Qualified local staff hard to find as mainland needs grow

Good corporate strategies make all the difference in finding and keeping the right employees

Hong Kong's resurgent economy combined with growing demand for talent on the mainland was making it difficult for companies to find qualified staff, human resources analysts said yesterday.

An increasing number of mainland companies are willing to offer international standard salaries to lure professionals from Hong Kong, according to Andrew Bell, an executive at HR firm Hewitt Associates.

'It's tough to get and keep the people you need, because everybody needs more people,' Mr Bell said at a seminar on recruiting and retaining staff, organised by the South China Morning Post in association with Hewitt.

When the economy was weak, many companies either pared staff counts or kept them static. Attracting talent during the lean years posed little difficulty.

As a result, many firms now lack the corporate strategies required to draw and keep the kind of staff they need. With business bustling again, companies are scrambling to use such strategies.

One Hong Kong firm that has succeeded is Ocean Park. During the seminar, chief executive Tom Mehmann outlined his company's human resources strategy to avoid losing staff to Disney, which is aggressively building its workforce before its launch in September this year.