In the past, when looking to hire people to work for your company, you would rely on your personal network and you still have to do that to a great extent today. But if you're trying to fill hundreds of positions then you can't only take personal recommendations.

Before the Internet, there were newspapers which made money by selling subscriptions and selling newspapers at newspaper stands, selling advertising, and selling space in their classified ads. It is still possible to put up classified ads to get employees for your restaurant, bar, massage parlor, hair salon, etc. Print classified businesses like Mua&Ban (Buy&Sell) have also gone online.

Nowadays, instead of Dice or Monster.com or other job websites that are popular in the US, in Vietnam we have three major employment websites: Vietnamworks.com, Kiemviec.com, Timviecnhanh.com. Vietnamworks (Navigos) is the premier and most costly of them all, but the other two get a fair number of CVs posted if you're looking.

Hiring Process

Once you've placed your ad and received some resumes/CVs or searched and found some by yourself, you'll start calling them up and scheduling them to come meet you for an interview. You can have them come to your office or meet them in a cafe. If the candidate isn't so fluent in English, then bring a Vietnamese person to help communicate.

Some problems you may face

They won't show up to the interview or they will show up late.

They will list skills they don't have.

Even if the candidate says they are fluent in English they may not really be comfortable speaking English with you at an interview. Unfortunately this means they don't have great English and if you can only communicate in English with them then this could be a problem unless you plan to only communicate via chat or email. Having a Vietnamese person on hand really cuts down on confusion. Being able to speak English well can easily double a person's salary.

Interviewing software developers

Since I'm usually cost conducting interviews with programmers I like to sit in front of a laptop with the interviewee and have him write some code while I watch. It should be in in language that he is comfortable with and if he's a good programmer he should be comfortable and at least 1 language.

Otherwise the programmer will spend a lot of time having to lookup function definitions online. I also like to use interactive programming environments and so using javascript inside Chrome developer tools is readily available and hopefully familiar to the programmer if not Firefox's Firebug.

Tips

Most cafes are not ideal for conducting an interview because they're too noisy for too loud or to smokey or otherwise just not very professional. A cafe that suits you for drinking coffee or working alone may not be right for meeting others professionally. But try to find a few cafes which have some rooms sectioned off, are non-smoking, and don't have music or movies playing.