Intel recruiters set sights on the best and brightest

Diplomas in hand, many thousands of students are spilling out of Vietnam’s universities and junior colleges. Business is on the prowl for talent. One company that’s spending money like water to corral talent is Intel.

From June 25 to July 3, the American IT giant coordinated with RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) to seek 20 gifted grads of polytechnic universities across the country. Intel’s offering billion dong scholarships for training at the HCM City branch of the Australian university. The winners will study electronics and computing for three years before taking jobs as engineers at Intel’s huge new chip assembly and verification plant near the southern metropolis.

On June 24, Intel announced awards to 22 students from universities in Hanoi, Da Nang and HCM City to fund their study in the US, and granted 83 scholarships to students of polytechnic universities to help them improve English skills. The total value of the Intel scholarships is 34 billion dong.

Ho Uyen, Public Relations Director of Intel Vietnam, explains that Intel, as the first firm to recruit in the high tech sphere here, has had to invent its own approach to training its labour force. “We recruit and will train people for posts that the human resource firms don’t know much about,” Uyen said.

Every scholarship recipient must commit to work for Intel at least for three years after they finish their training courses. When Intel’s factory is fully operational, it will need about 2500 engineers.

Other foreign firms are spending a lot of money on recruitment, too. Take Ford Vietnam, for example. At a workshop in Hanoi, Nguyen Huyen Chi, the American company’s Personnel Director, said that every year, Ford staff go directly to universities to organise recruitment seasons. The students who are selected with be enrolled in Ford’s own training courses to help their adjustment to the job.

Less well-endowed companies also are hunting for manpower at this moment by participating in recruitment festivals or job fairs organized right at universities.

Pham Tu Phuong, a director of Tien Phong Bank, says that the bank now has a programme for interns that enables students to work for the bank as candidate officers. Tran Huong Giang, Human Resources Manager of GP Bank, says GP has a programme called ‘future bankers’ that selects second year students from universities who may qualify to work for the bank when they have their diplomas.

Tags: Intel Vietnam, Vietnam infotech