful to hire people who have core values such as perseverance, as it allows them to meet diverse challenges in the long-term.
3.) A sense of self-worth
While traditional Filipino businesses may still value blind loyalty, managers in new startups and top-performing companies these days are more likely to value employees who understand what they’re worth. This should be kept in mind when you evaluate different organizations to apply in.
Passive loyalty is no longer enough to earn or retain a great job in an organization that matters. In the Philippines, jobs were historically kept because of loyalty rather than merit. These days, however, businesses are far less likely to appreciate or return that loyalty, as profits and performance become more of a key motivator in the local job landscape.
4.) Passion
Most business owners will naturally want to hire people who take the job seriously. Showing passion and enthusiasm at your job interview and during your probationary period is a sure-fire way to nail the position. That is, if you show the other qualities on this list.
5.) Honesty
This might seem a bit obvious. After all, who doesn’t claim to value honesty? But as much as many Filipino business owners and managers say they value honesty, this may not exactly be true. In traditional Filipino companies, honesty is often interpreted as negativity, something that has signaled the death of many careers. Even pointing out something that could be done better will often earn the ire of business owners and coworkers alike.
Thankfully, Filipino businesses are starting to move away from this way of thinking, finally understanding that an acknowledgment of failures is necessary for growth. Today, there are plenty of local and international companies in the Philippines with a work culture that truly values honesty, rather than just paying lip service to it.
6.) Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand how other people feel. This idea is often mistaken with “sympathy”, which is merely feeling similarly as someone else. The perceived lack of empathy among Filipinos has long been discussed and written about. If you’ve had any negative run-ins with Filipino businesses as a customer, you will probably be inclined to believe that empathy is something more Filipino businesses and front liners should practice.
Empathy has widespread implications in the running of businesses, from understanding the perspectives of customers to managing conflicts within an organization. Now that the role of empathy in long-term relationship-building is starting to gain traction worldwide, more and more business leaders are starting to place a premium on empathetic thinking in both hiring and retention.
Conclusion
While resumes and qualifications are still important when it comes to finding the job you want, organizations these days are more likely to hire applicants based on their cultural fit, relative to their long-term goals and objectives. This means that old-school techniques for landing good jobs such as leveraging your connections may not necessarily work as well as they used to. At least, not for the kinds of jobs many ambitious Filipino job hunters are aiming for these days.
