Where to find Filipino virtual assistants at scale: a guide to OnlineJobs.ph data

OnlineJobs.ph is the largest job board for Filipino virtual assistants and remote workers, with hundreds of thousands of public job postings spanning admin, customer support, content, design, video editing, development, marketing, and bookkeeping roles. If you hire VAs, sell tools to people who do, or build products for the Filipino remote-work market, the OnlineJobs.ph job feed is one of the highest-signal datasets you can have.

The catch: OnlineJobs.ph doesn't offer a public API or a bulk export for the postings themselves. This post is the buyer's guide to extracting structured job-posting data from OnlineJobs.ph — what fields you get, what you can do with the data, and the four paths to getting it.

Who buys this data, and why

Three buyer profiles dominate:

• Recruiting and staffing agencies matching Filipino VAs to US/UK/AU clients. They use the postings as a market-rate reference and a competitive intel feed — what skills are in demand, what the going salary is, and which employers are hiring.
• VA-economy product builders selling tools (time tracking, payroll, training, communication) to Filipino remote workers and their employers. The postings tell them which job categories are growing, which companies are hiring at scale, and where to advertise.
• Researchers, journalists, and economists studying the Filipino remote-work economy, wage trends, and the rise of cross-border employment. The job feed is a real-time index of demand.

In every case, the value isn't in any single posting — it's in the structured time-series of all postings, queryable by skill, salary, employment type, and date.

What's actually in an OnlineJobs.ph job posting?

Every public OnlineJobs.ph job posting has the following fields visible on the rendered page:

• Title — the job title as posted
• Employer — company/employer name and OnlineJobs.ph profile URL
• Posting date — when the job went live
• Salary — numeric range when the employer disclosed it (sometimes raw text like "Negotiable" or "$5/hr")
• Hours per week — typical weekly hours
• Employment type — Full Time / Part Time / Gig
• Skills required — explicit skill tags chosen by the employer
• Description — full job description
• Application URL — direct link to apply
• isRemote / isNew flags — OnlineJobs.ph's own metadata

That's the structure. The trick is extracting it for thousands of postings at once, not one at a time.

The four paths to OnlineJobs.ph data

| Method | Cost (5K postings) | Time | Quality | Fit | |--------|--------------------|------|---------|-----| | Manual collection | $0 + ~80 hours | weeks | Variable | Tiny niches, one-off research | | Build a custom scraper | $5,000-15,000 in eng time | 2-4 weeks | Whatever you build | Long-term commitment, custom needs | | General scraping service subscription | $200-$2,000+/month | 1-3 days | Variable | Multi-site scraping needs | | OnlineJobs.ph dataset on Apify ($0.003/posting, $0.005 delta-mode) | $15 for 5K | ~30 min | Schema-validated, deterministic | Most use cases |

Three of these are familiar from any "how to scrape X" buyer comparison. The fourth — the published Apify Actor — is unique to this site and is the best fit for most buyers.

The OnlineJobs.ph dataset on Apify

The OnlineJobs.ph dataset is a published Apify Actor that extracts public job postings on demand. Pay-per-result pricing:

• $0.003 per validated job posting (full-mode pulls)
• $0.005 per net-new posting (delta mode — only postings new since the last run)
• 5,000 postings = $15 in full mode
• A daily delta run that yields 100 net-new postings = $0.50 per day

Every record is validated against a Zod schema before it's billed. Records that fail validation are dropped and don't count against your spend.

Output formats: JSON, CSV, or browsable HTML preview. Drop into a recruiting CRM, a BI tool, a notebook, or a webhook pipeline.

What can you actually do with the data?

A few concrete buyer use cases:

1. Real-time wage benchmarking by skill

Pull all postings tagged with Customer Support or Video Editing over the last 30 days. Compute the median, p25, and p75 salary band. You now have a defensible market-rate quote for any client conversation.

SELECT 
  unnest(skills) AS skill,
  percentile_cont(0.5) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY salary_min) AS median_low,
  percentile_cont(0.5) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY salary_max) AS median_high,
  count(*) AS posting_count
FROM onlinejobsph_postings
WHERE postingDate > now() - interval '30 days'
GROUP BY skill
ORDER BY posting_count DESC;

2. Competitive intelligence on who's hiring at scale

Group postings by employer over a rolling window. The employers with the most active postings are the agencies and brands hiring VAs aggressively right now — your competition or your prospects, depending on what you sell.

3. Skill-trend tracking

Track the count of postings per skill week-over-week. AI-related skills (Prompt Engineering, ChatGPT, Claude API) have grown sharply in 2025-2026. You can quantify the trend and spot rising skills before they're saturated.

4. Sourcing pipeline for staffing agencies

Filter postings by required skills + budget + freshness. Match candidates from your roster against active postings. Reach out to employers offering matched candidates within hours of the posting going live.

5. Newsletter / market-pulse content

The OnlineJobs.ph feed makes for high-signal market reports. "Top 10 most-requested VA skills in Q2 2026" writes itself when you have the structured data.

Two ways to run the dataset

The Actor supports two modes:

Full mode

Extract all matching postings within an input range. Use this for one-shot dataset builds, market reports, and research. Cost: $0.003 per posting × the volume you pull.

Delta mode

Run on a schedule (daily, hourly), and the Actor extracts only postings new since the last run. Use this for continuously refreshed pipelines — recruiting CRMs, real-time market dashboards, alerting systems. Cost: $0.005 per net-new posting.

The delta-mode price is intentionally slightly higher per record because every run does change-detection work even on postings it doesn't return. The economics are designed so a daily delta run on a moderately active query costs cents-per-day, not dollars.

Schema validation, drift detection, and freshness guarantees

The OnlineJobs.ph Actor ships with the same three guarantees as every Directory Datasets dataset:

1. Strict Zod schema validation on every record before billing. Records that fail are dropped, not silently massaged. You don't pay for garbage.
2. Weekly drift detection against a fixed seed of known-good postings. If OnlineJobs.ph ships a UI change that breaks the extractor, the drift bot catches it and the extractor is patched before buyers notice.
3. Deterministic extraction — no headless browser, no LLM-based field guessing. Same input, same output, every run.

Combined, these mean a recurring delta-mode run can power production systems without a babysitter.

Two things this dataset is not

To set expectations honestly:

• It is not a candidate database. The data is job postings, not VA resumes or profiles. Employer-side data, not worker-side data.
• It is not a contract-staffing service. The dataset gives you the structured feed; what you do with it (recruiting, research, product) is up to you.

If you need the worker-side data — a list of available VAs with skills and rates — that's a different scrape against a different surface. The job-posting feed answers "who's hiring and for what" rather than "who's available."

A 2-minute starter run

To try it on your own data:

1. Open the OnlineJobs.ph dataset page.
2. Click "Run on Apify".
3. Start with a maxItems: 100 test run — that's $0.30 to validate output shape against your downstream system.
4. Once the schema fits, scale to a full pull or wire up a delta-mode schedule.

A 5,000-record full run is 30 minutes and $15. A daily delta run that catches 100 net-new postings runs about $0.50/day, or $15/month for continuously fresh data.

The Filipino remote-work economy is one of the fastest-growing labor markets in the world. The OnlineJobs.ph job feed is the most visible structured signal of that growth. Get it cleanly, get it cheaply, and build on top — start at the OnlineJobs.ph dataset.