You can recruit staff in Vietnam by using many different tactics. Building your brand, leveraging networks, clearly communicating your opportunity and effectively interviewing your applicants are all vitally important to the growth of your team. A bit of local research and know-how also helps!

Read on for more about recruitment in Vietnam and the use of recruitment agencies.

Better Outcomes from Recruitment

Hiring and retaining talent is often one of the most challenging issues for business. Hiring new employees can be difficult and risky. Your existing team can be distracted by a search for a new team member. Failing to find a suitable candidate can prevent a business from growing, or demotivate a team that’s making progress. Even worse, appointing the wrong candidate can impose significant costs and disruption on a business.

Recruitment matters: without the right team members it will be difficult to deliver operational commitments and strategic growth. The recruitment process should ensure that you have the right talent at the right price.

Adding Value as a Recruitment Agency in Vietnam

A good recruitment agency can assist a company in many ways. They’ll understand the job vacancy and interpret the capabilities needed to be successful in the job. They’ll know the best source of candidates and make the application process as user-friendly as possible.

Once underway, a good recruitment agency will screen quickly and accurately assess background, skill and personality. They’ll keep good candidates engaged through the process by being professional and courteous.

A good recruitment agency in Vietnam should be able to bring local and industry expertise to your specific hiring situation. They’ll be able to find great candidates and assist to convince these candidates to join your team. In the event that you miss out on your preferred candidate, they’ll help you to secure the next most suitable.

Overview of the Recruitment Process

Recruitment processes vary between company but they will generally include these seven stages.

1) Set up

Identifying the hiring needs should begin with a lengthy definition of requirements. It’s important that the initial brief includes more that a title for the position. It will be important to know and understand the responsibilities this position will have and the capabilities that will be required. Defining the requirements for a job takes some effort and skill, even if the candidate is a replacement for an existing position that has become vacant.

2) Planning

A good recruitment agency will know where to look for suitable candidates. This might include internal sources or a whole range of external sources. A good recruitment agency will actively spend time in networks that are likely to provide strong applicants.

3) Searching

Depending on the role, the search process may have passive or active processes. Active recruiting becomes very important where a niche skill set is required or the labour market is tight.

4) Identifying Candidates

Applicants are great, but a search needs to provide suitable candidates. Ideal candidates are much harder to find!

5) Screening

Applicants that have the required capabilities proceed to screening as candidates for a position. Hopefully they’re all strong and worthy of consideration, but often the initial screening will reveal gaps in capability or CVs that don’t accurately reflect an applicants capability. At the conclusion of screening, you should be provided with a shortlist of capable and interested candidates.

6) Interviewing

In-person interviews are critical to develop an informed view of a candidate. Remember also that the best candidates want to work on the best opportunities. The best candidates are highly likely to drop out of a slow recruitment process: they’ll either get frustrated or they’ll see it as a weaker opportunity. It’s vital that interviews and selection are conducted promptly.

7) Offers

Proposing and negotiating offers are a critical stage in the process. Not all offers will be accepted, but if the hard work has been done through the recruitment process, there should be a significant chance that the preferred candidate will accept. Next step: onboarding!

Achieving Recruitment Success Together

The relationship between client and recruitment agency is key for success.

Metasource Illustration - HR Advice

At every step of the journey, there is an opportunity to create value.

Select the Right Staff in Vietnam

Whatever the specific steps in the recruitment process used by your company, you should make sure you have multiple people involved in the final decision. Each individual will have a particular style and specific biases they bring to a recruitment process. It’s easier to identify potential problems amongst your candidates by working together.

For technical hires like software developers, there are several important practices that will improve the selection process:

  1. Structured interviews significantly improve hiring effectiveness. They’ve been shown to be far superior than a reliance on CVs.
  2. Experiential interviews should be considered. Get your candidates to solve a problem you are actually working on.
  3. Tests of technical ability. For developers, some companies prefer code submission, others administer technical tests, and some prefer standardized tests like HackerRank to improve the efficiency of testing.
  4. Involvement of your current team members. Your new hire will most likely need to fit in with existing team members. Consider getting shortlisted candidates to meet your current team members, particularly your key team members.
  5. Don’t just hire the smartest individuals. Good teams need more than smarts, as shown in recent research.

A good recruitment agency should ask the right questions about your process and prompt you when required, to ensure your decision makers are on track.

Get the Right Candidates to Apply

Wouldn’t it be great if you could improve the quality of your applicant pool? Fortunately, there are several short-term tactics that can really improve the quality of your applicants:

  • Write great job advertisements: Your ad needs to be succinct and compelling. Ask yourself: what is the core of the role? What are the essential requirements? Why should the candidate work with you? Strong answers to these questions will assist you to gather a decent pool of applicants, whichever hiring channel you use. Note that your job advertisement should not be the same as your longer job description.
  • Look at the local competition to make sure your offer is competitive: What titles do they use to describe their roles? How long are the job advertisements? What employee benefits are they offering? Answers to these questions should shape your own offer.
  • Make smart choices where you advertise:  Really think about where you advertise your jobs. There will be many options: is it better to advertise on an industry-specific platform, or a more general one? Are there local partners who will help to spread word of your opportunity, like platform-specific Facebook groups? Are there specific universities, coding schools or coworking spaces that have built a relevant physical community?

A good recruitment agency should be able to help you with each of these, if not take responsibility for the execution of these tactics.

Set a Solid Foundation for a Recruitment Process

Before you even consider recruiting a particular role, there are several simple longer-term approaches that will really improve your odds of success. For example:

  • Start early: Prospecting for potential employees well ahead of time can really improve your chances of finding a great fit.
  • Use your existing network: Explore your network and their connections for potential referrals, and consider building a network in your target country if you haven’t already. You might consider connecting with universities or coworking spaces in your target city, just to get started. If you already have offshore employees, consider an employee referral program.
  • Monitor the right places: Keep an eye on the online places that potential employees will engage (for example, Github or Stack Overflow for developers, but you’ll need a presence yourself).
  • Build an employment brand: You should attempt to build a strong employment brand before you formally commence a new search. In particular, it’s new companies that can suffer from a perceived lack of credibility, especially in Asian cultures. Tangible proof of your company or project can help, even if it’s a simple website.

These strategies will potentially add far more value than tweaking your ad copy or fine-tuning your choice of hiring channel. Small early actions can really improve your odds of finding that dream team member. And if you need to recruit for a company that is new to Vietnam, you might be interested in our startup tips.

Working with the Best Recruiters

The best recruiters have a distinct style. You should be able to recognise the quality of your recruiter very quickly. Ask yourself:

  • Does my recruiter understand the industry?
  • Does my recruiter understand the real job requirements of the brief?
  • Is my recruiter highly organised?
  • Is my recruiter actively working on the brief through traditional and new tools, including social media and candidate databases?
  • Can my recruiter deliver engaging and insightful interviews?
  • Can my recruiter convince an applicant to accept a position on factors other than salary?
  • Is my recruiter visibly working to excel on every brief?
  • Do I have a close working relationship with my recruiter, and see them as a trusted advisor?

Our Recruitment Philosophy

We know that your business or project depends on talent. Your team members will become a key asset for your business, and that team will underpin your overall success. Growing and keeping a team will be one of the most significant challenges in almost any business.

We’re here to help. We’ll get you a practical result from a quality process, delivered at a reasonable price.

We’re also passionate about HR in Vietnam and the growth of companies. We invest to ensure that we’re up-to-date and that we are adding value at every step of the recruitment process. We can also advise you on skills availability, salary, payroll issues and employee benefits.