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Workers favor Citi, Google, 3M

By Jerry Lin
STAFF REPORTER
Tuesday, Aug 05, 2008, Page 12

Citibank, Google Inc and 3M are the top foreign companies that Taiwanese would like to work for in the financial, service and manufacturing sectors respectively, an online human resource agency’s latest survey showed yesterday.

About 80 percent of local workers would like to work in foreign companies because they offer better employee benefits and career prospects, with the US and Japanese companies being respondents’ top two choices, the survey said.

However, the percentage of workers who wanted to work for foreign companies dropped by 16 percent from a year ago.

The percentage of workers who would accept employment on a contractual or hourly rate basis in order to work for a foreign company also dropped to 67 percent from 88 percent last year, the report said.

“As more and more large local enterprises have begun to recruit talent by following foreign companies’ employee benefit systems, foreign companies have gradually lost their attractiveness, leaving only those that offer better future prospects,” Ryan Wu (吳睿穎), vice general manager and chief operating officer of 1111 Job Bank (1111 人力銀行), said at a press conference yesterday.

3M, a leading global technology company that is also traditionally known for its household cleaning brands, including Scotch-Brite, Scotchgard and Filtrete, surpassed Panasonic Taiwan Co (台灣松下電器) and Texas Instruments Inc (德州儀器) to become the top foreign company in the manufacturing sector that Taiwanese workers most want to work for.

“3M’s patents in the industrial, medical and optoelectronics industries are all major sources of export revenue for Taiwan. That is why our company is popular among local job seekers despite a lack of advertising,” Kay Lo (羅怡君), corporate communication specialist at 3M Taiwan Ltd, said yesterday.

In the financial sector, Citibank, the nation’s largest foreign bank by assets, was voted by local office workers as the No. 1 bank that they would like to work for, at 36.65 percent, followed by HSBC Holdings PLC at 23.43 percent and UBS AG at 20.03 percent.

The search engine giant Google Inc took the No. 1 spot in the service sector with 33.25 percent. Microsoft Corp came in second at 24.56 percent and Sony Corp placed third at 19.65 percent.

Meanwhile, amid rising global inflationary concerns, 72 percent of foreign companies surveyed said their businesses had shrunk compared with a year ago.

About 51 percent of the foreign companies also said they might freeze hiring or lower the number of new recruits to reduce personnel costs.

Asked whether their companies would recruit in Taiwan this year, nearly 70 percent of respondents said yes and planned to hire an average of eight employees this year.

Among 30 percent of the foreign companies that said no, 8.8 percent said they planned to close their operations in Taiwan.
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