The Role
The HR Generalist is the primary point of support for onboarding, employee movement, and offboarding across Appen's Philippines workforce of approximately 600 Project Workers and 200 Corporate employees. This role sits within HR Operations team in the Philippines and reports to the Director of Employee Experience, ensuring HR services are delivered accurately, on time, and in full compliance with local requirements.
Beyond core HR operations, this role offers a supporting hand in benefits administration, employee engagement, and local reporting, plus exposure to HR systems (Sprout and Workday) and global projects. It's a strong fit for someone who wants to build deep HR operations expertise while contributing to process improvement through automation and AI tools, including Claude.
Key Responsibilities
- Issue employment contracts and confirm all pre-employment requirements are complete before Day 1, including government IDs, clearances and pre-employment medical results.
- Conduct new hire orientation covering Appen policies, code of conduct, benefits and local statutory entitlements.
- Coordinate Day 1 readiness with IT, Facilities and the hiring manager.
- Prepare and validate semi-monthly payroll inputs and reports, and resolve payroll queries within agreed service levels.
- Process statutory leave entitlements — expanded maternity, paternity, solo parent, VAWC and special leave for women
- Maintain complete and accurate employee 201 files in line with retention requirements.
- Maintain HRIS data integrity: audit records on a regular cycle and reconcile against payroll and organisational data.
- Process employee change notices for promotions, title changes, salary increases and transfers, ensuring approvals, system updates and payroll cut-offs align.
- Provide first-level advice to employees and managers on HR policy, the Labor Code and company procedures.
- Maintain and communicate local HR policies, and support updates when legislation changes.
- Manage offboarding documentation and system updates end to end — resignation acceptance, clearance, exit interview, final pay and Certificate of Employment.
- Support the administration of statutory contributions and remittances
- Support the administration of benefits enrolment and changes (HMO, life insurance, leave entitlements) and act as first point of contact for benefit queries.
- Contribute to cross-functional global HR initiatives and projects across Appen
What you'll bring
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Minimum of 2 years of experience in HR operations, generalist, or shared services roles in the Philippines, ideally supporting both project-based and corporate employee populations
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Working knowledge of Philippine statutory requirements (BIR, SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG) and payroll coordination processes
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Hands-on experience with HRIS platforms; Sprout and/or Workday experience highly regarded
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Strong attention to detail and ability to manage high-volume administrative processes across a 600-person workforce
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Interest in process automation and AI-enabled tools as part of continuous improvement
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Clear, professional communication skills and a service mindset
About Appen
Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialise in human generated data to train, fine tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre training, supervised fine tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.