Hunting for Seniority

Vietnam has joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO); therefore, it has great potential to send its workers to other countries, especially those already working in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam’s largest commercial hub. However, this is a big challenge for companies in Vietnam, as a result of the shortage of senior employees. According to Navigos Group, the operator of the online job introduction website www.vietnamworks.com, Vietnam is now capable of satisfying 35-40 per cent of demand for senior employees by companies. Currently, www.vietnamworks.com is holding job applications of more than 500,000 candidates and orders from some 6,000 companies. However, the distance between employers and employees remains considerable. This situation has various causes, but according to recruiters the biggest reason is the candidates’ low qualification in individual work, teamwork and independent mentality among others.

 

Although Vietnam does not have WTO entry commitments for opening up its labour market, the country is certainly a destination for a large number of foreign labourers. The possibility of recruiting foreign employees by domestic companies is high, especially in the fields of high tech and business administration. This may become an employment tendency.

 

According to statistics, Ho Chi Minh City and the southern focal economic zone alone have dozens of thousands of regular foreign labourers. They mainly handle jobs and positions that Vietnamese counterparts are unable to perform. For instance, a shoe outsourcing factory in Dong Nai is employing nearly 20,000 Vietnamese workers and some 70 foreign workers. However, the salaries it pays the foreigners are roughly equal to nearly 20,000 Vietnamese workers. The factory said it sought Vietnamese workers to replace the foreigners’ positions to reduce production costs, but has failed for years. This is a general tendency, possibly a “force majeure” in many FDI companies. In several sectors like banking, healthcare, finance and insurance, up to 40 per cent of employees with yearly incomes of US$14,000 upwards are foreigners. On www.vietnamworks.com website, thousands of candidates are from the US, Australia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The number of foreign candidates tends to increase sharply. Hence, many ponder the joblessness of Vietnamese workers once foreign workers are recruited in Vietnam. Recruitment experts agreed this is a significant possibility, but only to a certain extent.

A chief of human resources service department of Price Waterhouse Cooper said employers must pay higher salaries, from 10-50 per cent, to foreign employees than Vietnamese ones. Hence, many companies have adopted strategies to replace foreign employees with Vietnamese ones, but on the condition that the Vietnamese must satisfy recruitment requirements. According to human resources managers, WTO entry causes a more severe shortage of Vietnamese senior workers, because they have more career opportunities in changing their jobs to better ones. So from now on, companies in Vietnam must have suitable human resources strategies to keep their desired employees.

 

In a macro angle, Vietnam in general and Ho Chi Minh City in particular need to apply a national strategy for human resources training, with special concern over senior worker training to meet the demand of Vietnam in the global integration process. This is an urgent, basic and long-term project, to improve the capability and competitiveness of Vietnamese workers on the regional and global job marketplace.