Recruitment doesn't start with a job post. It starts with a budget that actually understands what an employee costs — not just the salary line you put in the offer letter.
Sep 29
2 min read
Most companies hire the role, then panic about the cost.
That's backwards, and it's why so many headcount plans quietly fall apart by month four.
Here's what most first-time hiring budgets miss entirely:
→ 13th month pay isn't a bonus, it's mandatory. (PD 851) Budget for it from day one, not as a Q4 surprise.
→ Employer-side SSS, PhilHealth, and Pag-IBIG contributions stack on top of gross salary — they are not absorbed by it. (RA 11199, RA 7875/11223, RA 9679)
→ Leave conversions, holiday pay, and overtime differentials under the Labor Code aren't edge cases — they're recurring line items the moment you have a full calendar year of employment.
→ If you're hiring through an EoR or contractor model, service fees and statutory pass-throughs need to be modeled before the req goes live, not reconciled after the first invoice lands.
Skip this step and one of two things happens: you either under-hire because the "real" number scared finance after the fact, or you hire anyway and quietly eat margin every single month without knowing exactly where.
Workforce budgeting isn't a finance formality bolted onto recruitment. It's the actual first step of it. The req, the JD, the sourcing plan — none of that means anything if the fully-loaded cost wasn't modeled before the search began.
The market hires on vibes and a vague salary range. The companies that scale sustainably hire on a number that was already true before the first candidate said yes.
If your last three headcount plans blew past budget and nobody can explain exactly why — that's not a hiring problem. That's a budgeting-came-last problem.
TTTDTYABS
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