I acquired my spousal visa in the Philippines a couple of months ago and started looking for work. Since I'm not Filipino, I knew it would be difficult.
First you have to deal with the fact that several companies flat out refuse to hire anybody who isn't Filipino and don't care if you have the right to work in the country.
Once you have filtered those companies out, you have to deal with several employers who assume that you won't be OK with the wages they are offering (even though you wouldn't have applied for it if this was an issue...)
This was all stuff I was expecting, but I've been rejected for several jobs for utterly absurd reasons.
The most common reasons have been as follows:
1. They don't consider being British and having lived and worked in the UK for 30 years as proof that I can speak English. My English qualifications also mean absolutely nothing to them.
Several HR teams have expressed concern that, because I haven't worked in a call centre in the Philippines, I may not speak English well enough to be able to hold down a job in an English language environment. I've been told that I need to go and work for a BPO company for at least a year before they are willing to accept that my English is good enough to work for them.
I assume the issue here is that, because this is how they would gauge a Filipino applicant's English skills, they don't know how to deviate from their script/requirements when a native English speaker applies for a job with them.
2. The HR team speak poor English, but are absolutely convinced that they speak English at a native level. Even though they know English is my native language, the possibility that their English could be wrong doesn't even dawn on them. It HAS to be mine that is incorrect and I must be an idiot if I can't even speak my native language.
The worst two examples I have for this are:
a) I was asked to read a couple of paragraphs. One of the paragraphs contained a grammatical error that was something like 'I need you to provide me with more detail information'. When I read this I changed 'detail' to 'detailed'.
Afterwards, they told me that I had mispronounced 'detail'. I pointed out that they had made a grammatical error and that 'detailed' was correct. They told me that I was wrong and suggested that I took an English course to improve my language skills.
b) I came across a job advertisement for a role in a field I have five years of experience in. They only required a minimum of two years experience for the role. They were also specifically requesting a native English speaker. I thought I was a shoo-in as the field is fairly niche and they needed an expat who was currently seeking work within the Philippines.
All of the responsibilities they had listed for the role were already mentioned in my CV, as were the skills (apart from showing up to work on time which I wouldn't consider to be a skill...). If you wanted to tailor your CV to match a position you were applying for, you couldn't have done much better than submitting the CV I already had.
I was rejected within minutes of applying for the position. They told me that my CV didn't meet the requirements for the role.
Bewildered, I reached out to the company, via their American website, asking if they could provide me with more information as to why they didn't feel that I was a suitable candidate. I thought that perhaps, because my CV was too perfect, they had assumed that I had built a CV off of their advertisement, then submitted it as a fake application. So I attached evidence that my CV had been that way for over a month and that I really had done the job listed in my CV.
Of course the American company outsourced their own customer support to their Philippines-based company. Somebody got back to me in horrifically bad English, telling me to check out their job portal if I was interested in applying for a job with them. She obviously hadn't understood the message I had sent either...
So problem identified. Their HR team have hired somebody who can't speak or understand English. The only way this person would have been given the job is if the company's HR team can't speak English either.
3. I will pass the first stage of the application process, then they will ask me to sit a few tests from home to measure my English language skills. When I score 100% on their tests, they assume that I must have cheated and reject my application.
I've managed to land several interviews, but it seems that the only way to get hired in this country is to purposely speak English incorrectly by attempting to match the language skills of the person interviewing you. I've yet to be interviewed by a Filipino who speaks fluent English and they're never willing to accept that there is any possibility that it could be their English that is faulty rather than mine.
I'm assuming that everybody else has experienced the same issues when applying for jobs here?
Does anybody have any tips on how to avoid these ridiculous situations?
(I blame the church, which sabotage logic thinking...)
so when I need such nowadays, I hire someone to do most of it. I switched when it became to much to be worth the time to update and keep fresh to be worth it by I many different types of work.
I HAVE bothered about such when it IS important and had a steady assignment for a rather big newspaper in almost 20 years (until they had to startt savbing by internet competition so they skiped all not full timers. ( have been paid e g for 200+ articles about as different subjects as sports and psycholopgy...
even at their nighttime! 
And if the handler dont know the answer self and no one else at work then, then they say sorry plus check it and answer soon when them knowing arrive. 
