MANILA, Philippines – Q2 HR Solutions was founded in the spare room of a house in Makati in the year 2000, in the hope of giving more Filipinos better employment opportunities.
Trixie Whyte with her late husband, Brendan (a British national), set up their company with the intention of providing jobs in the midst of so much unemployment in the country. “We felt that we could do something noble by providing job opportunities for Filipinos,” Whyte, who sits as Founder and Chairwoman of Q2, says. Whyte was born and raised in the Philippines, and remains a Filipino citizen.
Trixie Whyte
There were other headhunters at the time, but most were doing it on the side. Whyte has had extensive exposure in the HR industry, coming from a family whose line of business was recruitment, and where she had already started to do some headhunting. She and her husband realized the potential of the latter and set up their own firm, one that has now grown to become a full-service HR company that has diversified its portfolio to include Sourcing and Recruitment, HR Outsourcing, Managed Services, Background Investigation, Organizational Consultation and Development, Assessments, and other bespoke HR solutions. It currently has more than 3,000 deployed employees, and to date has served over 1,000 clients.
Q2 HR Solutions’ portfolio includes Recruitment by Design, a business unit handling executive search, permanent placement, and recruitment process outsourcing. Its HR by Design business unit offers strategic HR consulting, interim HR, organizational development and design, and assessments. They also have Allied Service partners in People4People for managed services, as well as build-operate-transfer model, and Hiring Basix for background verification.
Global standards, Filipino values
Integral to the company’s success and continued growth is ensuring that they deliver quality service, with their internal process and policies up to par with global standards, from the very beginning. Starting with their first three multinational clients in the banking and pharmaceutical industry sectors that have remained with them to this day, they’ve added several of the country’s top corporations in telecommunications, transportation, business process outsourcing, e-commerce, retail and manufacturing industries to name a few, to their list of happy clients.
In 2011, they were recognised by the People Management Association of the Philippines (PMAP) as Employer of the Year for the SME category, in their commitment to nurture their people as the backbone of their business.
By 2014, Q2 HR Solutions was selected by Randstad, a global leader in the HR services industry based in the Netherlands, as its exclusive Philippine partner. This partnership has led to several projects with various multinational firms seeking to find valuable talent in the country.
The commitment to quality service and global standards has made Q2 HR Solutions the first Filipino company awarded a Platinum Accreditation in 2016 by Investors in People (IiP), outside of the UK. The United Kingdom Commission for Employment and Skills governs Investors in People based in London, recognizing that Q2 is aligned with global people management standards.
While the company sets its standards at a global scale, at the core of the business are their Filipino values and the commitment to help uplift Filipino lives through gainful employment. “We live by our core values,” Whyte says. “To help us remember what these five Core Values are, I created this acronym to make it easier to recall: IMaGIn, which stands for: 1) Create Positive Impact, we are proud of our core purpose of uplifting lives and we add value to everything we do; 2) Embody Malasakit, we foster a genuine care and commitment to the welfare of our customers, company and people; 3) Grit, we never give up! We seek and aim to achieve extraordinary success; 4) We are Grateful, we celebrate life and make the most of what we have and we aim to pay it forward; 5) We Innovate, we embrace change and challenge convention by taking creative action through non-stop learning and looking beyond the current state.
A 20/20 vision for expansion in year 2020
At the heart of the organization is Trixie Whyte as the visionary who believes in the capabilities of the Filipino. “I have seen our talent pool grow. I remember when the BPO industry started in the country, and we were called upon to fill all those positions for call centre agents. This industry started from scratch, and now look at how it has grown. Many of the companies started with an expat management; now, there is no difficulty in finding Filipino talent to fill the management positions because the industry was able to develop the local workforce to take on the executive roles.”
She has also seen how Filipino workers are in demand overseas. “We are known for being hardworking. In fact, we are sought after by employers because of our work ethic.” This is why she diversified and founded Orange International Recruitment, an overseas placement firm with a license to source and deploy Filipino professionals and skilled workers abroad in various industries including healthcare and construction. “We don’t send other nationalities, instead we focus on our kababayans because we want to uplift their lives by giving them respectable jobs,” she explains.
As it marks its 20_year anniversary in September 2020, Q2 has earmarked an aggressive growth plan that includes expanding their managed services internationally to create demand for their various business lines. She has already established a presence in Australia with The People Expert, a new subsidiary of the Q2 HR Solutions Group of Companies, which aims to deploy health care workers. Whyte’s exposure with Orange International, sending nurses to England via a partnership with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and establishing People4People’s managed service, have paved the way for this new venture. She is looking to further replicate this business model in other countries; plans are in place for expansion in Japan, UK, Sweden and Canada.
There are foreign businesses coming in too. She has assisted them in setting up their manpower resource and presence in the Philippines and helped build capabilities and manage their risks through a build-operate-transfer model where Q2 can be the Philippine entity that hires and manages the employees, ensuring they are productive, and turns over the workforce to the company when it is ready. “This is good for our country because it brings in investments and more employment opportunities.”
For Whyte, her company’s growth has her countrymen at heart, with the knowledge that Filipinos are world-class experts and a rich resource for the country’s continued economic growth.
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For more information about Q2 HR Solutions, visit www.q2hrsolutions.com. Follow their social media pages: Q2 HR Solutions on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. The company headquarters is located at the 12/F 88 Corporate Centre, Sedeño corner Valero Streets, Salcedo Village, Makati.
For further inquiries on their suite of services, call (02) 8 889.6258
ADVT