Vietnam’s job market is tougher than ever. Companies are facing skill shortages, high employee turnover, and regional hiring challenges, so they need to find new ways to attract and retain top talent. Recruiting is no longer just about posting job ads. It’s now focused on building a lasting advantage by finding and keeping the right talent. This guide covers 20 effective recruiting strategies for Vietnam, including finding hidden talent, building your employer brand, and using data and skills-based hiring. If you’re an HR leader, founder, or executive, these tips will help you hire more reliably, lower your hiring risks, and grow your team with confidence.
TL;DR
- The Most Effective Recruiting Strategies in Vietnam (Overview):
- Employee referral programs
- Employer branding & EVP
Skills-based recruitment - Proactive sourcing & talent pipeline
- Data-driven hiring decisions
- Strong candidate experience
- The biggest mistake is relying too much on job postings instead of building a diverse talent pipeline.
- The best approach is to combine recruitment marketing, data-driven decisions, and a positive candidate experience to attract top talent.
What Are Recruiting Strategies?
Recruiting strategies are long-term plans that help organizations attract, engage, evaluate, and hire the right people efficiently and consistently. These strategies link hiring decisions to business growth, risk management, and workforce stability.
Recruiting strategies vs. hiring tactics
- Recruiting strategies help you decide who you need, where to find them, and how to connect with them over time.
- Hiring tactics are single actions, such as posting a job, conducting interviews, or offering referral bonuses.
Traditional Recruiting vs. Modern Recruiting
| Aspect | Traditional Recruiting | Modern Recruiting |
| Channels | Job boards | Multi-channel ecosystems |
| Mindset | Reactive | Proactive & strategic |
| Candidate role | Transactional | Experience-driven |
| Data usage | Limited | Data-led decisions |
Why Recruiting Strategies Matter More Than Ever in Vietnam
Vietnam’s labor market has entered a new phase:
- Talent shortages persist across IT, engineering, sales, and leadership roles.
- High job-hopping and attrition increase replacement costs and disrupt operations.
- Remote and cross-border hiring give top candidates more choices—and leverage.
- Bad hires are expensive, affecting productivity, morale, and compliance.
Moreover, according to regional hiring reports, Vietnam continues to face talent shortages in IT, engineering, and senior management, while voluntary attrition remains among the highest in Southeast Asia.
For executives, this means recruitment should be seen as a strategic skill, not just an administrative task.
Need help building a scalable recruitment engine in Vietnam? Schedule a free consultation with our expert for your best fit.
Read more: Vietnam Market Entry – Recruitment Guide: Hiring, Compliance & Cost Insights for Businesses
Sourcing & Talent Access Recruiting Strategies
In Vietnam’s increasingly competitive labor market, the biggest hiring challenge is no longer a lack of applicants, it is limited access to the right talent at the right time. Many organizations focus their efforts on active job seekers, yet this group represents only a small portion of the available workforce. The most valuable talent often sits outside traditional hiring funnels, waiting to be discovered through more intentional and strategic sourcing approaches.
A strong sourcing strategy shifts recruitment from a reactive activity into a continuous talent access function. Instead of searching only when vacancies arise, companies build visibility, relationships, and pipelines that support both immediate hiring needs and future growth.
Tap into the hidden workforce
Across Vietnam, a significant portion of skilled professionals are open to new opportunities but are not actively applying for jobs. These include freelancers seeking stability, professionals returning from overseas assignments, and candidates transitioning between industries or roles.
Organizations that successfully tap into this hidden workforce gain access to talent that competitors often overlook. This requires moving beyond job postings and investing time in understanding career motivations, transferable skills, and long-term potential. By doing so, recruitment becomes less about filling gaps quickly and more about unlocking underutilized capability within the market
Step up your sourcing game
If you only use job boards, you limit your reach and the quality of candidates. Proactive sourcing helps companies build talent pipelines before they need them. Tools like LinkedIn, industry groups, and internal databases let recruiters connect with candidates early and often.
In practice, this involves mapping out key roles, identifying target candidates, and keeping in touch with them over time. Companies that improve their sourcing are better prepared when hiring needs increase, which helps reduce time-to-hire and reliance on last-minute recruiting.
Engage with passive candidates
Passive candidates usually ignore urgent or generic job messages. They are more likely to respond to relevant, credible, and insightful communication. For them, recruitment starts with a conversation, not a sales pitch. To engage effectively, share market insights, talk about long-term career growth, and learn about each person’s goals before discussing specific jobs. In Vietnam, where relationships matter, this approach builds trust and shows the employer as a career partner, not just another recruiter.
Re-engage past candidates & alumni networks
Many organizations overlook the value of candidates they have already met. “Silver-medalist” candidates, who made it to the final stages but were not chosen, and former employees already know the company’s culture, expectations, and work style.
Reconnecting with these groups lowers hiring risks and speeds up decisions. Alumni networks can be strong sources of talent if managed well. Rather than seeing past candidates as closed cases, smart organizations treat them as long-term assets.
Leverage contingent and contract workers
In fast-paced fields like technology and shared services, permanent hires are not always the best option. Contract and temporary workers offer flexibility, speed, and specialized skills without a long-term commitment.
When used well, this approach lets companies respond quickly to project needs, try out new skills, and manage workforce risks. Over time, top contractors may become permanent employees, making the talent pipeline even stronger.
In Vietnam, channels like LinkedIn, Facebook groups, alumni networks, and industry meetups are key to reaching more talent.
Sourcing methods differ by industry. Tech companies use developer communities, manufacturers depend on referrals and supplier networks, and shared service centers often hire from alumni and internal candidates.
To know more about internal and external sourcing, you can read more on: 13 Recruitment Methods Every Employer Should Know
Employer Branding as a Core of Recruiting Strategies
In Vietnam’s competitive job market, recruitment starts long before someone applies. Early impressions are shaped by stories, signals, and experiences that influence how people see your company. That’s why employer branding and recruitment marketing are so important.
A strong employer brand does more than get noticed. It sets clear expectations, builds trust, and attracts the right people. When done well, it makes hiring smoother and shows the company is a place where people can grow and stay.
Work on your employer branding
Employer branding shapes how candidates see your leadership, culture, and long-term opportunities. It helps top talent answer the key question: “What will my future look like here?”
Companies with a clear and trustworthy employer brand attract candidates who fit both the job and the company’s values. Weak or inconsistent branding means companies have to compete on salary, which raises costs and turnover.
In Vietnam, where reputation and trust are important, employer branding is a key asset that helps with both current hiring and future workforce stability.
Improve your company’s online & offline presence
Every time a candidate interacts with your company, it sends a message. Career pages, LinkedIn posts, recruiter emails, the office environment, and interview manners all shape how candidates see your organization.
A professional, consistent presence shows candidates that your company is well-managed and well-prepared. But outdated career pages, unclear messages, or messy interviews can create doubt and quietly turn away good candidates.
Improving your online and offline presence makes sure candidates experience your employer brand, not just hear about it.
Use employee case studies or success stories
In Vietnam, where relationships matter, people trust real stories more than polished marketing. Employee stories about growth, learning, and contribution make the company feel real and the employer brand believable.
These stories help candidates picture themselves at your company. They show how careers grow, how leaders support employees, and how teams work together. Real stories build trust much better than generic claims about culture or opportunity.
Develop a recruitment marketing strategy
Recruitment marketing uses marketing techniques to attract and hire talent. Instead of sending the same message to everyone, companies define candidate types, tailor their messages, and choose the best channels for each.
For example, messages that attract senior leaders are different from those that appeal to early-career professionals. By matching messages to each group’s needs, companies achieve better engagement and fewer mismatches in applications.
With a structured recruitment marketing strategy, companies can build a steady flow of good candidates for both current and future hiring needs.
Optimize job listings for searchability
Even a strong employer brand can fail if job listings are hard to find or confusing to navigate. Clear job titles, using the right language, and well-structured descriptions help the right candidates find your jobs.
Well-written job listings reduce confusion, attract better applicants, and improve the candidate experience from the start.
Common employer branding mistakes in Vietnam are using generic messages, unclear career paths, and inconsistent communication during hiring. These issues reduce trust and hurt hiring results.
Technology & Data-Driven Recruiting Strategies
As companies grow, relying on gut feeling is not enough for hiring decisions. Technology and data help spot problems, measure what works, and plan for the future with confidence.
When used well, these tools turn recruitment from a reactive process into a proactive, results-driven function.
In addition, AI has impacted the job market in Vietnam. Summarizing these insights for the Vietnam market these days, please read: AI Impact on the Job Market in Vietnam: How AI is Changing Jobs, Employment, and Workforce Structure
Use AI to enhance sourcing & screening
AI now plays a key role in modern recruitment, especially when hiring in large numbers or for hard-to-find skills. It can help screen resumes, schedule interviews, and spot patterns that people might miss.
However, AI should support human decision-making, not replace it. The best companies use AI to handle admin tasks and provide insights, so recruiters and managers can focus on evaluating candidates and building relationships.
Use recruitment data to make better decisions
Recruitment data shows what actually works. By tracking results across channels, roles, and time, companies can allocate resources more effectively and avoid wasted effort.
Metrics like time-to-hire, source quality, and offer acceptance rates help leaders make decisions based on facts, not guesses. This improves hiring results and helps control costs and risks.
Implement skills-based recruitment
Skills-based recruitment focuses on what candidates can do, not just their job titles or years of experience. This is especially useful for fast-changing roles where traditional career paths don’t fit.
By looking for transferable skills and widening the talent pool, companies can boost diversity, adaptability, and long-term success.
What AI should and should not do in recruiting:
- Should: reduce manual workload, surface insights, improve speed and consistency.
- Should not: make final hiring decisions or replace human evaluation and context.
Hiring Process & Candidate Experience Strategies
Even strong sourcing and branding efforts can fail if the hiring process itself creates friction. In competitive markets, candidate experience often determines who accepts an offer and who walks away.
Elevate the candidate experience
Clear communication, respectful interviews, and timely feedback signal professionalism and care. These elements build trust and significantly increase offer acceptance rates.
Candidates may not always remember what was asked in an interview, but they will remember how they were treated.
Improve your interview process
Structured recruitment processes reduce bias, align stakeholders, and lead to more consistent hiring decisions. Clear evaluation criteria help teams focus on what truly matters for performance.
Strengthen recruiter–hiring manager collaboration
Misalignment between recruiters and hiring managers is a common source of delay and mis-hires. Early agreement on role requirements, timelines, and decision authority ensures smoother execution and better outcomes.
Integrate recruitment and onboarding
Recruitment doesn’t stop when a candidate accepts an offer. Good onboarding helps new hires become productive faster, stay engaged, and remain with the company longer.
Internal & Early-Career Talent Strategies
Prioritize internal mobility & talent access
Sustainable growth relies not just on hiring from outside, but also on how well a company develops and moves its current and future talent.
Launch (virtual) campus recruitment activities
Early-career hiring builds long-term talent pipelines. Internships, graduate programs, and virtual engagement help organizations shape future talent while strengthening employer brand visibility.
Design an effective employee referral program
Employee referrals often lead to better hires because they use trust and shared networks. To keep referrals working, offer clear rewards and make the process simple.
How to Build a Winning Recruiting Strategy (Step-by-Step)
It’s easy to come up with recruitment ideas, but making them work in a real company with time limits, tight budgets, and other priorities is where most strategies fail.
Many companies spend on new tools, job boards, or branding, but still struggle to hire the right people on time. The problem is usually not effort, but a lack of a clear, structured plan that links recruiting to real business needs.
The following steps can help turn good recruiting ideas into consistent, repeatable hiring results.
Read more: Strategic Workforce and Talent Planning: Guidelines for business needs
Step 1. Clarify hiring goals & talent gaps
Before picking a recruiting strategy, leaders need to clearly understand their current and future workforce needs. Workforce and talent planning helps align hiring priorities with business growth, expansion, and skill gaps.
This goes beyond listing open roles. It means understanding:
- Which positions are critical for business growth
- Which skills will have the biggest impact in the next 6–12 months?
- What type of people will realistically succeed in your culture and environment?
If companies skip this step, recruiting becomes reactive. Teams rush to fill jobs based on urgency, not importance, which often leads to bad hires and high turnover.
Kendra Janevski, Managing Director of Human Resources at Vault Consulting, suggests a practical way to create focus: identify which two of three priorities matter most for each role – speed, cost, or quality.
“For example, if the priority is hiring the highest-quality candidates as quickly as possible, the recruiting strategy may require higher investment, such as executive search, deeper assessments, and more resources to move candidates through the process. Once you know which roles and skills matter most, you need to see where that talent is and how tough the market is. Talent mapping helps by showing talent availability, what competitors are doing, and the best ways to find candidates before jobs are posted.
Step 2. Audit current recruitment channels & data
After setting clear hiring needs, the next step is to honestly review how your company hires now.
Many companies keep using the same hiring channels just because it’s what they’ve always done. But markets and talent change, so what worked before may not work now.
A recruitment audit helps answer questions such as:
- Where do our best hires actually come from?
- Which channels produce volume, but not quality?
- Where do candidates drop off in the hiring process?
Looking at recruitment data often shows a bigger problem: many companies don’t have a steady talent pipeline. Instead of building relationships with candidates over time, they scramble to find people when jobs open up.
This step replaces guesses with real data, setting the stage for better decisions.
Step 3. Prioritize strategies with the highest ROI
Once you see the gaps and problems, it’s tempting to try to fix everything at once. But this often leads to scattered efforts and little progress.
Top companies do the opposite. They focus on a few recruiting strategies that give the best results for their situation.
For example:
- If speed is the biggest challenge, simplifying interviews and pre-building talent pools may have the highest impact.
- If quality is inconsistent, structured interviews and skills-based assessments may be the priority.
- If cost is rising, strengthening referrals or internal mobility could deliver faster wins.
By setting priorities, recruiting supports business goals instead of becoming a burden.
Step 4. Align recruiters & hiring managers
Even the best recruiting strategy won’t work if recruiters and hiring managers aren’t on the same page.
Misalignment often shows up as:
- Changing requirements mid-process
- Delayed feedback
- Conflicting views on what “good” looks like
Successful companies spend time upfront to agree on role expectations, decision criteria, timelines, and responsibilities. This shared understanding makes hiring smoother, faster, and better for candidates.
When recruiters and hiring managers work as partners, not in separate silos, hiring becomes faster, clearer, and more predictable.
Step 5. Collect candidate feedback & iterate
Candidates go through your recruitment process long before they join your company or decide to leave.
By actively collecting feedback, organizations gain valuable insight into:
- Where communication breaks down
- Which steps feel unnecessary or unclear
- How the employer brand is perceived in practice
This feedback loop makes recruitment a learning process. Small, ongoing improvements add up over time, making hiring better and strengthening your employer reputation.
Step 6. Standardize and scale
The last step is when recruiting strategies fully develop.
Once you find what works, document it, standardize it, and use it across all teams and roles. This way, you don’t rely on individual recruiters and keep things consistent as the company grows.
Standardizing doesn’t mean being rigid. It gives you a solid base, so you can be flexible where needed while keeping quality and control.
Scaling team in Vietnam with Sunbytes Transform – Secure – Accelerate model
Growing a team in Vietnam isn’t just about hiring quickly. It’s about building teams that can deliver, grow safely, and keep performing well. Many companies struggle when hiring is not linked to real business needs.
Sunbytes is a Dutch technology company headquartered in the Netherlands, with a delivery hub in Vietnam. For over 14 years, we’ve helped international organizations accelerate workforce growth by building delivery-ready teams, not just adding headcount.
Digital Transformation – Hire with clarity, not guesswork
Since we handle digital products from start to finish, we know what high-performing engineering and product teams need. This means clearer job roles, better candidate matches, and faster onboarding.
Security Solutions – Scale without increasing risk
Our Secure by Design approach helps teams grow with clear standards, strong security awareness, and compliance, which reduces risks as you scale.
Accelerate Workforce Solutions – Achieve performance faster
With Sunbytes, recruitment and delivery are connected. You get teams that fit your plans, tools, and work style, leading to reliable hiring and steady growth.
With Sunbytes, you don’t just hire in Vietnam – you build a team that’s ready to perform from day one.
Struggling to scale your team in Vietnam?
Talk to our experts to help you build, secure, and grow high-performing teams with reliable hiring results.
Let’s start with Sunbytes
Let us know your requirements for the team and we will contact you right away.
FAQs
The best recruiting strategies in Vietnam combine employee referrals, strong employer branding, and skills-based hiring.
Referrals use trusted networks and speed up hiring. Employer branding helps companies stand out in a competitive market. Skills-based hiring makes sure businesses focus on real skills, not just job titles, which is important in a market with uneven skill levels.
Foreign manufacturers do well when they focus on mapping local talent, hiring through referrals, and ensuring their recruitment complies with local rules. Knowing the local labor market, matching jobs to local skills, and working with partners who understand Vietnamese labor laws lowers hiring risks and improves retention, especially for plant, engineering, and supervisor roles.
A great way to find top sales talent is through community-based sourcing. This means connecting with sales professionals at industry events, in specialized LinkedIn groups, and through referral programs with performance incentives. Top salespeople may not be actively looking for jobs, but they respond well to recommendations from peers and clear information about earning potential.
A winning recruiting strategy typically follows six core steps:
- Clarify hiring goals and talent gaps
- Audit existing recruitment channels and data
- Prioritize strategies with the highest ROI
- Align recruiters and hiring managers
- Collect candidate feedback and iterate
- Standardize and scale execution
This structured approach helps organizations move from reactive hiring to predictable, scalable talent growth.
