About
I came to executive support through operations.
Executive VA and Operations Specialist with experience across operations, customer support, HR and recruitment, supporting founders and teams from the Philippines.
MM · Method & Momentum. Keep the work moving, then build enough structure that it keeps moving without you.
How I got here
I started in coordination, where good work meant keeping people, information and deadlines moving without constant supervision.
Recruitment sharpened that discipline. A candidate left waiting can disappear. An interview without context wastes everyone’s time. A process that lives in someone’s memory eventually breaks.
So I learned to close loops, document decisions, surface problems early and make recurring work easier to run.
When the same task returns for the fourth time, I rarely see four tasks. I see one process that needs fixing.
Working arrangement
I’m based in the Philippines, with strong live overlap for both of the markets I focus on.
Australia: Manila is typically two to three hours behind Sydney, so most of the working day overlaps naturally.
UAE & Gulf: Manila is four hours ahead of Dubai, giving strong morning and afternoon overlap.
I work independently, document decisions and report in writing. The goal is fewer things for you to chase.
Experience
A progression with widening responsibility.
The two recruitment roles below were at sister companies — the same operation, with widening responsibility.
2021 – 2025
Operations, support and HR coordination
Recruitment agency, customer operations and digital operations roles
Before recruitment, I worked across HR and deployment coordination, customer operations and high-volume digital operations. Those roles made accuracy, documentation and clear escalation part of how I work, especially under volume and time pressure.
Approximately 8 months
Recruitment Coordinator
Sister company · anonymised
Candidate coordination, interview scheduling, screening support, follow-ups and onboarding across teams in the UAE, Pakistan and the Philippines. This is where the trackers started: the coordination load had outgrown one person’s memory.
Approximately 5 months · 2026
Recruitment Operations Lead
Sister company · anonymised
Expanded remit across recruitment strategy, process design, KPI reporting, SOPs, Microsoft 365 automation, stakeholder coordination and quality control. The case studies on this site came from problems I handled in this progression.
Now
Executive VA & Operations Specialist
Remote · Australia, UAE and international
Bringing the same operations discipline directly to founders and teams through full-time support or a focused system build.
Tools
Grouped by what they’re for.
I primarily build inside Microsoft 365 using tools already available to the team. Exact licensing needs depend on the workflow.
If your business uses something else, I learn the system before proposing a replacement.
Outside of work
Eleven cats. Three dogs. All rescued.
None of them were planned. It started with one and somehow became fourteen.
Feeding takes a while. Vet bills have become a family joke. Several of them are convinced my desk, chair and keyboard were purchased for them.
What that says about me
Kindness and responsibility shape how I work.
I believe competence and kindness can coexist. Humility keeps me teachable; responsibility means caring properly for what has been entrusted to me.
The rescue work is personal. The values behind it are the same ones I try to bring to work: consistency, patience, responsibility and care for what has been entrusted to me.
A bigger vision
What I want to build.
My long-term goal is to build a recruitment company that creates stronger global opportunities for Filipino professionals.
I believe Filipino talent should be valued for skill, judgement, adaptability and the ability to contribute meaningfully to a business. Cost should never be the whole argument.
The goal is bigger than placing people into jobs. I want to build a company that develops talent, represents it well and creates access to opportunities that might otherwise stay out of reach.
Long term, building something of my own may become part of that goal. Right now, my focus is becoming exceptionally useful to the businesses I support, learning how strong operations are built and doing work I can stand behind.
One opportunity now. More opportunities later.
Contact
Have too many moving parts?
Tell me what keeps getting chased, repeated or remembered manually. We’ll start there.
Mekaella Magbanua
Executive VA · Operations Specialist
Email magbanuamekaellapro@gmail.com
Also on LinkedIn, or download my résumé.
- Engagement
- Ongoing support, or a single system built and handed over
- Availability
- Full-time — 40 hours per week
The fastest way
Book a discovery call
Bring one recurring problem. I’ll tell you whether it needs ongoing support, a cleaner process or a system worth building.
Book a timeTimes show in your own time zone.
or
Prefer email? Send a message