CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY, Philippines--Small players in the call center industry here are losing their employees due to aggressive poaching by dominant players in the business process outsourcing industries of Cebu and Manila.

Engr. Elpidio Paras, owner of the Arriba Telecontact Inc., has said small firms have become training grounds for talents who eventually move to bigger companies for higher pay.

"Bigger companies are willing and ready to offer very huge incentives and salary packages, including contract signing bonuses and financial assistance for their relocation. These attractive packages are something that we cannot afford," said Paras.

"Good and skilled people are being poached. These are people in whom we have already invested money for training and skills improvement. After they are armed with the necessary tools, they leave us in exchange for better pay…and we could not afford the high cost of counter-poaching," Paras added.

Small companies here have been forced to shut down their operations largely due to loss of human resources. That Cagayan de Oro City is located in Mindanao has turned off potential investors, according to Eliza Pabillore, director of the Department of Trade and Industry for Misamis Oriental.

"We have not yet been successful in getting the big ones. The first time we joined road show, we got a lot of inquiries. But when they learned that Cagayan de Oro is in Mindanao, they backed out. We are plagued by the image (that Mindanao is a troubled region)," Pabillore said.

She said business players in Cagayan de Oro must try to dispel notions that the city was "part of the conflict areas of Mindanao."

Paras said the entry of more investors would pressure local players to improve employment packages and provide workers with bigger opportunities not only for higher pay but also experience.

The only large BPO company in Cagayan de Oro today is Synnex-Concentrix, a company that bought what was known as Link2Support. It offers voice-based services, software development and systems integration, web and multimedia development, knowledge management and product life cycle management.

Along with Arriba and the BPO offered by Capitol University, Synnex-Concentrix provided employment opportunities for many Mindanaons. But industry players said Synnex-Concentrix, the California-based information technology supply chain service provider, trimmed down their employees to fewer than a thousand from its almost 1,500 strong workforce.

Paras hinted that even a big company like Synnex-Concentrix had difficulties coping with the competition for higher pay.

Considered a small company, with barely a hundred employees, Arriba Telecontract Inc., started in 2005 and provided a round-the-clock calling and answering services to clients in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. It is offering telemarketing, answering service, lead generation or the matching of consumers and decision makers, and market research.

Paras said the "shrinking of the talent pool" must be addressed. He revealed that not many graduates could meet the qualifications of the BPO firms.

"We have to admit that the quality of our graduates is something that is also problematic. The best ones are being pirated and those who are left for the local players are the second best," he said.

From January to November, he said they were able to interview more than a thousand applicants from various universities and colleges in Cagayan de Oro and the nearby towns but so far, the BPO firms got to employ only more than a hundred who passed the quality test.