Marcos Visits Jobstreet Career Con 2025, Shares Plans to Make Monthly Job Fairs

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. unveiled plans for more frequent job fairs in an effort to increase the country’s employment rate. 

The statement was made during Jobstreet’s two-day Career Con 2025 at the SMX Convention Center Manila on Tuesday and Wednesday (Jan. 28-29), with the latter date coinciding with Marcos’s visit and the Lunar New Year, a special non-working holiday in the Philippines. 

BPOs, Recruitment Agencies Dominate Jobstreet Fair

Aside from TESDA and other state agencies helping jobseekers on basic concerns like government IDs, Jobstreet also hosted scores of companies, most of which are in the business process outsourcing (BPO), recruitment, and retail industries. Some of the big firms that participated include Accenture, Acquire, Amazon, Cardinal Health, Flash Express, Grab, JPMorgan Chase, Meralco, Nestlé, Philip Morris, and San Miguel Global Power Holdings.

Companies under the SM conglomerate also dominated the fair, including the National University system. Meanwhile, firms in the creative and media industries are notably absent in the job fair, while there is a lack of companies in the service sector, especially in the food and beverage (F&B) industry. 

Jobstreet is under the Melbourne-based SEEK group of companies, which operates multiple online job boards in the Asia-Pacific region.

Marcos: More Job Fairs Coming Soon

In a speech, the president stressed the importance of more frequent job fairs in order to allow Filipino workers to not only be hired for jobs that fit them but also to be skilled enough for such jobs. 

“We have organized [this event] to be a one-stop shop for all the needs of an applicant for a job not only here in the Philippines, but also abroad,” he said in Tagalog. “The government’s current support [for jobseekers] is stronger than before, so that you would have more capacity to get good jobs.”

Marcos was accompanied by Labor Secretary Bienvenido Laguesma on the Wednesday installment of the event. It is understood that the Jobstreet event has been organized by the platform under a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). 

The chief executive added that the government is working on further lowering the country’s unemployment rate, but stressed that it is also working on making sure applicants and employees get “quality jobs” and the opportunity to branch out and establish their own businesses. 

“The cooperation of the private sector, [particularly] businesses and corporations, is very important,” Marcos added, citing mall chains like SM, which hosted Jobstreet’s event, as a great initiative to make job recruitments accessible to the public. 

According to the most recent DOLE figures, the unemployment rate in the Philippines decreased from 3.9% in October 2024 to 3.2% in November of the same year. 2024’s year-on-year (YoY) unemployment figure is yet to be finalized, but it is at 3.9% as of this report, compared to 2023’s 4.4%. 

Among the exhibitors of the job fair is the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA), the Philippine government’s trade school regulator. Marcos tasked the agency to offer free skills training for jobseekers to give them an advantage in the applicant pool. 

According to the president, about 18,000 people registered for the Jobstreet Career Con. He hoped that such an initiative would be followed through in the coming years. 

“[This fair] is like a pilot project, because we saw that this initiative is successful…” he said. “It only gives us a chance to have this project to be held every month, not just in Manila but elsewhere in the country … if it continues to garner positive results.”