Hire a verified Filipino executive assistant

Who this is for

Founders, managing directors and partners of small UK businesses, usually somewhere between five and fifty people, who have become the bottleneck in their own company. The work only you can do is being squeezed by work that anyone organised could do: the inbox, the diary, the follow-ups, the meeting nobody wrote up.

A UK executive assistant is a significant salary for a business that size, and often more hours than the job actually needs. In the Philippines, supporting an overseas principal is an established career, and executive support is one of the most common backgrounds among the professionals who join our network.

What an executive assistant actually does

An executive assistant works for one person rather than for the whole business. The aim is simple: give you back the hours you spend on things that are not the job only you can do. In practice that usually means:

• Your inbox. Triage, drafting replies in your voice for you to approve, flagging what genuinely needs you, and chasing what is waiting on someone else.
• Your diary. Scheduling across clients and time zones, protecting the time you need to think, and rearranging the week when something moves.
• Meetings, before and after. Agendas and briefing notes beforehand, notes and actions afterwards, and making sure the actions actually happen.
• Travel and expenses. Bookings, itineraries, receipts and expense claims.
• First point of contact. Handling routine requests so they never reach you, and knowing which ones should.
• Documents. Reports, board papers and presentations pulled together and formatted properly.

The difference from a virtual assistant is focus. A virtual assistant usually takes tasks off the business. An executive assistant takes load off one person, which needs judgement, discretion and a good feel for how you like to work.

Why the checks matter more for this role

You are giving this person your inbox. Usually your diary, your contacts and some of your documents as well, and sometimes access to things that touch money. That is more trust than almost any other remote hire asks for, which is why checking who they are is not box-ticking here.

Everyone we introduce has passed five checks before you see them:

1. Government photo ID, matched to a live selfie. A real document, and a real person holding it.
2. NBI clearance, the Philippine national criminal record check, verified at source rather than taken on trust from a PDF.
3. PRC or TESDA registration where the role calls for it, checked against the official register.
4. Work history, evidenced role by role. Certificates of employment where they exist.
5. Two referees, contacted by us. Not a reference letter the candidate supplies. We write to them ourselves.

You also see how well each past job is evidenced, labelled per role, so a documented role is never presented the same way as an undocumented one. Why verified profiles get hired first goes into the detail.

Give access in stages, whoever you hire

Good checks are not a reason to hand over your password. Gmail and Outlook both let you delegate access to your inbox and calendar without sharing your login, and a password manager lets you share individual tools one at a time and take them back just as easily. Start with the diary, add the inbox once you are comfortable, and leave anything financial until you have worked together for a while. A good executive assistant will expect exactly that.

How the engagement works

1. Tell us about the role. Whose support it is, roughly what hours, and what you are willing to pay.
2. We source against it and put forward people who have passed all five checks.
3. You meet whoever you want to. That costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
4. You contract with them directly. We give you a contract pack ready to sign.
5. You pay them directly, at the rate you agreed, on your own schedule.

We are never the employer, never the middleman on your money, and never taking a cut of what the professional earns. Our fee is a one-off placement fee and it is published in full.

Hours and the time difference

The Philippines is GMT+8, so a UK nine to five is roughly five in the evening to one in the morning there. Working UK hours is a long-established and well-paid career path in the Philippines, and plenty of people actively want it.

Executive support usually needs more overlap than other remote work, because so much of it happens around your day. Most arrangements are full overlap, online when you are, or partial overlap, where a few hours of crossover cover the live work and the preparation and follow-up happen on their own clock. Either way, you start the day with a sorted inbox and a briefed diary.

Whatever you agree is agreed between you and the professional. Everyone in our network states the hours they want up front, and you see that before you meet them.

The legal side, briefly

Someone living and working in the Philippines is not UK tax resident and is not performing duties in the UK, so the off-payroll rules do not reach them and there is no PAYE, employer National Insurance or pension auto-enrolment. There is a VAT consequence to buying services from overseas that catches people out, including businesses that are not VAT registered.

Both are covered in full: IR35 and Filipino contractors, and the VAT reverse charge. The wider legal picture is in our UK employer's guide to hiring in the Philippines.

What we will not tell you

We are a young company and we would rather be straight with you than impressive.

We will not quote you a percentage you will save, because it depends on what you would otherwise have paid. We will not promise a specific number of candidates by a specific day, because we would rather send you the right person than a quota. And we will not show you testimonials we do not have.

What we will do is check every person properly before you meet them, show you the evidence behind every claim on their profile, and charge you nothing until you actually hire someone.

Common questions