Recruiters want faster OFW deployment process

MANILA, Philippines — To revive the country’s overseas employment, a group of recruitment agencies has pressed for the acceleration of the process in deploying Filipino workers overseas.

The Association for Professionalism in Overseas Employment (ASPROE) said not only the coronavirus pandemic but also existing government policies are hampering the hiring of Filipino workers overseas.

Recruitment agencies have been losing P1 million to P2 million monthly since the start of the pandemic, and yet they still want to continue deploying overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).

“(Our OFWs) are missing out on overseas employment opportunities due to difficulties and inefficiencies of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA),” ASPROE said in a letter to the agency’s governing board.

“We need to redevelop and accelerate the deployment of OFWs, to reassess the different accreditation and processing procedures in the light of promising opportunities from other countries,” the group added.

ASPROE said POEA officials must know the negative implications of the policies and processes being implemented by the agency on overseas employment.

Accreditation requires a minimum of eight weeks to process while additional job orders take as long as six weeks and job order encoding to the POEA system about a week.

Even before the pandemic, ASPROE said, securing appointment at POEA was already an “extreme hassle.”

Recruitment agencies, ASPROE added, face a great challenge to continue operations to serve foreign employers and OFWs.

“A major approach to improve the system has to be seriously addressed; otherwise, we will lose potential or existing principals, and OFWs will be deprived of their livelihood and earning capacity,” the group said.

It also asked the governing board to look into ongoing and recurring difficulties being encountered by recruitment agencies.