Firms in China are hiring more locals

Over 45 percent of Taiwanese enterprises planning to invest in China will choose to recruit Chinese employees over Taiwanese, posing fierce competition for an estimated 340,000 Taiwanese college students scheduled to graduate this year, a local magazine survey found yesterday.

The survey -- conducted by Cheers magazine, a sister publication of CommonWealth magazine (天下雜誌) -- was sent out to 1,394 companies, of which 300 responded.

Traditional and high-tech industries were the most aggressive in expanding into China's markets, according to the survey.

The major purpose of recruiting local talent in China is for "their experience in areas, whereas cheap labor is no longer Taiwanese firms' biggest concern," said Isabella Wu (吳韻儀), deputy managing editor of Cheers.

Echoing Wu's view, Wang Chin-po (王俊博), president of Soft-World International Corp (智冠科技), said the gap in personnel costs across the Strait narrows when Taiwanese firms offer more cash in order to compete for the same talent pool in China.

Soft-World, one of Taiwan's largest game software companies, currently has about 570 employees worldwide with 200 in China. Programmers comprise nearly half of its workforce, with about 160 in Taiwan and another 100 in China.

With five years of experience operating in China, Paul Chou (卓正欽), senior vice president of the human resources and administrative division at Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), yesterday said that "it has become an inevitable trend to place local Chinese on local production lines."

Chou, however, insisted that company policy requires maintaining a research and development (R&D) base in Taiwan, which still has the upper hand in R&D talent.

"For a period of five years China won't be able to replace Taiwan's R&D talent pool," Chou said, adding that Compal had 150 job openings for Taiwanese R&D talent in the first half of the year.

Drawing a comparison to workers across the Strait, Chou added that Chinese workers are, in general, more hard-working and career-motivated, and with better English comprehension than their Taiwanese counterparts. He also said that Chinese workers are catching up on their free trade experience and world perspective, in which Taiwanese workers currently excel.

Soft-World's Wang further pointed out that Chinese workers, however, show less loyalty to Taiwanese firms, saying "their hostility is obvious toward Taiwanese firms, which are treated as stepping stones by them."

Wang also said that Chinese workers often engage in power struggles, causing difficulties in human resources management and upsetting the harmony within a company.

He therefore said that he preferred to hire Taiwanese workers who often demonstrate their strength at crucial times though they are sometimes inactive in the workplace.

Unwilling to discuss potential future plans to move an eight-inch fab to China, the world's biggest made-to-order chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said it will plan ahead its talent pool before expanding into China's markets.

Richard Pao (鮑惠明), director of TSMC's human resource operation center, said that the company plans to recruit about 3,200 employees this year, adding that a job fair will be held this weekend in Hsinchu and Tainan cities.

He added that TSMC puts an emphasis on job seekers' working enthusiasm, creativity, professionalism and learning potentials.