One of the important lessons the corporate world has learned, especially in the past three years, is that people are organizations’ greatest asset. Whether hiring or outsourcing, every business must be on their A-game to get it right, as most of them don’t have room for a go-around, especially in today’s sensitive, customer experience-centric market conditions. According to Grand View Research, the Asia Pacific business process outsourcing market was estimated at $66.27 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7 percent from 2023 to 2030.
As the outsourcing industry regains its pre-pandemic momentum, businesses are in pursuit of IT outsourcing partners who stand tall on transparency, staff retention, and effective hiring infrastructure. Pioneering this transparent, direct control talent model in the Philippines is Technology Elite—a next-generation staffing organization empowering tech and finance companies globally to start, build, and optimize their skilled workforce in the Philippines.
The story of Technology Elite is also the story of the evolution of the modern-day staffing industry. In a traditional outsourcing model, the vendor needs to comprehend and become an expert in every aspect of the services being delivered. Effectively the client is paying for an outcome, and they are largely detached from the number and type of staff used by the facility to deliver the result. This approach was designed to service very large enterprises and has been well-proven over decades for call center and repetitive process work done at scale.
However, for highly complex and non-repetitive work like that performed by Managed IT Services Providers and Software Companies, the traditional outsourcing model has serious limitations. Such businesses have sophisticated processes, complex tech stacks, and non-scripted diagnostic, maintenance, or project work.
For such an organization, the precise skillset of each employee matters a lot; quite different from the rapid swap or replacement of staff which is possible with lower-skilled or repetitive work delivered by traditional outsourcers. For tech and finance firms, recruitment of the exact high-end skills is critical.
Established in 2015, Technology Elite introduced a more effective outsourcing model for high-skill firms —a direct-control, transparent model.
Lend your ears to Scott Linden Jones, President, Technology Elite, who possesses more than two decades of experience in technology staffing. He says, “Our straightforward, transparent model means that clients are involved in the recruitment of their staff, and they know and influence the salary package for every team member. The client also manages the staff day to day and therefore each team member sees our client as the boss and must work to their direct instructions and quality standards. Meanwhile, we provide ongoing services to make scaling much easier, including Payroll, HR, cultural consulting, staff training, IT infrastructure & facilities management. This provides significant advantages over a traditional ’hands-off’ outsourcing model.”
The direct-management model does not need each client to train Technology Elite on their processes. Instead, the client will onboard and train each team member — in the same way they onboard new hires onshore.
Direct control removes a layer of management and obscurity. This allows clients to focus on doing what they know works for them and gives employees a direct relationship with the client and their end users.
Building Sustainable Organizations
While hiring done right solves a significant amount of problems for businesses, retaining the best talent is at the core of building a sustainable business. Among Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines has a significant attrition rate at 18 percent, though less than Singapore at 19.6 percent.
Minimizing the churn of these skills allows for superior embedding of clients’ company culture, reduces training overhead, and minimizes the loss of tacit organizational knowledge.
Technology Elite further extends its transparent approach to help organizations retain talent. The company proactively assists clients in building strong personal relationships with their Filipino staff.
It adopts a consultative approach to enhance retention while also offering best-in-market salary & benefits packages.
The modern-day talent pool includes increased interest in working from home, as well as the well-documented preferences of Generation Z. The salary package is still important, but it’s just one part among the decision-making aspects. Staff constantly look for the best experiences, location, infrastructure, support, and exposure. Technology Elite has clearly invested heavily to address these changing needs.
Our straightforward, transparent model means that clients are involved in the recruitment of their staff, they know the salary & benefits package for every team member, each filipino team member sees the client as the boss, & each client is hands-on with managing their own team members
The “next-generation social workplace” the company built on the tail end of COVID-19 is a strong testament to this.
Technology Elite describes its office environment as a ‘platform’ for delivering retention-focused services. This, of course, includes a quiet and productive workspace, but much of the facility is dedicated to activities that help staff build strong friendships, add new skills, and indulge their passions.
There is a large range of free activity options for all staff, including bicycles, table tennis, darts, golf putting, foosball, e-sports (computer gaming), basketball, badminton, yoga, and more. The company uses the phrase “those who play together stay together” to explain the logic of merging work and play into a single environment.
The company’s extensive benefits package is also noteworthy, which includes free lunch daily, high-quality HMO for both employees and dependents (with no waiting period), expansive mental health services, personal financial consultants, dieticians, an investment program, employee advocates, and much more.
Being at the Cutting-Edge
High-performance staff naturally want high-performance equipment to conduct their work, and of course, clients in the tech industry have little patience for reliability or speed problems impacting their service delivery. Hence, Technology Elite invests to ensure its equipment and infrastructure is never the bottleneck.
Scott adds, “Our standard equipment issue is a late model HP laptop with minimum i5 processor, 16GB RAM, and SSD drive, plus high-quality Jabra headsets, webcam, monitors, and other accessories. Some clients choose to manage the endpoint devices themselves, while others prefer our internal IT team to manage all devices. We support both home and office-based staffing. If the staff are office-based, we assign a unique VLAN to each client team so that they have network separation, and we customize routing, bandwidth, and security rules on a VLAN basis. Internet is served via 5 links from 4 providers across 3 diverse paths, which along with automatic diesel generator power redundancy means we deliver greater than 99.999 percent uptime.“
In other words, Technology Elite supplements the highest quality base infrastructure, with the ability for client organizations to customize their team’s networking and security according to their needs.
The company also significantly helps its clients be at the cutting edge with a strong learning & development infrastructure. This includes a training department launched in 2023, incorporating a wide range of instructor-led courses across technical, cultural, and soft-skill segments. They are also certified as a Pearson Vue testing center, empowering staff to take globally recognized certification exams without leaving the building. As staff generally feel a sense of accomplishment and career progress with the training, it also significantly helps with retention.
“A key focus for 2024 is continuing to grow our training services. Initially, the focus is on adding more content and maximizing its effectiveness for existing staff. But later in the year, we will start building core technology content that will be injected into local universities. In the aftermath, we will be able to create IT graduates that are immediately valuable to our clients; even to tech firms who deliver complex technologies and services and therefore normally require much more experience,” Scott concludes.
The Success Recipe
Soon to cross 500 total staff, the exceptional success story of Technology Elite can be attributed to various factors, including the team’s experience in staffing, its reputation for delivering on client promises, and the employee experience.
Technology Elite boasts 14 years of experience in building high-skill technical teams in the Philippines since its founding team originated from Scott’s previous IT Services and software businesses.
Scott explains, “Lots of BPOs claim to be able to hire technical staff because they think it’s as simple as creating some job ads, pasting the client’s JD, and stuffing someone into the role. However, hiring tech talent with consistent precision requires deep knowledge of the client, their existing team, the technology stack being supported, and the needed outcomes.”
Technology Elite is also extremely careful only to promise what it can deliver. For instance, the company analyses all requested roles meticulously before going to market to ensure that the requested skill combinations are available and that the right salary bracket is offered to get the best applicants. The expectations are also set carefully in terms of how long it will take to fill each role. Most importantly, the company never takes on more new clients than its recruitment team can satisfy within its standard 6-8 week hiring timeline. As Scott puts it, “In IT globally employment is tight, so our sales team moves only at the speed of recruitment, to ensure we deliver on hiring promises. Sometimes this results in a queue of new clients waiting to sign up, but better that than failing to prioritize the hiring for loyal clients, or failing to hire accurately for new clients.”
En Route to the Future
Over the past two years, on the back of an excellent growth journey, Technology Elite has completed many internal improvements to ensure scalability. These include replacing payroll and ERP software systems, gaining cyber security and ISO certifications, and restructuring some internal teams to ensure consistent service delivery. In the process, the company more than doubled in size, echoing that the improvements were indeed important and timely. Technology Elite is all set to expand its market further into the UK & EU, with strong continued growth also expected from its long-term markets the US, Canada, and Australia.
Scott Linden Jones, President
An Australian technopreneur, Scott began his entrepreneurial journey in 2002 at the age of 24. The company received numerous awards over the next 17 years and was merged with Digital Marketing agency IONLINE in 2016. In 2015, Scott founded Technology Elite, a next-generation staffing facility in the Philippines, which builds high-skill tech and support teams for clients, who then take direct control.
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