What Is the Process to Hire Filipino Staff in New Zealand?

New Zealand employers who search this question are usually further along than they realize — they already know they want Filipino workers, they just don’t know that two separate government processes have to clear before anyone boards a flight. One runs through Immigration New Zealand (INZ), the other through the Philippines’ Department of Migrant Workers (DMW). This guide walks overseas staffing agencies through both, and where they intersect.

Two Regulators, One Hire

Every legal placement of a Filipino worker into a New Zealand job clears two independent gates. On the New Zealand side, the employer needs Accredited Employer status and a successful Job Check with INZ before the worker can apply for an Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV). On the Philippine side, the DMW governs how the worker is recruited, documented, and cleared to deploy — and its overseas arm covering New Zealand, the Migrant Workers Office (MWO) in Wellington, formerly the Philippine Overseas Labor Office (POLO), is the point of contact in-market.

Agencies that treat this as a single process tend to prepare the wrong paperwork at the wrong stage. The two tracks run in parallel, not in sequence, but they depend on each other at specific points — which is what the steps below map out.

Step 1: Employer Accreditation and the Job Check (New Zealand Side)

Before recruitment can start, the New Zealand employer has to become an Accredited Employer under the AEWV scheme and pass a Job Check for the specific role. The Job Check confirms the job meets INZ’s pay and employment standards requirements before any visa application is possible.

Pay is one of the requirements INZ checks, and the reference figure — the immigration median wage — changes periodically. As of the most recent update we could verify, the median wage used for AEWV purposes is NZD $35.00 an hour, effective from 9 March 2026, based on June 2025 wage data.

This step belongs entirely to the New Zealand employer (or the New Zealand-side recruitment partner advising them). A Philippine agency cannot substitute for it, and a job order cannot be usefully drafted until the role, pay, and accreditation status are settled on this side.

Step 2: Work Out Whether You Need a DMW-Licensed Agent

This is the rule agencies most often get wrong in either direction.

Immigration New Zealand’s own guidance states it plainly: if you are hiring six or more Filipino workers, you must use a DMW-licensed agent. For five or fewer, using a licensed agent is not mandatory — but the employer still has to comply with DMW rules and regulations and is expected to exercise due diligence, including using experts where needed.

In practice, this means a small pilot hire of two or three workers does not automatically require a DMW-licensed Philippine recruitment agency (PRA) — but it does not exempt the employer from Philippine recruitment law either. Once the headcount reaches six, working through a licensed PRA stops being optional. Given that a single job order can cover many applicants at once, most agencies find it more efficient to set up the licensed-agent relationship from the first hire rather than restructure mid-process once headcount crosses the threshold.

Step 3: Contact the MWO and Submit a Job Order

Before recruitment begins in the Philippines, the employer — or the agency acting for them — needs to contact the MWO about two things: the Philippine requirements for hiring overseas Filipino workers, and how to submit a job order for the specific role.

The MWO’s role at this stage is to assist with the employer’s Foreign Employer accreditation application and to confirm which supporting documents are required. This step is where the two regulatory tracks actually touch: the job title, headcount, and terms confirmed in New Zealand’s Job Check need to match what goes into the Philippine job order, because a mismatch between the two is a common source of delay later in the process.

Step 4: Screen, Offer, and Contract the Worker

Once the job order is in motion, the employer (typically working with their PRA) carries out preliminary screening and selects from the shortlist, followed by interviews and skills assessment. Background checks, including police checks, are part of this stage.

For a staffing agency managing this from the New Zealand side, the practical work is less about running the screening yourself and more about making sure your PRA partner’s screening criteria actually reflect what your client asked for — trade test level, English proficiency where the role requires client-facing communication, and prior overseas work experience where relevant. A shortlist that technically matches the job title but not the client’s real expectations is the most common reason a placement gets rejected after interview, not before it.

After selection, the employer sends a formal letter of job offer to the worker, and an employment contract is drafted to comply with both New Zealand employment law and Philippine requirements. This dual-compliance point is worth flagging to clients early — a contract written only to New Zealand standards, without DMW-compliant terms, is a common reason submissions get sent back for revision.

Step 5: The AEWV Visa Application

With the Job Check passed, the job order cleared, and the contract signed, the worker applies for the Accredited Employer Work Visa. This stage is governed entirely by Immigration New Zealand’s visa rules rather than by the Philippine side, and it runs alongside the DMW’s own pre-departure requirements for the worker (medical clearance and deployment clearance), which are outside the scope of this guide.

Where This Gets Complicated for Overseas Staffing Agencies

If you’re a staffing or recruitment agency advising a New Zealand employer — rather than the employer itself — you’re usually managing both sides at once: the AEWV accreditation conversation in New Zealand, and the DMW/MWO relationship in the Philippines. Few agencies have both in-house.

This is the same reason most agencies working the Philippines end up partnering with a DMW-licensed PRA rather than building that licence and relationship themselves. Getting DMW-licensed as a foreign agency, learning a specific MWO post’s checklist, and maintaining a screening pipeline in the Philippines is a multi-year undertaking on its own — not something worth building for a single New Zealand client’s headcount. A licensed partner handles the recruitment-law side instead — accreditation documents, job order submission, worker screening and deployment clearance — while you keep the client relationship. How that kind of partnership is structured, including our position on never approaching your client directly, is set out on our for-partners page.

Industries Where New Zealand Demand Shows Up

New Zealand’s Filipino labour demand isn’t concentrated in one sector, but the roles agencies most often bring to us fall into trades and hospitality-adjacent work — categories covered on our construction recruitment page and our hospitality staffing page. If your New Zealand client’s requirement sits outside those two, our industries overview covers the rest of what we source for.

Working with Jezem on a New Zealand Placement

Jezem Manpower Agency Inc. is a DMW-licensed Philippine recruitment agency based in Quezon City. If you’re advising a New Zealand employer and want to know whether a specific headcount and role is workable under the process above, send us the requirement — role, headcount, and where the employer’s AEWV accreditation currently stands — and we’ll tell you what the next step looks like.