2017 Asia Salary Trends: Are You Paying Too Much?

After the release of Links International’s 2017 Asia Salary Snapshot, our comprehensive salary guide for professionals in Asia, we hosted an event with The British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, entitled 2017 Asia Salary Trends: Are You Paying Too Much?

We had a great turn out, with over 30 attendees from a wide range of industries, including legal, insurance, tourism, retail, FinTech, real estate, tech start-ups, relocation and consulting, both from large multi-national corporations and small to medium enterprises, who were all curious to see what the benchmark salaries in Hong Kong were for different industries.

The event was hosted by the Group Managing Director of Links, Nick Lambe. Nick kicked the event off with an informal true or false quiz, based on a variety of HR trends we have seen in Asia. For example, he made a statement such as,

“More candidates said they were likely to change jobs in 2017 than they did in 2016”

The attendees were then asked to hold up a true or false card based on their opinion of the job market in Hong Kong.

The likeliness candidates will be changing jobs in the next six months.

This sparked an interesting discussion about which jobs are most in demand in Hong Kong and what sort of talent acquisition and employee engagement strategies employers are using to hire and retain talent in 2017.

One of the most interesting points of discussion was that over half of the employees that responded to our Salary Survey said they were satisfied with their onboarding experience. This led a couple of the event’s attendees to admit that they perhaps needed to make improvements to their own onboarding experience in order to improve their employee engagement!

Candidates' satisfaction with their onboarding experience in their current company.

Following the quiz, Nick gave a brief market review of the four key sectors that Links International’s recruitment teams cover, namely: Banking and Financial ServicesSales and MarketingHuman Resources and Administrationand Temporary and Contract. For each of these markets, Nick touched on how each market has fared over the past 12 months in terms of recruitment, which jobs are most in demand, what the expected salaries are for 2017, and what sort of bonuses can be expected.

The discussion closed with a market comparison between MNCs and SMEs, followed by a look at how these HR and hiring trends in Asia will affect the talent pool in the market.

Are you interested to know if you’re paying the right salary in Hong Kong? Or if you are earning close to the benchmark salary for banking and financial services, for example? Click the image below to download our 2017 Asia Salary Snapshot.

links-international-2017-asia-salary-snapshot-salary-guide

If you are looking to hire top quality talent to grow your business this year, please do not hesitate to contact us.