Meet Tarah, Our HR Manager

Tarah is our International HR Manager, based in Manilla. If you hire a VA through us, it will be Tarah who personally recruits your team member and manages them on a day to day basis. 

What do you like about your job and working for IBS?
There are many things I’m grateful for with this job, one is that I get to work full-time from home! Not that I didn’t like working in an office, but the commute can be tiring, especially for people with a chronic illness like me (I am also a person with a disability ). I love working with the team, everyone is supportive and professional and I’ve acquired plenty of new skills working with IBS.

How long have you been managing Virtual Assistants?
About 4 years.  

What keeps you busy outside of work?
I like to dabble in a lot of things – painting, cooking, singing; but perhaps the one that I’ve committed myself to most is dragon boat paddling. I haven’t been able to do it recently due to Covid-19, so I’ve been doing more gardening. I used to be so bad at it (I kill even Aloe Veras), but now I’ve managed to grow Zinnias, Coriander and Thyme from seeds. 

What does your home office look like? 
I work in different areas of the house, and sometimes out in the garden, but my main ‘office’ is in my room. It’s just a table, a chair, my laptop and notepads as I like to keep it pretty simple. No LED lights or double monitors that lots of people have – I just get distracted by those!  

Tell us a bit about where you live
We have two official residences, one in Metro Manila, which is a studio unit, and the other is in the outskirts of Tagaytay where the weather is cool as it is high up. We used to go back and forth between them. Currently, we are in Naga and we haven’t gone to the other places due to Covid-19. Naga is a city in the province, with fresh air and great food! It has most of the conveniences of metro living, but you still get to enjoy the ‘provincial life’, things like having chickens in the backyard, and growing veggies, which would be hard to do in the Metro. The only downside to being in Naga is that we’re almost always on the path of each storm coming through the country (and there are plenty of those!). We are usually one of the hardest hit every time a superstorm passes through. 

What is something you saw recently that made you smile? 
Oh, my adorable furkids! Looking at them doing anything, or nothing at all, just always makes me smile. 

Are you a dog person or cat person (or neither)? 
I’ve always had dogs all my life so I’m definitely a dog person! 

Do you prefer beach or mountains? 
The beach!

What’s your most used emoji? 
Being a typical geriatric Millennial, I overuse the laugh-crying emoji!  

If you could only have 3 apps on your smartphone, what would they be? 
Facebook because I can contact everybody in there, Email for work and a web browser so I can look things up. 

Can you play any instruments?  
The triangle LOL. Seriously though, I’d love to learn to play something, even just the Ukelele. 

If you could pick one age to be permanently, what age would you choose, and why? 
I would choose 30. I remember not feeling old then but I had enough authority and experience to be confident about important decisions in life.  

What’s the best way to spend a day off?  
Chilling out watching Korean dramas and ordering pizza.