Employers are increasingly looking at working skills and job-hopping probability rather than “competitive salary requirements” when hiring new graduates, according to a survey by Jobstreet.com reported in HR in Asia.

 The market has both demand and supply for new young graduates according to Nguyen Xuan Trinh, Marketing Director for Jobstreet Vietnam. Q3 2015 has begun with thriving signs in the economy with many more Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) projects. The country has 17,499 FDI projects and 448,148 operating companies. While the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training believes, 425,000 people would graduate during the 2014-15 academic year.

The Jobstreet survey showed that 65% of the companies had a high demand for recruitment in the second half of this year, especially in trading, information technology, and engineering. At least 10% of recruitment demand is for new graduates. The fields with the highest demand for new graduates are information technology, engineering and customer care.

The biggest problems of the workforce were bad skills and inexperience, especially for new graduates, the survey showed. At least 50% of the new graduates have jobs not related to their main study at university; 17% could not find a relevant job, and 45% said that they had taken a temporary job while waiting for a relevant one.

Though 54% of new graduates said they have no problems with their jobs being unrelated to their main study, 46% said they had to spend a lot of time to learn new skills and improve their knowledge of the job.

Enhancing the quality of the young workforce is not only the task of the education sector but also the recruitment sector, Angie SW Phang, general director of Jobstreet Vietnam, said. One of the biggest challenges is bringing relevant and appropriate jobs to the workforce, she added.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, Vietnam has a population of 90.5 million. At least 52.34 million people out of 69.2 million of working age have jobs. However, 178,000 people with bachelor’s or master’s degrees are unemployed.

Compared with other countries in the region, the salary range Vietnamese employers offer to new graduates is VND 2 million – VND 5 million (USD 90 – USD 226) a month, accounting for one-seventh of the salary for new graduates in Malaysia (VND 14.3 - VND16 million or USD 647 – USD 724). Vietnam ranks third in the region based on the rate of opportunity for new graduates, after Indonesia and Singapore.

Recruiters in Singapore and Malaysia care the most about salary demand, while Vietnam enterprises put working skills at the top, as 84% care about workforce quality and only 14% about salary costs. Vietnamese enterprises said that new graduates not only lack experience but also require time to train skills, which causes enterprises to seek experienced candidates. Other employers think new graduates may be unfaithful, and job hop.

Surveys conducted by Jobstreet in the region showed that 26-29% of employees were “faithful” to the first job. The rate was 12% in Singapore. When asked why they did not want to hire new graduates, 67% of enterprises in Vietnam blamed anxiety about ability and 33% blamed the high rate of job hopping. Malaysians cited bad attitudes, communication skills, and high salary requirements as risks of hiring new graduates.

In the region, Vietnam ranked fourth out of five countries on English language skills. Only 5% of Vietnamese new graduates were confident about their English, and 27% said they were weak in overall English skills. “Poor English skills are now a big disadvantage of the Vietnamese workforce, causing them to lose competitiveness in the global market,” Phang said.