High-class personnel market heats up VietNamNet Bridge – Ten years after receiving the first job websites, Vietnam has witnessed the boom of job websites in recent years together with the Internet boom. Labor experts believe that the presence of the job websites in Vietnam has helped businesses seek the personnel suitable to them over the last 10 years. In the past, businesses had to allocate big budgets and spend much time on the recruitment by posting job vacancy information on print newspapers. Meanwhile, they nowadays can easily find suitable personnel through online labor market. With the new recruitment model, both the employers and employees can save money and time to have their works done. Hunter Arnold, President of CarreerBuilder Asia-Pacific, has noted that with the high percentage of Vietnamese Internet users – 33 percent – Vietnam has become an attractive online recruitment market. Having realized the great potentials of the Vietnamese labor market, a lot of multi-national human source solution groups have flocked to Vietnam, thus heating up the market and making it more competitive. With the number of businesses, both Vietnamese and foreign invested, increasing rapidly, the demand for high quality personnel has also increased sharply. And this gives the opportunities to job solution service providers to do their business in Vietnam. A report of the HCM City Human Resource Center showed that the high quality labor market would develop strongly in the next five years, with high qualified officers becoming the aiming points of multi-national groups. However, the market has warmed up since the beginning of the year already. The public was stirred up in February 2013 with the news that VON JSC, which ran the two job websites KiemViec.com and HRVietnam.com, merged into the US CareerBuilder. KiemViec.com was known as the job website which had the second biggest revenue in Vietnam and the highest number of registered members. CareerBuilder is the big guy which has been present in 62 markets worldwide with the network of over 10,000 websites and the association with broadband information portals such as MSN and AOL. The US service provider is believed to have the inner strength powerful enough to make a breakthrough in the Vietnamese market. In April 2013, Navigos, the owner of the biggest job website in Vietnam, reportedly sold stakes to a Japanese investor. en-Japan, which specializes in providing online job services in Japan, has confirmed the investment deal in Navigos Group, which is running two websites VietnamWorks and Navigos Search. The two sides declined to reveal the information about the value of the deal. However, a source said the deal was worth $22 million, or VND460 billion. Carlton Pringle, Managing Director of Navigos Group, said he has every reason to put a high hope on the group’s business in Vietnam, the large market with 90 million people and the young population aged 28 on average. The demand for high quality personnel in Vietnam has increased significantly since businesses are undergoing their restructure process. Dau tu has quoted its sources as saying that 18 big commercial banks have changed their key personnel since 2012, while more and more changes with the high quality staff of the banks would be made in the time to come when the banks’ restructure reaches the hide tide. Compiled by Thu Uyen