Choosing between High Five and Glints comes down to a fundamental question: do you need a job board where candidates find you, or hiring infrastructure that finds candidates for you? High Five operates as an always-on sourcing engine that delivers pre-screened, interview-ready candidates on a flat subscription. Glints is a career and recruitment platform where employers post roles and candidates apply. Both serve Southeast Asia, but they solve different problems for different types of companies.
TL;DR
- Glints is a candidate-driven job board with career development features; High Five is an outbound sourcing platform that works whether or not candidates are actively looking.
- High Five charges a flat monthly subscription with no success fees; Glints charges per hire or per posting, which scales costs with your growth.
- For startups hiring tech talent in competitive markets like the Philippines, Indonesia, or Vietnam, passive sourcing often outperforms job boards because the best engineers are rarely browsing listings.
- High Five uses a hybrid AI-plus-human model; sourcing, screening, and shortlisting are handled by AI with human expert review at every stage before candidates reach you.
- If you are a founder or operator without a dedicated HR team, the two platforms are not direct alternatives; they complement different stages of hiring maturity.
About the Author: High Five is an AI-powered hiring platform built specifically for startups and scale-ups hiring tech and business talent across Southeast Asia. With clients including Hupo, PayMongo, and Nafas, and deep market coverage across Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, High Five brings hands-on regional expertise to every hiring decision.
What Is Glints, and Who Is It Built For?
Glints is a job marketplace and professional development platform connecting employers with talent across Southeast Asia [f6s.com]. Employers post roles, candidates browse and apply, and Glints facilitates the match through its marketplace. The platform has a strong consumer-facing identity: it is designed to help candidates find jobs, not primarily to help companies find specific candidates.
That orientation matters. Job boards, by definition, serve people who are actively looking. For entry-level roles, internships, and volume hiring where a large applicant pool is an asset, this model works well. For startups trying to hire a senior backend engineer or a product manager with fintech experience, the pool of actively-looking qualified candidates is thin, and the best candidates are rarely the ones submitting unsolicited applications.
How Does High Five Approach Hiring Differently?
Rather than waiting for candidates to come to you, High Five’s sourcing technology scans LinkedIn, GitHub, and niche communities simultaneously, around the clock, to find people who match your role requirements, whether or not those people are actively job hunting [landing.underdog.io]. This is a structural difference, not a feature difference.
The five-step pipeline works like this:
- Role definition: Employers describe the role in minutes; the system builds a comprehensive search strategy automatically.
- Autonomous sourcing: Searches run across multiple channels continuously, with human specialists guiding and monitoring the process.
- AI screening and scoring: Candidate profiles are analyzed and ranked against role requirements, with human review applied to results.
- Human expert review: Internal recruiters apply judgment and quality control before candidates reach the client.
- Interview-ready delivery: A shortlisted batch of pre-vetted candidates is delivered weekly.
The result is that employers only spend time meeting candidates who have already passed sourcing, screening, and human review. The initial filtering that typically consumes hours of a founder’s week is handled before the first interaction, with human specialists involved throughout.
What Does Each Platform Actually Cost?
This is where the comparison becomes concrete and the stakes are real for early-stage companies.
| Cost Factor | High Five | Glints |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Flat monthly subscription | Multiple models available, including EOR-only, recruitment plus EOR, or PEO; recruitment fee is optional at 18% only when using their sourcing |
| Success fees | None | Varies by service tier |
| Cost as you scale hiring | Fixed | Increases with each hire |
| Lock-in | Cancel anytime | Depends on contract |
| Replaces third-party hiring fees? | Yes (no 15-25% fee on first-year salary) | Partially; companies using their own candidates pay only the EOR fee, while an optional 18% recruitment fee applies only when using Glints sourcing |
Third-party hiring fees in Southeast Asia typically run between 15% and 25% of a candidate’s first-year salary. On a senior engineering hire at a competitive market rate, that is a significant line item. High Five’s flat subscription removes that variable, which means the cost of hiring your third engineer in a month follows the same structure as hiring your first.
For startups where cash runway is a constraint, this is not a minor detail. It is the difference between a predictable operating cost and a fee that scales against you as hiring accelerates.
Which Platform Works Better for Tech Roles in Southeast Asia?
Building on the cost argument above, the harder question is about candidate quality and market coverage. The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore each have distinct talent markets with different supply dynamics, compensation norms, and hiring expectations.
For companies looking to hire developers in the Philippines, for example, the market for strong senior engineers is genuinely competitive [boundev.com]. Demand from global companies and local unicorns has tightened supply, and the candidates worth hiring are rarely the ones actively posting their CVs on job boards. Reaching them requires outbound sourcing at a scale that manual recruiting cannot sustain.
This is where an AI-powered hiring platform with continuous sourcing has a measurable advantage over a passive listing model. High Five’s talent network includes professionals previously employed at notable regional companies, including Tokopedia, and the system learns from feedback over time, improving the relevance of future shortlists.
Niche boards and platforms focused on specific tech stacks or startup ecosystems often outperform generalist job boards for technical roles [landing.underdog.io][proficiently.com], and the same logic applies here. A platform purpose-built for the sourcing problem, rather than the listings problem, is a better fit for technical hiring in competitive markets.
Is Glints Ever the Right Choice?
Stepping back from the technical sourcing argument, a separate consideration is hiring stage and role type. Glints is a reasonable tool for:
- Volume hiring for junior roles, where a large applicant pool is an asset and screening at scale is manageable.
- Reaching professionals who are actively exploring new roles in the region.
- Markets where candidate supply exceeds demand, making inbound applications viable.
If you are an early-stage startup running your very first hire and your main challenge is not finding candidates but deciding whom to interview, a job board can work. The constraint shifts when you are consistently competing for the same narrow pool of experienced engineers, product managers, or data professionals.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does High Five work for non-tech roles? Yes. High Five covers accounting, finance, marketing, operations, legal, and other business functions in addition to software engineering, data, product, and design roles.
What markets does High Five cover? Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, with deep local market knowledge across each.
Can I pause or cancel a High Five subscription? Yes. The subscription can be paused or cancelled at any time with no lock-in.
Does High Five integrate with my existing interview process? The platform is designed to plug into your current workflow. You do not need to change how you run interviews or evaluate candidates.
Is Glints only for entry-level candidates? Glints serves a range of seniority levels, but its platform identity is oriented toward early-career professionals and career discovery, which affects the candidate mix employers typically see.
How fast does High Five deliver shortlisted candidates? The pipeline is designed to move from role definition to a qualified shortlist in days, not weeks, with new batches delivered on a weekly basis where the pipeline is active.
What makes High Five different from conventional hiring services? No success fees, no variable placement costs, and no manual account management bottlenecks. Human specialists stay involved throughout, but the process is built around the platform rather than around individual account managers.
About High Five
High Five is an AI-powered platform that helps fast-growing startups and operators hire top talent across Southeast Asia without paying success or placement fees. The platform combines autonomous sourcing technology with human expert review to deliver interview-ready candidates on a flat monthly subscription, making hiring feel like infrastructure rather than a one-off transaction. With clients including PayMongo, Nafas, and Hupo, and coverage across Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, High Five is built for the way founders actually hire.
If you are a founder or operator evaluating your hiring setup for 2026, the right question is not which job board has more listings. It is whether your current approach can consistently surface and deliver the specific candidates you need, without consuming the time and budget you cannot spare.
Learn more or get started at highfive.global.
