MAX: Thanks for joining us. I'll be inviting on the stage, Jun Abo from Transcom, Alethea from Manulife, and Fleurette from iQor. Each of them had the talent acquisition function for their respective companies, which all hire north of 5000 people a year in the Philippines alone. And so we'll be talking to them about onboarding and hiring without an office. After that, I'll be holding the mic for a little bit longer to talk about what we've experienced at Talkpush in the last year, overcoming the fear that was initiated by the crisis and building on the change that was forced in the market. And then afterwards we have a networking session, So we have 150 plus people currently online. You'll have a chance to interact with each other, and you'll have a chance to interact with a panelist at random very soon at the end of the session, but also the reason why you should stay online till the very end, is because if you stay, you will be entered to win a raffle. And if you win the raffle Talkpush will pay for a slice of pizza for everybody in your recruitment team. Terms and Conditions apply, we don't want a 100 people team, but maybe we'll go up to 10 to 20, we'll see. And so you get a chance to feed pizza to your whole team, whether they're working at home or they're working in an office if you win the raffle. So we thought that would be a good team building outcome if we could win this. So, yeah, as I was saying, these are the panelists who will be joining me on stage right now, Jun, Alethea and Fleurette from Transcom, Manulife and iQor respectively. And so, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd be kind enough to join me on stage. Hi Jun.

JUN: Hey Max. 

MAX: Hello Fleurette.

FLEURETTE: Hey Max. Hi, everyone.

MAX: And Alethea. Hello.
Fantastic. Thank you all for joining. Welcome to the stage. 

PANELISTS: Thanks Max.

MAX: So, you all had the HR function or talent acquisition function for some of the largest employers in the Philippines, and about a year or plus ago, you'all had to adapt to a really rapid change. And I think we're all past the trauma of how to adapt a little bit and we've kind of shaken it off. But, take us back to that time perhaps of a year ago, when the biggest challenges of hiring remotely, and particularly on the onboarding side hit you in the face. Can you remind us what you went through at that time, and I don't have a particular order in mind so maybe we'll do alphabetically, starting with you, Alethea. Yes?

ALETHEA: Okay. I think I've had a very interesting experience in this pandemic simply because I was actually in a different organization when I first joined, or when they first experienced a pandemic and I was the Global Head for onboarding for that bank. So I was managing all the regions across the world, and was basically the one responsible for ensuring that the digital onboarding was happening. And then I decided for some crazy reason to change organizations so I actually experience digital onboarding as a candidate, right. So, I think, from both of those perspective, the main concern was really how do you maintain the candidate experience, and it was very interesting because I didn't have the best experience on boarding on with Manulife, and that was actually the reason I decided that their job offer really focus because I said I can do this better than they're doing it now. And because I was a candidate right at that point in time, and you know it was really seeing that in both perspectives really just highlighted and how this pandemic is going to turn everything into a digitalization concern, as well as coordinating with a government so it was such a shock to actually be going through that last year.

MAX: Yeah, that's a really good hot tip for everybody who's in talent acquisition which I know is most of the audience, if you're applying for a company that has a horrible onboarding process, that's it. That's where you should be working because you have a lot of things you can fix. Great. Thank you. Fleurette, tell us about those challenges from a year plus ago, and particularly on the onboarding side.

FLEURETTE: So Max I told my husband that once we have grandkids. I'm going to be spending days and days talking about the horrible experience of pandemic because we get to live through it right, but as we all know there's so many learnings that came through but let me discuss to you a few things that really shocked us to our core because there's no playbook, there is no training that will prepare you for this. So one is, it was really difficult to connect with employees, right. You can't just call them and expect them to pick up the phone and on the onboarding side it was so difficult for us to get all the documents completed on time. So every company will have a list of mandatory contractual requirements for them to be able to join us. And that has been really difficult and then in addition to that, when the government started reducing the capacities of your government agencies, like NBI. The schools aren't open, their online portal is not very helpful, you have issues with your pre employment medical clinics, all of those put together is clearly a nightmare and I'm sure everyone in attending this event is nodding their head trying to relive that experience. So when you put really big issues in front of people, that's when you're gonna see teams actually working together, because for us, this is the time that we have to prove our worth. This is the time that you have to do the noble job of giving Filipinos the jobs that they need. So, yeah, I can, I can go on and on but trust me, you want Jun to also weigh in.

MAX: I do. But yeah, there's a double message here, it's like, on one hand, it's overwhelming, on the other hand, it's hero mode. This is when we do our most important work. So that was, I think a lot of people went through those two emotions at that time. Jun?

JUN: Yeah I echo everyone's sentiment. So there is a Chinese curse that goes, may he live in interesting times. And like it or not we are living in interesting times just like everyone else. When we transition to the lockdown in the pandemic its impact on work, initially a lot within the talent acquisition team it's okay, we're not going to be hiring. So there's not enough work for us. But lo and behold after a month of slowdown, we started hiring and hiring, and hiring. One of the few questions that we started asking ourselves is with our onboarding process, how do we make our candidates feel that they've made the right decision in terms of joining Transcom. Second one, and the most important one for me I think it's, How do we make them excited about being part of the Transcom culture. How do we help them prepare for their role that they signed up for and how will employees fit in based on the new team, which they could not be meeting for weeks or even months. What we've learned early on, it's the pandemic, and the shifting to working at home. It's much easier for new employees to resign when there's no feeling of loyalty to develop and again organizational culture appears remote. Again most of our organization was centered towards building that rapport, that engagement and culture when they're on site. When you can see them, when you can touch them, when you can talk to them. But how do you translate that into this new normal. So, yeah those are the challenges that we face early on.

MAX: I'm gonna go back to what Fleurette was talking about, and the paperwork and working with the administrative side of onboarding, b...