RE: The establishment of a system whereby prospective employers can obtain objective details on an applicant
Are you talking about hiring Taiwanese, or foreigners?
Primarily I am speaking of hiring Taiwanese, and secondarily of hiring US citizens or foreigners.
(I believe this is quite reasonable. As we know, doctors in Taiwan can access a local Taiwanese person’s or foreigner’s “medical history,” based on the data IN THE SYSTEM here in Taiwan … )
So … I am thinking that similar procedures could be instituted for “employment history” of persons in Taiwan …
I am interested in how anyone thinks such a system should be organized, supervised, put together, or whatever …
I’m quite surprised that you would bring up such a suggestion.
U.K. certainly has no such system, except such information as provided by the applicant and subsequent checking by prospective employers via such means as references, phonecalls, etc.
I’m afraid that privacy issues would rule out the possibility of such information first of all being collected by an agency other than the IRS or NHI. I suspect much information is already collected under those departments.
Of course, even if there were such a department, privacy issues would restrict the availability of such information, surely.
Come on, Richard. You’d be best to think this through. Even then, suppose someone worked at a particular company doing a particular job, would you expect this “Govt. Dept.” to know how well he/she did the job?
I’m suspecting that this would drive privacy advocates bonkers.
Kenneth
What kind of fairness can you expect from employers???!!! This would give them inordinate powers indeed.
Terrifyingly big-brotherish. Imagine a former boss stamping on your face, forever.
In this country, US citizens are foreigners too. Grrr.
I too think that such a system would be invasive. And I wouldn’t particularly trust a previous employer’s evaluation of someone anyway. Sounds like unnecessary and unhelpful bureaucracy to me.
But finding good help is a problem. Any other solutions?
Make this a government function? From a western perspective that’s :loco:. It would however make a lot of sense from a Taiwanese view. This wouldn’t be that much different from how the/why the HRC system is in place after all.
I feel this ought to be the responsibility of corporate HR departments to follow up on references and employment history. Staffing companies do have procedures for checking employment history as listed in your application and/or resume.
How or why this additional bureaucracy is needed is beyond me? Maybe you could shed a bit of light on that? As Europa pointed out, this sort of system would be open to rampant abuse that would/could unfairly brand an individual and deny the person his/her livelihood.
Becareful what you ask for, you may get it :neutral:
As we know, the Taiwan economic scene is primarily filled with medium or small companies. Now, more and more, you even have one or two person offices, and they may hire one or two staff. Thus, it is often found that (1) previous employers are not available for comment on their former employee’s behavior or work performance, (2) there is inadequate staffing in small companies to check out all these historical details, etc.
Hence, (and I say this based on 30 years observation) … in terms of employing staff members for any length of time —
it often happens that the staff steal all the company records, (including company developed intellectual property, on CDs, discs, etc.), and other hardware and software … and then go into business by undercutting the original employer’s prices … offering freebies, etc. or various other (what I feel are) totally unethical business practices …
The employer wants to develop his/her business, but how can he do that when the staff are continually engaging in these types of improper activities, and there is no social control over all this?
I say this based on 30 years observation, and ladies and gentlemen, in my opinion, in the last five years, the “problem” has gotten worse. (It hasn’t gotten better by any means … )
Thus, the thrust of my original posting is to say –
- How can this problem be successfully dealt with?
- How can we avoid seeming “big brotherish”?
- How can we develop a better method for recruiting staff in Taiwan, and have some insurances in place that they won’t steal all our “software” (i.e. in-house company know-how) and end up putting us out of business?
[quote=“Hartzell”]it often happens that the staff steal all the company records, (including company developed intellectual property, on CDs, discs, etc.), and other hardware and software … and then go into business by undercutting the original employer’s prices … offering freebies, etc. or various other (what I feel are) totally unethical business practices …
Thus, the thrust of my original posting is to say –
- How can this problem be successfully dealt with?
- How can we avoid seeming “big brotherish”?
- How can we develop a better method for recruiting staff in Taiwan, and have some insurances in place that they won’t steal all our “software” (i.e. in-house company know-how) and end up putting us out of business?[/quote]
Enforceable noncompete clauses in contracts work pretty well elsewhere. If someone is contractually prohibited from joining or starting a business in the same field for two years after leaving, and if the ex-employer can sue the ex-employee into oblivion for it, then people won’t push it.
A centralized bureaucracy to check past references isn’t going to solve that problem anyway. How many times does an employee need to swipe company info to set up his own business? I’m guessing “once” is usual, although maybe serial offenders would get caught eventually.
One of the points mentioned is that small and medium companies don’t have resources to followup on checking resources and credentials of new hires. In the US there are companies that will do this work for you, and not only do small and medium companies use them, but large companies as well. Large companies would rather a third party do this both to reduce their HR costs as well as to reduce their own liability if something goes wrong.
As for non-compete clauses, unfortunately many have become over-broad in western countries, and now there is a backlash. In California many types of non-compete clauses have been ruled invalid because they effectively prevented an employee from working in any even vaguely related field.
OK, this is good information.
But, where are these companies (that check background references) getting all their data … ? Especially in the situations where a former company has gone out of business? Is there a central database of some information … perhaps linked to “credit information” or something???
There’s no central database, there’s hundreds of databases containing masses of data about americans, most of them run by private companies. Most credit reports have employment history (you usually have to say who you employer is when you apply for credit), and where you have lived, as well as rough info on your income, besides the usual information of how you managed your credit. There are three main credit report companies, then there are the companies that collect “public information” such as arrests, parking tickets, marriage, divorce, lawsuits, house ownership, etc. Then there’s the private databases at stores and credit card companies, debt collectors, etc. Even if a company doesn’t exist anymore, the people who wokred there are still around somewhere and can be tracked down. There is very little privacy protection in the US, so much of this data is open to those in the loop.
Considering that just about 0% of Taiwanese companies employing foreigners have serious credibility or business ethics, and taking into account the huge number of foreigners who are screwed by their employers here, shouldn’t we have a database about the employers?
This is an interesting question/problem whose solution will have huge social and economic ramifications.
In the US, it’s possible for employer’s to do background checks based on your credit history, social security number. Certain companies will use private agencies that specialize in security clearances. Given the amount of information that’s out there based on the SS number and driver’s license number, people can get a good history of what you’ve done, where you’ve lived. People’s tax records can probably be traced just based on your SS#.
Taiwan can do the same if it wants if it had good IT infrastructure or centralized repository of information. I’ve chatted with large private and government institutional folks and its readily apparent to me that Taiwan organizations lack the ability to create huge information stores and linked databases to capture and mine that information.
In the US, there’s a lot of company directory services that one can hire such as Hoovers Online, Dun & Bradstreet to do corporate fact checking. Calling HR depts in US companies however will only result in “Yes, that person worked here from such and such date”, or “No, that person never worked here”. HR people in US companies will also shy away from confirming your title, and they would never discuss anything related to your employment history, status or otherwise. This is due to protection against lawsuits. Taiwan may require something different.
As white collar crime is a huge problem, there’s not a lot of easy solutions. Whether using government as a force to change social mores is effective or not is highly debatable. Especially given that governments work very slowly and businesses work much faster. White collar crime isn’t always discovered quickly enough to prevent damage from occurring. So, what is the company’s recourse? What ought to be the compensation to the company? Don’t know the answer here.
On the issue of staff recruitment, that’s a societal issue ingrained from one’s childhood. So many kids here are growing up fat, dumb and lazy as all shit. There’s going to be a generation of kids who won’t be able to feed themselves because they’ve never had to work for anything in their lives. In the MNC HR staffing company I work at, this is a major issue: finding qualified candidates to submit to corporate clients. Looking through the process of sourcing for candidates, verification of candidate’s background and credentials, sale of candidate’s credentials and the sale of HR outsourcing function is miserably tough with very low margins. Companies don’t care enough about this area. They figure they’ll just hire another person and keep rotating people in and out. Companies don’t feel training is necessary and employee retention is a foreign concept. They’re afraid that if they train someone, that person will go to a MNC and then they’re back to square one. So they just keep their workers dumb and dumber. Taiwanese mentality is mostly “we’ll make do” and scrape along.
Going back to your original question of how does a business person protect his/her business from unethical employees? To me, that’s Taiwanese/Chinese culture. There’s a reason why Taiwan is still king of OEM’ing. What is OEM’ing? It’s the whole sale copy of products. They see what you’ve done and they duplicate it on the assembly area. Copying is a Taiwanese trait, you’re not going to legislate that out of existence. It would be asking Taiwanese people to stop being Taiwanese. If that happens, I’ll eat my words and go back the US and never come back. So what can a business person do? I feel it’s a business training issue. It’s about improving and practicing modern business practices. Stop running businesses as a family thing – keeping your family mouths fed. It’s not. Business is about making money. Running a business requires internal controls and procedures. Having rules and regulations and its enforcement of them.
So a combination of several things need to happen before improvement can happen:
- Legal recourse for companies and protection of its assets is needed. Does the current Taiwanese business/corporate law statutes recognize a cause of action related to white collar crimes and also grant relief of damages in such cases?
- Businesses need to modernize their internal business practices and processes. They have very lax controls. They need to improve their infrastructure.
- Society - people’s attitudes need to change. How?
