Your next job application in the Philippines may start with a conversation with an AI, not a recruiter. Jobstreet by SEEK unveiled seekAi, its employment-focused AI engine, at the Jobstreet Connect hirer convention in Manila on Thursday, September 24, 2026. The headline feature is an AI voice interview that pre-screens applicants before a human ever joins the process, Rappler reported from the event. The launch lands in a market that already leads Southeast Asia in AI-assisted hiring: 39% of Philippine employers say they use AI in recruitment, against a 27% regional average.
What seekAi does
seekAi is Jobstreet's proprietary engine, and the company says it draws on more than 25 years of employment-market data and about 750 million daily candidate and employer signals across Asia-Pacific. It arrives in two parts:
- Personalised Targeting learns what a strong candidate looks like for a specific company, using the role requirements, the employer's preferences and its past hiring activity, instead of broad keyword matching. Jobstreet says candidates the system flags as likely to be interested are up to five times more likely to apply.
- seekAi Assist is the agentic layer. It runs AI pre-screening voice interviews, ranks applicants, suggests a recruiter's next step, and automates reference checks. "Agentic" here means the AI can carry out a multi-step task on its own, rather than just answer a question.
The company framed the pitch in one line at the event: AI should make hiring "better, not busier," managing director Dannah Majarocon said, as BusinessMirror reported. The convention gathered more than 200 business leaders, HR practitioners and decision-makers under the theme "Turning AI into Organizational Advantage."
How the AI voice interview works
The pre-screening interview asks applicants about their experience, motivations, availability and other job-relevant questions. Candidates complete it on their own device and on their own schedule. A human recruiter steps in only after that first stage.
Jobstreet used the conference to illustrate the busywork it wants to remove. Going from a job advertisement to a shortlist can involve roughly 3,000 button presses across separate tools for screening, rating, pre-interviewing and managing applicants, the company showed. Pulling those steps together through AI could save recruiters around 10 to 12 hours of work each week, according to Majarocon.
For applicants, Jobstreet's argument is that better matching helps qualified workers surface for roles that fit them, instead of vanishing into a large generic pool, and that an on-demand interview removes the scheduling friction of an early-stage screen.
39% of Philippine employers already use AI to hire
The adoption figure comes from Jobstreet's 2025 Hiring, Compensation & Benefits Report. It puts the Philippines well ahead of the 27% average across Southeast Asia. Employers cited low-quality applicant pools, limited time, increasingly complex hiring workflows and rising cost pressures as the reasons they turned to AI, and those that adopted it reported faster hiring, more precise matching and less administrative work.
The flip side, as BusinessMirror noted, is that for entry-level applicants AI increasingly decides who gets matched, screened and moved forward before a human recruiter enters the process. That makes the guardrails around these systems the real story.
Bias, transparency and who is accountable
Majarocon told Rappler that hiring decisions can decide whether a person gets an economic opportunity at all, so governance has to travel with the technology. She said Jobstreet continuously checks whether its systems, tools and structures guard against bias, and that explainability matters: applicants should understand what kind of AI is used, what it does for them, and how their data is stored.
Two other speakers at the convention pushed the same point from the employer side. Kin Enriquez argued that a company must get its hiring process right before deciding which parts to hand to AI, and Ralph Regalado said AI adoption fails without good data governance, per BusinessMirror. Jobstreet says final hiring decisions in AI-assisted recruitment remain under human control, and Majarocon stressed that a human must stay accountable for what the AI does.
Not every employer is buying in
The counterpoint came from one of the country's own telcos. DITO Telecommunity chief human resources officer Holy Ampaguey told Rappler that DITO still handles much of its recruitment the traditional way, with people reviewing applicants one by one. Her reason is a feedback loop: applicants now use AI to optimise their CVs for the very systems that screen them, so DITO has chosen to keep humans in the loop rather than automate the screen.
What this means for Filipino jobseekers and HR teams
- If you apply through Jobstreet, expect the first round to increasingly be an AI voice screen you take on your phone. Prepare for it the way you would for a short phone interview, since your answers feed a ranking a recruiter will read.
- Jobstreet has not published pricing for seekAi or said which employer plans include it. Philstar's report describes the engine as being built into the platform's workflow, so treat it as a feature rolling into the existing employer product rather than a separate purchase, until Jobstreet says otherwise.
- The Philippines is the test case for how well this holds up. With 39% of local employers already using AI in hiring, the bias and explainability commitments Jobstreet made this week will be judged on entry-level Filipino applicants first. It fits a wider local pattern we have tracked, from agentic AI reaching Philippine mid-market firms to AI already handling nearly half of Philippine customer-service chats.
Context.ph, which also covered the launch, noted Jobstreet's own caveat: the technology does not fix hiring by itself, and winning talent still depends on competitive pay, flexibility and real career growth.
