3 Finding Employees, Salaries and Wages

Every entrepreneur and business consultant would undoubtedly agree that one of the most important aspects in developing your business is to build a good team. This team could be directly employed by your company, or outsourced; this team could sit in the same office as you, or they could be spread out all over the world. Nonetheless, as you are a business owner-to-be based in Taiwan, this chapter will focus on resources to find employees in Taiwan.

Most companies in Taiwan use online human resource banks, as well as the Bulletin Board System (BBS), to find employees.

Websites

The biggest and most famous recruitment website in Taiwan is 104 Job Bank. The website has some English content and has the largest database of job seekers and job opportunities. You need to have a company set up already to register as an employer. If you need any help, you can send an email to - <english_service@104.com.tw>.

Another noteworthy online resource is HiRecruit Services. Developed and managed by the government, there are Chinese, English and Japanese versions of the website. HiRecruit has a more multi-lingual / international focus than 104, but also a smaller database.

Other sites that are worth checking out are:

Bulletin Board System (BBS)

BBSs are text-based tools, also known as Telnet, which were often used before the invention of the World Wide Web and graphic-based Internet browsers. While these systems have mostly died out in other countries, Taiwan is unique in having around 1,500,000 Telnet or BBS users, mostly university students. The increased usage in recent years of Facebook has decreased PTT use but it is still a useful tool to reach students.

The biggest and most famous is PTT BBS, maintained by the National Taiwan University. As the bulk of BBS users are university students and relatively recent graduates, BBS is a great place to look for young graduate and/or part-time employees. There are hundreds of categorized forums in PTT, covering almost every conceivable topic.

The content is virtually all in Chinese. In order to use it, you need to use a special browser. Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. are not able to access PTT. We suggest you download PCMan or KKMan.

You can download PCManX from the web.

After installing the program, open it, and type in the following address: “telnet://ptt.cc”. To gain access to the messaging service and forums, you will need to create an account.

In order to create an account, you will need a non-free email address (that is, not a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., email address). If you are a Taiwanese university student, you can use your university account.

To use PTT to find employees, there are two useful boards, titled “job” and “part-time” (located under the 求職 Qiúzhí section), where you can post advertisements looking for employees. You can simply post information about your company and job description.

Intern Programs

Big companies like General Electric, Microsoft, Intel, etc., are running internship programs and internal “universities” to train their people, but small companies often reject these recruitment and training programs as too costly. But is it really? One really good employee who can take initiatives and work independently is worth training another 9 interns that go on to do other things. It’s a long-term commitment but it is worth it.

Enspyre Internship

For years Enspyre struggled to find marketing and sales people. We interviewed, hired, trained and fired. Over and over again. It was costly, time consuming and extremely annoying.

In the fall of 2008 I was negotiating a cooperation deal between the ECCT SME Centre and Private Chinese Cultural University. From ECCT, what we had in mind was access to PCCU’s great locations for our seminars and workshops. PCCU have their main campus up on YangMing Mountain, but they also have three great modern buildings in downtown Taipei where Enspyre had been renting events facilities for years.

Now we were discussing with PCCU that they would give us free rooms in exchange for access to ECCT’s international network. We discussed many aspects of cooperation and the topic of internships came up. It is my feeling that many foreign entrepreneurs, even the ones who are doing well, are a bit removed from many aspects of Taiwanese society. One of these areas is internship and other more informal ways of recruiting. So I was very excited to have this discussion. PCCU has something like 25,000 students, a combination of regular students ages 18-23 and also older students who work during the day and study in the evenings.

We figured that if our members could have the university’s help to actively recruit suitable students for their company, we could add a whole new facet to our recruitment process.

The cooperation agreement between ECCT and PCCU was signed at a ceremony at PCCU’s JianGuo campus in February 2009. Since the economy was bad, employment down and everything international has a nice ring to it, the media was all over it. I was interviewed by 5-6 TV stations and many other media and felt like a real rock star.

A month or two later Enspyre started our first intern group with five people starting a three month program. Since Enspyre’s office often is completely full with people answering and making thousands of phone calls, I decided to have the group come in on Saturdays only and then I gave them work to be done at home.

Three years later, we have had over 120 interns coming from 11 different universities. Of them, maybe 60 finished the program and we have hired 20 great students to work part-time at Enspyre or one of our partner companies. As the crowning achievement one of the graduating part-timers has been hired as a full-time employee. The first of many, hopefully.

You can check out http://www.interns.com.tw for more info about Enspyre’s intern program. That website is built and maintained by interns and at least as of this writing, anyone searching Yahoo! for “internship” in Chinese will find us right at the top of the list. Not bad for a bunch of students, eh?

How to set up your own internship program:

  1. Think long and hard about what kind of students you want to attract.
  2. Think about what you can teach this student and what he or she can learn from your internship. This is the reason why they do it. There are too many programs out there that are just cheap labor abuse disguised as an internship.
  3. Come up with a clear program description that includes start and end time, location, tasks, classes, teachers/managers and whether you will pay them or not. I usually do NOT pay any salary. Instead I promise lots of learning opportunities and a possible job at the end.
  4. Contact the universities within travel distance and ask them to post your info to their websites or career news. They will likely ask you to submit your company license and all sorts of info since they don’t want to get sued for sending students to get robbed or raped. It takes time but it only has to be done once - a good investment.
  5. Once the program is up and running I suggest you ask your interns to blog about it so potential future interns can get an even better idea of the opportunity you offer.
  6. The Enspyre Internship program has its own Facebook group which is a useful way to stay in contact with people.

AIESEC

AIESEC is an international, student-run organization for students. It has a presence in over 110 countries, and has a membership numbering tens of thousands. AIESEC is a great way to find interns from all around the world, check their International site or Taiwan site.

HR Issues

A few years ago when I was Co-chair of the European Chamber of Commerce Taipei (ECCT) SME Centre we organized a workshop about these issues. We asked a manager from one of Taiwan’s largest job banks to give a speech and also the HR manager from TGI Fridays.

In attendance were about 30 foreign bosses from a variety of industries. The consensus was that hiring is tough.

In a world of internet job searches, people can easily apply for a hundred jobs in a day without too much research and interest. So if you call them and ask for an interview, they are likely to ask who you are and why you are calling them. According to several people in the room, 70% of people don’t show up for their interviews and a sizable number of the people who accept a job offer from you might not even show up for the first day.

So you need to put some energy into marketing yourself to potential employees. If you are hiring younger people, they are often still living with their parents until they are about 30 which means you can get away with paying them not so much. But they are also not all that dependent on their salaries, so if they don’t like working for you, they can quit, be out of a job for a while and then find something else.

Revital of Anemone Ventures and Cedric of Infine both agree that hiring younger Taiwanese staff has its advantages. They say that as a general rule, younger Taiwanese staff tend to be less set in their ways, more willing to take initiatives, and can be developed and nurtured. More experienced staff, although more mature, may be more set in their ways; that is, in Taiwan, employees tend to take orders from the boss and not take initiative.

Gi Tae requires his employees to speak Korean so that they are able to communicate with his overseas Korean buyers. He has had a difficult time finding employees in Taiwan who are proficient enough in Korean. In the past, he has relied on graduates of the Korean language departments at Taiwanese universities to fill roles within his business.

How Much To Pay and Salary Surveys

So you have decided to hire someone. What should you offer in terms of salary and benefits?

Of course this should be determined in a negotiation between you and the employee, but here are some thoughts. Taiwanese people, especially younger ones, are very likely to just accept or reject your salary offer without attempting to negotiate. This means that you might lose an otherwise valuable employee because you bid a bit too low.

Average Starting Salaries in Different Job Positions

Job Position Average salary NT$/month
Secretary 22,000 - 28,000
Sales 25,000 - 33,000
Marketing 25,000 - 33,000
Accounting 30,000 - 37,000

The average salaries3 will be influenced by the location of the company (Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, etc.), education requirements, experience and the job tasks. What we provide here can only serve as reference. Adjust according to your situation and remember to make sure you make your company and the job opportunity attractive to the people you want to hire.

Finding Top Talent

Jake Morrison of Cogini Systems says he has had a hard time finding good software engineers in Taiwan. He says it is very rare to find technical talent who can communicate well in English. Jake thinks this is because top technical talent in Taiwan has little interest in working for a start-up or small company and therefore gets absorbed into large corporations such as Acer, HTC and TSMC.

In an attempt to overcome this deficiency, Jake has attempted to import foreign talent, but has been snagged by work permit rules. As a result, Jake has outsourced a significant part of his operations to Vietnam.

Average Salary in Different Industries

Industry Average Salary NT$/month
Finance and Insurance 67,000
Information and Communication 59,000
Estate 41,000
Arts, Entertainment and Recreation 31,000
Hotel and restaurant 29,000
Construction 41,000
Engineering Master 45,000
  Bachelor 37,000
Food Manufacturing 35,000
Drink Manufacturing 52,000
Textile Manufacturing 36,000
Clothing Accessories Manufacturing 33,000

The Taiwanese government provides an interesting online salary database. Select the time period, industry class and press “GO”; the average salary will show up right away. And it is in English!

The biggest Human Resource Bank, 104, provides two functions providing salary information. The first one is for applicants, and the second is for companies, all in Chinese. For more help, you can call them at +886-2-2912-6104#8986.

Yes123 is another Taiwanese job bank. They have a service that was originally designed to let people compare their expected salary with the average industry salary. You can use it as another reference. Select the job category, location and type the expected salary and you can compare with the average salary. It is in Chinese only.

Minimum Salary for Foreigners

For most foreigners with an Alien Resident Certificate the government requires that you earn at least NT$48,000. Read more about this in Chapter 19: Visa, ARC and Work Permits.

  1. Taiwan’s National Science Institute, Statistics Division http://www.startabusinessintaiwan.tw/book/link#a1↩
  2. Negative List for Investment by Overseas Chinese and Foreign Nationals http://www.startabusinessintaiwan.tw/book/link#a5↩
  3. National Statistics (Chinese) http://www.startabusinessintaiwan.tw/book/link#a6↩