Scaling Salesforce in ANZ: How More Companies Are Hiring Across the Region

Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore each have well-established Salesforce communities. The people in them are skilled, experienced, and in genuine demand — and that demand is not slowing down.

That is precisely the problem for employers. When every company wants the same small group of proven specialists, the hiring process gets slower, shortlists get thinner, and the best candidates get counter-offered before you finish the interview process. It is not a commentary on what those specialists are worth — it is just what happens when demand consistently exceeds available local supply.

The companies that are scaling Salesforce capacity most effectively right now are not choosing between local and offshore talent. They are doing both. And many of the objections that historically made offshore hiring feel risky — language, culture, working style — no longer hold up when you look at the Philippines specifically.

The Supply Reality

Salesforce specialist roles in ANZ have always been hard to fill quickly. The certification path is long, real project experience takes years to accumulate, and the best practitioners are rarely on the open market — they are being retained, counter-offered, or approached directly. That was true five years ago and it is more true now.

This is not a skills pipeline problem that will resolve itself soon. Salesforce continues to release new products (the Agentforce era is creating an entirely new category of specialist demand), and the certified talent base in ANZ simply cannot grow fast enough to match the pace of platform adoption.

For employers in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore building or scaling Salesforce teams, this creates a practical constraint: if your hiring strategy begins and ends with the local market, you are working from a limited pool by default.

Where the Overlooked Talent Is

The Philippines has been building Salesforce capability for longer than most employers in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore realise.

A significant number of established Salesforce professionals based in Manila and other major cities have worked with enterprise clients across the US, UK, Australia, and Japan — often through managed service providers, implementation partners, and BPO operations that run Salesforce delivery functions at scale. These are not entry-level practitioners. Many have multi-cloud experience, active certification portfolios, and years of exposure to complex client environments.

We have mapped where this talent sits — by city, by Salesforce specialisation, and by seniority. You can see that map here.

The depth is genuine. It is not a small or shallow pool, and it has been growing steadily as Salesforce adoption across Southeast Asia accelerates and more practitioners move into more senior roles.

The Three Objections — and Why They Don't Hold Up

When Australian, New Zealand, and Singapore companies first consider hiring in the Philippines, three concerns usually come up. They are worth addressing directly.

"Will there be a language barrier?"

The short answer is no — and the data backs this up. According to the 2024 EF English Proficiency Index, the Philippines ranks 22nd out of 116 countries globally and second in all of Asia, behind only Singapore. The average Filipino professional scores 570 out of 800 on the index, compared to a global average of 477. English is an official language of the Philippines, used in government, business, education, and the courts. Philippine professionals — particularly those in Metro Manila and other major cities — communicate in clear, neutral English with no strong accent. This is not a recent development: the Philippines has had one of the strongest English proficiency profiles in Asia for decades, which is precisely why it became the global centre for BPO and customer service operations run by English-speaking companies.

"Will they understand how we work?"

This is the objection that most underestimates how much experience already exists. A large proportion of Salesforce professionals in the Philippines have been working with Australian, New Zealand, and Singaporean companies for years — not as subcontractors or junior support, but in substantive delivery roles through implementation partners, managed service providers, and enterprise BPO operations. They are familiar with ANZ project methodologies, stakeholder communication expectations, sprint-based delivery, and the way decisions get made in companies headquartered in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, or Singapore. Many have direct experience on the books of ANZ companies. When FutureHero sources candidates in this market, we can specifically filter for those with existing ANZ company experience — which removes the onboarding guesswork entirely.

"Won't remote be a problem?"

ANZ workplaces answered this question during the pandemic, and the shift has been permanent. In Australia and New Zealand, remote and hybrid working arrangements are now standard practice across most knowledge-worker roles — including Salesforce. Professionals in Sydney and Melbourne routinely work from home two to four days a week. Singapore has seen a similar normalisation. The infrastructure, management practices, collaboration tools, and cultural comfort with distributed teams that remote work requires are already in place across most organisations that would be hiring a Salesforce specialist. Adding a Manila-based team member to a distributed team is not a structural change — it is a geographic extension of something that is already working.

Why Most ANZ and Singapore Companies Haven't Accessed It

The talent being there and the talent being accessible are two different things. Hiring someone in the Philippines from an Australian, New Zealand, or Singapore business used to require either setting up a local entity (expensive, slow, and operationally complex) or working through a third-party services arrangement that added cost and friction.

Employer of Record (EOR) models have changed that equation significantly. An EOR allows a company to hire a full-time employee in the Philippines — compliantly, with local payroll, contracts, and HR administration handled — without needing to establish a legal presence in the country. The person works directly for your team, on your projects, within your culture. The EOR handles the regulatory and payroll complexity on both sides.

This has become the standard mechanism for how companies in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore are accessing offshore specialist talent, and it has removed the primary structural barrier that used to make it impractical.

What the Right Model Looks Like

The strongest Salesforce team structures we see across Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore right now share a common pattern. Senior Salesforce architects, team leads, and client-facing specialists are based locally — in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, or Singapore — where market knowledge, stakeholder relationships, and strategic leadership benefit from proximity. Delivery capacity, development depth, and specialist execution are built across a wider geography, including the Philippines.

This is not a compromise. It is a deliberate design. The local team focuses on what local presence enables. The broader team provides capacity and specialist coverage that the local market cannot always supply at the pace the business needs.

The companies that have adopted this approach are not doing it to reduce costs as the primary objective. They are doing it because it gives them a more resilient, scalable hiring position in a market where the alternative — competing for the same small local pool of available specialists — is getting harder every year.

A Different Question to Ask

The question most hiring managers start with is: "Where can I find a Salesforce developer?" A more useful question is: "What does the full geography of available Salesforce talent look like for the role we need — and what's the right structure to access it?"

The Philippines is part of a real answer to that question. It has the talent, the experience, and now the accessible hiring infrastructure to support businesses in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore that are serious about building Salesforce capability at scale.

We have mapped it. If you want to understand what is actually available before you brief a role, that is a conversation worth having.

FutureHero specialises in Salesforce, CRM, Marketing Automation, AI and Data talent across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Southeast Asia — including EOR-supported hiring in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Talk to us about your next hire.