Bench

How it works

If you did not pay for a bench, you do not have one. A recruiter’s network is not a bench. When your EA is sick, the queue waits or you cover it. For a U.S. company hiring one Filipino teammate, write this into the brief, the employment contract, and the peso payroll file before the start date. Slack habits do not override the Labor Code, BIR, or NPC. If the local employer of record holds the paper, they run the statutory step; you still owe a clean operating definition so the seat does not fail in week three. Put a number on the example when you budget loaded cost, because a nameless allowance always returns as a December surprise or a missed SLA.

Example: BPO vendor swaps an agent by lunch. Dedicated seat out with dengue: queue pauses two days. Those are different products.

How it differs

Floating status is an employment-law holding pattern. Backfill is a new hire.

Common errors

Promising bench coverage on a $2,400 search fee.

In practice

Treat Bench as a week-one operating object. Put this on the scorecard or the start-date checklist. If it only appears in a pitch deck, it will not survive week one. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have bench yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.