The Philippines Already Leads Southeast Asia in AI Hiring. Now Comes the Harder Part.

Filipino employers aren’t waiting to see how AI plays out in hiring. According to Jobstreet’s Hiring, Compensation & Benefits Report 2025, 39% of employers in the Philippines now use AI tools in recruitment. That is the highest rate in Southeast Asia, where the regional figure is 27%.

But using AI and gaining an advantage from it are not the same thing. That gap was the focus of Jobstreet Connect, Jobstreet by SEEK’s recent hirer convention. More than 200 business leaders, HR practitioners, and decision-makers attended under the theme “Turning AI into Organizational Advantage.”

The problems that haven’t gone away

Even with new tools, recruiters described familiar frustrations: applicant pools full of poor fits, too little time, hiring workflows that keep piling up, and rising costs.

Faster screening helps, but speed alone doesn’t fix a stack of mismatched résumés. Hiring needs to get smarter, not just quicker.

Enter seekAi

Jobstreet by SEEK’s answer is seekAi, a proprietary AI engine built specifically for employment rather than adapted from general-purpose technology. It draws on more than 25 years of market intelligence and 750 million daily candidate and employer signals across APAC. It also sits directly inside the hiring workflow instead of running as a separate tool.

Two features stood out:

Personalised Targeting goes beyond keyword matching. It learns what a strong hire looks like for each business, based on role requirements, the employer’s preferences, and past hiring activity.

It then combines those signals with real-time intent data. The result is candidates who are up to five times more likely to apply.

Assist works as an always-on, agentic hiring partner. It doesn’t just answer questions. It anticipates what comes next and handles multi-step work such as AI pre-screening voice interviews, smart applicant ranking, next-best-action guidance, and automated reference checks.

Final hiring decisions stay with people.

“We believe that AI should make hiring better, not busier,” said Dannah Majarocon, Managing Director of Jobstreet by SEEK. “By combining employment-specific data with agentic AI built directly into the workflow, seekAi is designed to reduce friction, improve talent matching, and give leaders more time so they can focus on what matters most: their people.”

Keeping the human in human resources

The rest of the program focused on the people side of AI.

Liza Manalo-Mapagu, CEO of ASEAMETRICS and Chair of PMAP’s AI and Innovation Committee, gave a keynote on leading teams through human-AI collaboration.
Joey Yusingco, Head of Country Marketing at Jobstreet by SEEK, presented the Salary Pulse 2026 Insights. He covered how pay expectations, workplace flexibility, and clear career paths affect retention and workforce confidence.

Holy Ampaguey (CHRO, DITO Telecommunity), Ralph Vincent Regalado (Chief AI Officer, Kollab), and Kin Enriquez (Risk & Compliance Manager, GRC, Emerson ROHQ) shared practical ways to build AI into talent development, company culture, and business growth.

The Philippines has already won the adoption race. The next advantage will go to organizations that use AI to hire smarter, not just faster, and that free their teams to spend more time on people.