Malaysia vs Philippines: Which Market Builds External-Facing Talent Better
Your customers expect more and more from your business and its products; which market equips you with the best team to deliver it?
As businesses across SEA scale their customer-facing operations, two markets keep coming up in the hiring conversation - Malaysia and the Philippines. Both are recognised for external-facing talent. Both attract companies building support, sales, and customer success functions across the region. But they serve different needs, attract different profiles, and produce fundamentally different outcomes. This session maps exactly where each market wins in offering high-quality customer service, and what that means for how you build your customer-facing teams.
What you'll walk away with:
A strategic read on how Malaysia and the Philippines compare as talent markets for external-facing and multilingual functions
The intelligence to make informed decisions on where to build your customer-facing capability as you scale across SEA
A clearer picture of what rising demand for multilingual talent is revealing about both markets
Peer perspectives from senior HR leaders making these hiring and market decisions at the regional level right now
This session is for you if:
👉 You are responsible for customer-facing capability across SEA and need a clearer picture of where the right talent markets actually are
👉 You are making strategic decisions about where to build or scale external-facing functions and want data to back the call
👉 Your regional talent strategy depends on multilingual capability and you need to understand which markets deliver it at scale
👉 You want ground-level market intelligence on external-facing talent in SEA, not assumptions handed down from global HQ
Your host and speaker:
Li Zhang - is an executive coach and leadership development specialist working with C-suite and C-1 leaders across APAC's fastest-growing scale-ups, specialising in succession planning, leadership assessment, and organisational transformation. She is also the Chair of SeaChange.
Zheng Peng Lim - leads business intelligence, GTM strategy, and commercial operations across Southeast Asia at Glints - one of the region's largest talent platforms. With a track record spanning large MNCs and high-growth startups, he brings ground-level data on talent supply, hiring trends, compensation benchmarks, and workforce expectations across Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore. As Glints' commercial strategy leader, he brings the market intelligence that most cross-border HR decisions in SEA are currently being made without.
Session format: A focused discussion with live market intelligence from Glints TalentHub. Intentionally small and intimate - capped for depth.
Part of The SEA Talent Strategy Series - Market intelligence for HR leaders operating across Southeast Asia.