Who then are being welcomed at the Manila domestic airport?

Newly-hired applicants! They are the new employees at PeopleSupport.

We even have a welcoming committee that greets our recruits from the provinces, I paraphrase PeopleSupport Philippines President Bong Borja conversation with a group of trade and industry and IT reporters recently.

Earlier this month, PeopleSupport opened a recruitment center in Davao City.

This facility will support the company’s initiative of tapping the southern Philippine workforce for its sites in Manila and Cebu, he said.

Borja takes pride in the company’s incentive program which include competitive night differential pay, acquiring a travel agency to cater to employees desiring to spend a weekend vacation in Hong Kong for example, first-class gym equipment and facilities, transportation allowances, and many more.

"With the need to grow our employee base to support our clients’ businesses, we make sure that we continuously address our employees’ concerns, and provide above-industry benefits. We initiated PeopleSupport Travel, including IATA accreditation, giving our travel support eReps IATA cards and the rest of our employees the benefit of discounted travel," he reported.

Travel advisories from foreign embassies, e.g. US Embassy, prevent PeopleSupport building an operations center in Mindanao. At the least, he said "we have a foot on the door. We already have a training center there."

He stated, "From our first Davao recruitment fair in 2004, we have regularly come back to Davao and have since hired close to 500 Customer Service Representatives (a.k.a. eReps). A lot of them have already been promoted to supervisory or leadership positions. We are very impressed with the skills of the young professionals there, and we would like to further open our doors to them. Opening this center is a testimonial of our belief in the Davao workforce."

Simulataneously, buildouts are in place at the 4th floor of the PeopleSupport Center in Ayala, Makati; including a second site in Cebu. The target is to have all facilities operational by the second quarter of 2006.

He commented, "We are particularly excited about 2006, as PeopleSupport recently added two new growth engines in our service offering. First, in January 2006, we expanded our business process outsourcing offering to include transcription and captioning services, through our acquisition of Rapidtext. Second, early this month, we launched our operation in Costa Rica, to diversify our geographic operations, and to greatly expand our Spanish and bilingual services."

He disclosed that "between now and the end of the second quarter, we need to fill up close to 2,000 seats combined in our sites in Manila, Cebu and Costa Rica."

A majority of PeopleSupport’s services are performed in the Philippines by over 5,000 college-educated, English speaking Filipinos. It is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.