Start date lock

How it works

Count NBI, laptop shipping, account provisioning, and the current employer’s 30-day notice. A Monday start that ignores a 30-day resignation is how you hire someone who is still employed elsewhere until mid-month. 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: accepted 1 June, current job notice through 30 June, start 6 July with laptop already in Cebu.

How it differs

Time-to-start measures this. Onboarding week is what happens after. Resignation notice is their old employer’s clock.

Common errors

‘Can you start tomorrow’ as a loyalty test.

In practice

Treat Start date lock 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 start date lock 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.