Heartbreak has a way of forcing decisions that logic never would. Paulene Cuartero knows this better than most.
The 43-year-old Filipina left the Philippines in 2013 not chasing a dream, but running from pain. A long-term relationship had ended in betrayal, and staying felt impossible. “Leaving the Philippines to work abroad broke my heart,” she says. “I wanted to start a new life abroad to completely eliminate my pain of having been betrayed.” She arrived in Dubai as a licensed physical therapist. What she built over the next thirteen years is something she could not have imagined on that flight out.
A therapist who read the room
Cuartero was no stranger to building things. Back in the Philippines, she had run a spa, a salon, and a rice retail business simultaneously. She had the instincts of an entrepreneur long before she called herself one. In Dubai, she worked her clinical hours and quietly studied the landscape around her. The demand for Filipino workers in the UAE was unmistakable — and the infrastructure serving them was imperfect at best. “I worked as a licensed therapist for years and saw that there was a huge demand for Filipinos to work abroad, so I began to understand the industry and build my own company,” she says.
That company is now Al Raha Human Resources Consultancies, a Dubai-based recruitment firm whose tagline — “Discover your future with us” — Cuartero means in the most literal sense.
The woman behind the mission
To understand why Cuartero runs Al Raha HRC the way she does, you need to know about her mother. Marites Cuartero, now 60, spent years working as a domestic helper — the income that kept the family afloat and, eventually, propelled it forward. Paulene watched every bit of it. “I witnessed firsthand the sacrifices, struggles, and resilience my mother endured,” she says. “Despite limited opportunities, my mother persevered, shaping the path that led our family to a better life.”
That image never left her. When it came time to define what her company stood for, the answer was already there. “We did not construct the business for my own benefit,” she says. “I created it to leave a legacy of helping my kababayan prosper in life.”
The long game
Building a recruitment business in a foreign country is not a straightforward endeavor, and Cuartero does not pretend otherwise. She encountered setbacks. What steadied her was a straightforward conviction: she had built businesses before, under different circumstances, and she could do it again. That bet paid off.
Her sights are now set further — expansion across the GCC and a formal agency license in the Philippines to process workers for overseas deployment. At home, she is raising three children: Thessa, 22, studying medicine; Reynaldo, 18, in political science; and two-year-old Alleah.
Her advice to Filipinos struggling abroad strips everything down to its core: “Just have faith in God Almighty and never lose hope. Your current struggles will eventually pass, and your success will cause everyone to smile.”
She would know. Hers already has.
