VNExpress-Nov 2
Vietnamese recruitment firms that once had seven or eight applicants for every Japan job order now send staff into villages and still find it hard to fill their quotas. Recruiters blame a weaker yen and more jobs at home, and many workers are turning to other markets, especially Taiwan, where the wait to depart is shorter. For almost a year, Pham Van Trong, human resources manager at a company that supplies workers to Japan and Taiwan, has traveled to rural and mountainous northern Vietnam twice a month to recruit young people for jobs abroad. Based in An Khanh, Hanoi, the company has sent workers to Japan for more than 10 years in food processing, mechanical engineering, automobiles, machine building, seafood and agriculture, and to Taiwan for electronics work. It asks local Women’s Union and Youth Union officials to help find candidates, but they turn up only about 10% of the workers it needs. “The villages are empty of young people because they’ve moved to the big cities to work in services, drive for ride-hailing apps or take factory jobs. Visit their homes and you only find old people and small children,” he said. Japan is one of Vietnam’s three traditional labor markets. Vietnamese were the largest group of foreign workers there as of October 2025, according to Japan’s labor ministry. At the end of June, 176,865 Vietnamese were in Japan as technical interns, more than any other nationality, and another 176,915 as specified skilled workers, Immigration Services Agency figures show. Japan took nearly 28,500 Vietnamese workers in the first half of this year, the most of any market but down from 35,240 a year earlier, Vietnam’s Ministry of Home Affairs data show. By the end of August, Taiwan had pulled ahead, 39,890 to 35,837. Trong’s company takes more than 600 job orders a year from Japanese partners on average, but filling them has become very difficult, with its supply of candidates down about 60% from before.
A decade ago, seven or eight applicants competed for each order. Now there are two per position, or the company accepts anyone who turns up. Read more at:
