| Vietnam’s largest city faces massive recruitment requisite | |
Ho Chi Minh City will need to hire 110,000 new employees in the final quarter of this year, no easy task as the global economy has only just begun to recovery, experts say. “More than 10,000 enterprises in the city are now looking for 110,000 new staff,” said Tran Anh Tuan, deputy director of HCMC Center for Human Resources Demand Forecast and Market Information, “But only 50,000 will be permanent positions.” Tuan also said unskilled workers accounted for only 30 percent of the figure. Demand for skilled employees, including those working in the power, electronics, financial, construction sectors, would be very high in the last months of this year, a drastic change from the end of 2008, said Tuan.
Le Thi Thuy Loan, CEO of Loan Le Co. Ltd, a manpower agency that specializes in executive and middle management jobs, said small and medium-sized companies had found it hard to retain skilled staff since the economic slowdown hit late last year due to lower salaries.
Now that the global economy has begun recovering and order volumes are increasing, those companies lack skilled workers, she said, adding that a hiring rush was building momentum as a result.
Both Tuan and Loan said it would be hard for small and medium-sized companies to lure skilled staff again as most of them now have stable jobs. When these firms hit hard times, larger companies rolled out the red carpet to attract highly-skilled workers, Loan said. Tuan said small and medium-sized companies need to offer impressive salaries and benefits programs to get their recruitment engines going. “But as the salary growth is slowing, will there be any companies that offer large enough wages to lure employees?” he said.
Salary increases in Vietnam slowed to 16.5 percent in the year ending last March as a weakening economy cooled a “red hot” job market, according to an annual salary survey by Navigos Group, the country’s largest recruiter.
In the first three quarters of this year, Vietnam’s economy grew 4.6 percent, compared with 6.3 percent for the same period in 2008. | |
| SGTT |
