VietNamNet Bridge – In spite of the ongoing global economic crisis, HCM City’s labour supply market remains active.

In the first six months of the year, demand for recruitment increased 75 per cent over the same period last year.

The city now has 35 licensed job placement centres mainly supplying manual labour to companies, according to the website Employment Viet Nam (www.employmentvietnam.com).

Among them, only eight state-owned centres have managed to provide between 1,000–2,000 workers per month. They are magnetic addresses for blue collar workers have signed up at them to find jobs.

Tran Anh Tuan, deputy director of the HCM City Job Placement Center, said: "These centres only attract a large number of manual labourers, not white-collar workers."

While domestic job placement centre control the lion’s share of the manual labour market, foreign companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst&Young and KMPG are leaders in the white collar job supply market. "Domestic customers don’t know our services and foreigners don’t know our brand name," said Pham Thi My Le, general director of L&A Co, one of the first Vietnamese companies to supply white collar workers.

Viet Nam’s enterprises need to renew themselves, expand their business and co-operate with other companies to build a strong network that is capable of managing and developing the domestic labour market, said Le.

Apart from job centres, nearly a hundred job websites have worked to provide both employers and employees with diverse choices.

Huynh Van Thoi from the website www.onlinejobs.vn said: "Job websites allow employers to find employees’ information easily and upload recruitment information at any time."

Tran Phan The Vu, recruitment manager of Employment Viet Nam, said Viet Nam’s personnel service needed to be upgraded to meet recruiters’ requirements.

Loan Le Co Ltd, a new job supplier, recently became the first in Viet Nam to apply English recruitment software named Filefinder to facilitate the supply of information on its labour pool.

"The software is useful so that it’s used by 50 per cent of famous job suppliers in the world," said Loan Le, the company’s director. "It also helps us to delete incomplete and duplicate files and update information by cellphone," she said

(Source: Viet Nam News)