Market Update Q3 2019 - Pinpoint Asia

A lot has been happening in Hong Kong this past quarter. Here is an update on tech hiring:

Being in the Recruitment space, one question we continue to receive is whether companies are still hiring in Hong Kong given our political situation at the moment. This is what we see:
1. So far, we have seen minimal impact on hiring in the tech space. This is because most of our clients are MNCs and the situation in Hong Kong is not serious enough for them to take extreme measures to relocate their business elsewhere.
2. We have seen an infrequent interruption to our business – interviews getting rescheduled due to transportation issues caused by strikes or clashes on the streets. However, these interviews end up being rescheduled and hiring has continued to happen.
3. Some of our local banking clients are adopting a “wait and see” approach but the vast majority of them have pre-approved budgets for 2019 and are proceeding with hiring.
4. Overseas candidates are more cautions about looking at jobs in Hong Kong given the seriousness of what they see on the news.

Given we are entering Q4, hiring is slowing down at Investment Banks as candidates usually wait for bonuses to be paid out around February. Mainland China-based financial conglomerates have been active in hiring. The main demand we see is for Java Developers / DevOps specialists.
Virtual Banks have been hiring various kinds of technologists – Java Developers / DevOps / BAs / Project Managers. It will be exciting to see the products being rolled out next year.
We have heard that Insurance Firms could be losing out on customers as there are fewer mainland visitors buying insurance policies. However, so far, we have not seen any impact of this on IT hiring which continues to be active.
Security and Risk are still some of the major areas where there is a strong demand for talent, especially with the new incoming Virtual Banks. We are noticing an increasing demand for talent in the first level (security/network/application) and second level (IT Risk) space.

Despite the protests, the start-up scene in Hong Kong has been quite active and continues to hire strong tech talent. We have received requests from companies looking mainly for mobile developers / full stack developers / DevOps.
We participated in the Microsoft Hong Kong Summit and Google Cloud Summit in early September. Both Summits have been promoting the easy usage and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies within their respective Cloud platforms. We saw some very interesting use cases demonstrated by Microsoft on Voice Recognition and RPA (Robotic Process Automation).

Hope you found this information useful. Please do contact us should you need more information.