Job hunting in Taiwan — A personal insight from a Taiwanese millennial

Finding a job in Taiwan is not too hard, but in terms of a good one, it is.

Taiwan is famous for its technology, chips, semiconductors, and OEM manufacturing, you name it, even your iPhone is assembled by Taiwanese companies.

Sadly, the average wage is quite under the line in Taiwan, well, it’s not a top secret, and maybe because of the nature of Taiwanese people, most laborers are diligent and obedient than many other countries’; that means, employers can pay lower salaries and get the most use of the employees, what a bargain! And what’s more, Taiwan is full of technology talents. I’d boldly say hiring a Taiwanese engineer is one of the best deals. However, the biggest weakness of those workers is the short of international vision, I’ve heard too many times that lots of my talented friends are limited by their language skills; Taiwan is a bit unlike other well-developed Asia countries, for some reason, though it’s improving, it doesn’t have enough global diversity in the society.

Enough complaints, let’s dive into the job hunting part. In Taiwan, many of the students would have an internship during their third-year to final-year of university, after graduation, they start looking for their first full-time job. 104, 1111, and 518 are the famous job-searching websites, (all of their names are numbers, very interesting) for most of the small-medium sized companies or corporations, they pay some fees for those websites to advertise job listings. Also worth noting, as I have applied for many companies, either foreign or domestic ones, headhunting is not very popular in Taiwan, there are few dispatch work agencies that you might have heard of, but I rarely see people do headhunting compared to other countries, I’m by no means an expert in this field, but my assumption is Taiwan is geologically small, business owners can easily reach out to the potential candidates, and oftentimes, those companies would rather have their own HRs.

Recently, there are also some fast-growing startups in the job searching canvas, for example, CakeResume, Yourator, Meet.jobs, those are much more targeting on younger generations, either young talents or startups, and have a broader point of view about globalization and working styles, for instance, it’s more likely to find remote options on those emerging websites rather than on 104.

So far is just my personal insight as a millennial in Taiwan, like many others, struggling and keep moving toward the career goal, and hoping to essentially fulfill the deepest inner needs of the meaning of work. There is still a lot of unfair hierarchy in terms of the workforce. As younger workers we might lack experience, but we should learn how to defend our rights; pursuing a job is not begging, we provide our time and skills, it is our reseponsibility to enhance the value and we deserve adequate compensation in return, to make a better balance for the workplace and society. We’re trying, and we never stop.