ACS Call Center offers 30K sign-on bonus
By Juan Dela Cruz

Huge Sign-on bonuses is the big trend in recent months for big Call Center players in the Philippines. With the global economy rising from recession, companies like IBM-Daksh, Teletech and even BPO recruitment agencies have fiercely been competing with one another to attract the best possible talents for their late quarter ramp-ups for 2009.

Call center jobs are a dime a dozen here in the Philippines where it is not unusual for a common jobseeker to find and be confused with thousands of BPO jobs available. In a bid to outsmart each other, some call centers have even gone to local college registrars and bribe them to obtain their list of fresh graduates to contact and lure them to the industry. Being creative and offering wads of cash is fast being the norm in the Philippine call center industry.

In a recent development, Advanced Contact Solutions (ACS), a local-bred contact center has been attracting much attention from jobseekers because of their pretty tempting offer. A 30,000 pesos (approx 30 thousand rupees) sign-on bonus plus a free cellphone per successful applicant! The factor that makes it even more attractive is that they only require applicants to have finished at least second year of college, willing to work at their Makati site and be amenable to shift hours. In case a person doesn’t pass initial application screening because of deficiency in communication skills, they have these applicants sent to a third-party training center to re-train for free and come back to apply again. Needless to say, such positive, proactive moves by ACS have won them much favourable attention.

Feedbacks from recent applicants, however, have not been all positive. My contacts who have applied to ACS this past week told me they had to endure chaos in the recruitment area, wait a really long time for their turn through a ticketing system ACS has in place and literally spend the whole day in the building. According to those who were lucky enough to be selected no sign-on bonus shall initially be given upon job contract signing and only a daily stipend of 200 pesos will be provided until end of training. The chaos at the recruitment centre is difficult to comprehend as ACS has some excellent HR and Admin managers.

Creativity is the key while being upfront is optional in the Philippine call center industry.

(You can contact me at: 1delacruise@gmail.com)

Techgoss note: ACS started with 300 seats and has now grown to 6500 seats.  It has clients in US, Canada, Australia and United Kingdom. In 2003, ACS became the first publicly listed call center in the Philippine Stock Exchange (Ticker: Paxys). In 2006, ACS notched its ISO 9001:2000 Quality Management Systems Certification and has undertaken a proprietary Risk Management Program to ensure quality and redundancy in all conditions.