7 guerilla hiring strategies for startups in Southeast Asia

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How do you compete for top tier staff when going up against established companies in Southeast Asia? Without the brand, the budget and the bankroll, what are your options?

Based on my own experience of hiring talent for my company in the region over the last 10 years, I’ve put together some guerilla tactics that you can use for your own recruiting efforts, regardless of which stage your company is in.

1. Ask your university teacher friends

There’s no shortage of foreigners teaching in a lot of Asian nations. You have probably met them at events, in bars or at meetups. Have you ever thought of not only what a great network these guys have, but how amazing their insights are?

They not only know countless potential graduates before they even hit the job market, they also know which ones are the top performers. Ask them to pass on your job offers to their top students. Their endorsement will carry a lot of weight and their reach and opinion beats any headhunter a larger corporation might employ.

2. Pay a recruitment commission to your staff

Once you have a small team together, you should motivate them to recruit their friends and former coworkers. The prime motivation should be that they get to work together with people who share their passion, drive and commitment. Of course you can just ask them to pass along the job ad.

However, offering a reward for anyone recruited who passes probation is a great way to not only incentivize them to really spread the word, but also shows your appreciation for their efforts. I usually make it the equivalent of a week’s salary – not so much that people do anything to get it, but substantial enough to warrant a posting to their Facebook or Twitter account.

3. Present relevant topic at Barcamp

Cambodia, Myanmar and several other Southeast Asian countries have regular Barcamps taking place. These are ‘unconferences’ where tech-interested people gather to share and listen to geeky topics, with a huge focus on programming.

These are the women and men who use their free time to learn more about skills that are not only rare, but also very valuable to your own company. Go to one of them, present a topic that’s related to the field you’re recruiting for. Listeners who are curious can be potential candidates for your opening.

4. Learn to speak the local language

Many foreign founders feel their calendar is already full to the brim, leaving little space to learn the local language beyond taxi driver instructions. If that’s you, maybe this will make you reconsider: the pool of talent you can recruit in a country with low English proficiency increases exponentially once you no longer have ‘fluent English’ as a requirement.

Thailand is a prime example of this. Due to the Thai education system splitting students between a technical track and a language track before they even leave high school, it can be quite a challenge to find engineers with great English skills.

So being able to speak the local language means you can work with non-English speaking, technical staff. Unlike their English-fluent counterparts, they are largely left alone by headhunters working for multinationals and are thus much easier to retain.

5. Offer work permits to foreign applicants

If you’re located in a popular vacation destination like Thailand and work in the software industry, you have access to an additional, very different kind of labor pool: tech talent looking to live and work abroad. Due to the bureaucracy, investment requirements and regulations, comparatively few companies are offering legitimate work permits to foreign specialists.

This means that you can differentiate your company by going the extra mile in creating positions and handling the permit process for them. I had leading developers in major open source projects apply at my company that I would have no chance of ever attracting with the conditions I could afford to offer in more traditional locations like Germany or the United States.

6. Empower your staff

7. Settle in a less central area of town

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