Taipei, June 30 (CNA) The hiring outlook for the third quarter improved as the local economy continues on a slow path to recovery, a survey released by an online job bank showed Friday.
The survey conducted by the 1111 Job Bank found that 56.4 percent of polled employers said they plan to expand their workforces in the July-September period, up 1.1 percentage points from a quarter earlier and up 2.2 percentage points from the same period of last year.
Employers in the information technology and financial sectors appeared the most willing to recruit newcomers in the upcoming quarter, according to the job bank's analysis of the survey's results.
Some 60.3 percent of the employers who intend to hire in the third quarter said they needed more people to make up for an existing manpower shortage, 25.40 percent said the hiring was part of a regular recruiting campaign, and 10.1 percent said they needed more people because their business was expanding.
The job bank said that with Taiwan's unemployment rate falling to a two-year low of 3.66 percent in May, the job openings posted on its website in June rose almost 10,000 from a month earlier to 400,000.
In terms of pay levels, employers who wanted to hire in the third quarter were offering average compensation of NT$29,074 (US$956) per month, up NT$1,835 from a year earlier, the survey found.
The figure was the highest for a third quarter since the July-September period of 2013, when the average monthly wage offered hit NT$30,137, the job bank said.
The survey found that the biggest manpower needs in the third quarter will be in the engineering, research and development, manufacturing and marketing/trading fields, the job bank added.
In terms of hiring new graduates, 66 percent of those enterprises that have hiring plans said they are willing to recruit new graduates and were planning to allocate an average of 20 percent of their job openings to first-time job-seekers, the survey found.
With most economic think tanks having raised their forecasts for Taiwan's economic growth for 2017 to more than 2 percent, 25 percent of the survey's respondents said they are upbeat about their business outlook, while 18.5 percent were downbeat, the survey found.
The survey was conducted from June 11-27 and collected 670 valid questionnaires, the job bank said.
