If you’ve heard about the 4-hour work week, you’ll appreciate the brilliance of Remote Workmate- a recruitment company helping businesses offshore work by leveraging the skills of Philippine-based virtual professionals - and the variety of business problems it can help solve.
Remote Workmate has its largest customer base in Australia and the US, with a proven track record in helping businesses grow financially through hiring Philippines based remote workers at a very low costs for exceptionally high productivity.
We spoke to Chris Whitrod, General Manager at Remote Workmate, and Jorj Maceda, Recruitment Manager, who shared with us the inspiration behind the company’s creation and how recruitment businesses can get more done in a day and accelerate business growth with virtual assistants.
Vincere: Unlike other recruitment firms, Remote Workmate recruits ‘Virtual Assistants’. That’s a super interesting concept….can you tell us how this business came about and why this makes Remote Workmate special?
Chris Whitrod: It was actually a blow to my self-esteem. I ran my own marketing company and started outsourcing web design and programming to various people in remote corners of the world. Over time, I realized some clients were more interested in where I was recruiting my virtual talent than the actual marketing services I was offering. So after getting over the rejection, I moved into scouting talent instead of solving marketing challenges.
I spent a lot of time growing recruitment teams and sourcing talent all over the world. I learnt a lot about different countries and the compatibility of their workforce with Australian businesses. Working with my clients it became clear to us that the Philippines provided the right combination of talent, work ethic and cost.
Today our contracting workforce is 100% Philippines-based, supplying offshore services to companies all over the world. Work-from-home positions are very attractive to the Filipino workforce and allow us to attract very high-quality talent. If you’ve been to the Philippines you would know that most people spend at least 90 mins each way travelling to work. You can imagine how attractive home-based work is when 3hrs of your day is wasted in traffic jams.
We also offer centralised staff for clients growing large teams, but the majority of Remote Workmates work from home. As for internal staff, we’ve got a huge recruitment team in Manila and Cebu, our marketing department has just moved from Romania to the Philippines and our head office is in Australia, with a satellite in the USA. We preach the benefits of having a virtual workforce and we practice what we preach.
Jorj Maceda: In terms of how we work, we do not charge for recruiting and our clients can get involved as much or as little as they like. Our strategy to find the best talent is to build long-term relationships with individual workers and potential candidates based on market needs. We invest primarily in active sourcing and we are keeping in contact with candidates every day. This allows us to have access to the best candidates within a suite of particular industries and roles.
VC: We happen to know that some other Vincere customers- growing boutique recruitment firms- are also customers of Remote Workmate. Can you give us an idea of how a recruitment firm might engage you?
C: There are so many important functions within every recruitment company. Delegating an entire function- say talent pooling, advertising or prescreening- can really help an agent get on the front foot as they can then focus on the bigger picture stuff. Take me as an example. As a recruitment company manager, the only two processes that I have not delegated are lodging tax statements and making bank transfers.
Usually, the question is not whether you have a job for a Remote Workmate, it is how many jobs you have, and where should you start! Of course, as it is with every business, there is not a one size fits all answer here. That’s why we give you a free Needs Analysis to determine if using Remote Workmate is the right thing for you and if it is, where you could start. Areas we consider are how to develop, protect and promote your business’s unique strengths. To put it simply, you increase efficiencies within your team workflows by delegating some of the heavy lifting to our Remote Workmates.
VC: How important do you think having the right CRM is to running a good recruitment business? Why Vincere? How does it compare to what you’ve used in the past?
C: We were previously with Jazz. At the time Jazz was more of an ATS and advertising is not very effective in finding quality talent in our field. We would have to compete with the more general work-from-home crowd, and we ended up attracting the wrong candidates, such as short-term focused freelancers from.
Sourcing is a super important aspect in recruitment but we all know that getting in front of and speaking to potential candidates requires a lot of manual work. Having someone actively sourcing and pooling for you can save a lot of time and help you find ready candidates quicker.
We rely on talent pooling. So a CRM like Vincere is so important in refining our pool and getting referrals.
Vincere: With Jorj being in the business of recruitment for many years, we were keen to know how Vincere matches up to the competition and why.
J: I have tried many CRMs like Avature, Zoho, Salesforce, etc. However, I find Vincere more holistic and applicable to our business needs. I like that it’s a 2-in-1 system - a recruitment CRM & ATS for staffing agencies.
On top of that, the Search function is the best out of all of the other ATS I have used.
The system is really flexible and we can configure it to suit Remote Workmate’s needs instead of us having to adapt to it. You can customize fields on candidate profiles and it can be fully searchable. In fact, almost everything, is searchable within Vincere - this to me, makes it an exceptional ATS for a staffing agency.
The Auto Triggers function saves me a lot of time. It basically captures your activities and connects up to your client company, contacts, jobs and candidates automatically, which means no more manual updates! If I were to create an ATS/CRM it would look exactly like Vincere.
Remote Workmate is always happy to accommodate calls and enquiries. They will be keen to hear from you. Learn more about how their services can boost your business productivity at http://remoteworkmate.com/ or connect with Chris on LinkedIn.
About Vincere
Vincere is your new Recruitment Operating System: the modern OS purpose-built for recruitment & staffing agencies worldwide.
An all-in-one tech platform to streamline the Front, Middle & Back office operations of Exec Search/Perm/Contract/Temp businesses.
Vincere's suite of modules are natively built & pre-integrated from day one:
- Vincere Core CRM / ATS
- Portals: Website CMS, Client & Candidate portals
- Intelligence: AI, analytics & custom dashboards
- TimeTemp: Temp, Contract, shift scheduler, online timesheets, Door Clock app, invoicing
- Comms: Omni-channel chat collaboration & communication hub
- Vinneo: Video interviewing & outreach module
- Vincere Automate: Advanced recruitment workflow automation
Ready to learn more? Request a demo today.