ASML Taiwan | Six Years of Employer Branding and Live-Streamed Recruitment for the Lithography Leader

The Challenge: Making ASML’s Work Visible to Taiwan’s Young Engineers

ASML, headquartered in Veldhoven in the Netherlands, makes the lithography systems that print the finest patterns on computer chips, including the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems that only ASML builds. Taiwan is its largest base in Asia. ASML Taiwan opened its first office in 2003, and its engineers now install and service ASML systems at chipmakers’ fabs across the island, while its plants in Linkou and Tainan refurbish systems and make parts.

The chipmakers that buy from ASML know it well. The people ASML Taiwan most needed to reach were engineering students and young engineers, who often recognized the name but had little idea what an ASML engineer does all day. Many of them were also being courted by ASML’s own customers.

In April 2017, ASML Taiwan’s communications team sent us its goals for Facebook: more than 10,000 followers, an engagement rate of 5 to 6% on every post, and 500 or more quality CVs. On LinkedIn, it wanted more followers in Taiwan and a page its employees would use when referring friends. Every post also had to follow ASML’s global brand guidelines, written in the Netherlands for an audience everywhere.

In 2020, COVID-19 added a new problem: the campus career fairs ASML relied on to meet graduates were canceled.

What We Found

1. On Facebook, the audience was future employees. ASML sells to a short list of chipmakers whose engineers already work alongside its people every week. The people who still had to discover ASML were students and young engineers deciding where to start their careers, so we planned the page as a recruitment channel from the first month.
2. Taiwanese engineers look for information on local platforms. Job banks and PTT, Taiwan’s large bulletin board system, shaped what young professionals heard about ASML, and LINE is the messaging app most people in Taiwan use. At the end of 2017 we advised ASML to keep marketing posts off PTT and let its own people answer questions there, and in March 2019 we added a LINE official account.
3. Employee stories and timely posts drew a response. In 2018, the employee series “ASMLers in the world” brought more than ten private messages asking about jobs, and a July post that linked ASML to a trending topic reached 47,900 people without paid promotion.
4. ASML’s global messages needed local examples. ASML’s values (Challenge, Collaborate, Care) and its recruitment line, Be Part of Progress, were written for candidates everywhere. To mean something to a graduate in Hsinchu or Tainan, they needed Taiwanese engineers and Taiwanese career paths behind them, in Chinese.

What We Did

For nearly six years we ran ASML Taiwan’s social media and recruitment campaigns and wrote a new social media strategy for each year. Our video team made everything from monthly social clips to recruitment films and live shows.

Facebook: An Employer Page Published Every Week for Nearly Six Years

A dedicated team of a project manager, a copywriter, a designer and an analyst published about three posts a week on ASML Taiwan’s Facebook page from May 2017 to January 2023. The 2017 contract included a full day of video production every month, so short videos with ASML’s engineers were part of the page from the start.

The content plan changed as ASML’s messages changed. In 2018 it rested on four themes: the company, its technology, life at ASML and open jobs. From 2020 the content was built around ASML’s values, Challenge, Collaborate and Care, and in 2022 the plan followed ASML Taiwan’s local messages: a strategic partner to Taiwan’s chip industry, a responsible employer and a good corporate citizen. Series such as Whiteboard Session and Super Science explained the technology, while an illustrated guide to ASML’s engineering roles (ASML工程師圖鑑) and explainers on pay and benefits answered the questions candidates asked most. Timely posts worked too: in October 2022, a post that used a moment from a popular TV show to explain EUV reached 39,898 people organically, almost three times the year’s average for a post.

We reported to ASML every week and every month, and tracked ASML’s page against other semiconductor employers’ Facebook pages so each year’s strategy started from data.

LINE and LinkedIn: Channels Built Around Candidates

ASML Taiwan’s LINE official account went live in March 2019, timed with campus recruitment. We set up its menu, welcome messages and keyword replies, then used it to promote the live streams and run prize draws, and to move Facebook followers onto a channel where ASML could message them directly.

On LinkedIn, organic posts ran alongside sponsored campaigns for hard-to-fill roles, such as customer support engineers in Tainan and global operations planners. In December 2019 we promoted a recruitment day for customer support engineers with targeted ads and a short film about a day in the life of one of those engineers (GSC工程師的一天). In 2022 we took ASML Taiwan’s hiring to Southeast Asia: a LinkedIn landing page, “Be Part of Silicon Island at ASML Taiwan”, featured engineers from the region already working at ASML Taiwan, backed by image and video ads.

Career Talk LIVE: Campus Recruitment Moved Online, 2020 to 2022

When campus fairs were canceled in 2020, we turned ASML’s career talks into a Facebook Live series. Four episodes in May 2020 introduced ASML’s departments through the people who work in them, with sign-ups through the 104 job bank, one of Taiwan’s main job sites, and prizes for viewers who stayed to the end.

The format grew each year. In November 2021, a single live show took on five common myths about working at ASML, set up by three “unboxing challenge” videos in which engineers from manufacturing, development and engineering, and customer support showed what their jobs involve. In 2022 the series became 光的事務所, a four-episode program from April to June covering the Global Operations Center, customer support, YieldStar metrology, and development and engineering. Each year we handled the themes, scripts, promotion across Facebook, LINE, email and text messages, studio production and the live broadcast, editing, and a survey of the audience afterward.

Films and Campaigns: Be Part of Progress, Made in Taiwan

At the end of 2020 we wrote and filmed “Be part of progress, work at ASML in Taiwan“, ASML Taiwan’s recruitment film for ASML’s global Be Part of Progress campaign, working with ASML’s headquarters to match the global look. A one-minute corporate image film followed in 2021.

From August to November 2021 we ran Be Part of Progress as a campaign in Taiwan. The plan pointed every channel at a Chinese landing page on asml.com: ads on YouTube, Google, Facebook, Instagram and LINE; a sponsored video by the YouTuber 志祺七七 (Shasha77) on ASML’s role in the chip industry; four podcast episodes; an advertorial; and a live career talk.

For ASML Taiwan’s 20th anniversary, we made a series of films in 2022 and 2023. Three of them tell ASML’s values through its employees. Others cover customer support, the Linkou and Tainan plants, ASML’s suppliers and its community work, and a main film brings the series together.

Results

The employer brand at work, 2017 to 2023:

• Followers up more than fivefold. ASML Taiwan’s Facebook page grew from 11,558 followers on December 31, 2017, to 60,477 on January 31, 2023.
• Reaching people who didn’t follow the page yet. From September 2018 to August 2019, posts reached 2,102,436 people in total; from September 2020 to August 2021, 6,177,953. Engaged users who did not follow the page went from 78,520 to 392,391 over the same periods. In 2022, engaged users averaged 11.8% of the people each post reached.
• A LINE audience built from zero. The LINE official account grew from its launch in March 2019 to 12,048 friends in January 2023.
• LinkedIn ads above the benchmark. Sponsored posts in 2019 and 2020 averaged a 2.70% click-through rate, against LinkedIn’s benchmark of 0.57% for engineering and 0.8% for Asia-Pacific. Organic impressions rose from 169,707 in 2019 to 433,899 in 2020.
• Three years of live streams. The three series drew about 190,000 three-second video views. In 2020, 56,571 people watched the four episodes, and 2,302 CVs came in through the registration page on the 104 job bank. Surveyed viewers rated how likely they were to consider ASML as an employer 9.5 out of 10 afterward, up from 8.5 before. The 2021 show had 893 sign-ups and peaked at 612 live viewers. In 2022, 1,321 people made 2,519 sign-ups across the four episodes.
• Talent from outside the chip industry. Half of the 2022 audience were recent graduates and half young professionals; among the young professionals with four or more years of experience, 88.2% worked outside the semiconductor industry.
• A national recruitment campaign. The 2021 Be Part of Progress campaign made 20.4 million impressions from August 31 to November 30, 2021, more than three times its target, and visits from Taiwan to asml.com rose 510% on the same period a year earlier. The 志祺七七 video had 182,419 views by October 1, 2021.

ASML Taiwan since:

• The film is still online. “Be part of progress, work at ASML in Taiwan” is still on ASML’s YouTube channel.
• ASML kept working with us on video. After the social media work ended in January 2023, we finished the 20th anniversary films, and ASML brought us back to record Chinese voice-overs for its global brand films in 2023 and 2024.
• Still hiring. ASML Taiwan had more than 4,700 employees in August 2026 and raised its 2026 hiring target in Taiwan to more than 1,000, from 600, according to its interview with CNA.

“Geber is one of the most supportive partners during these years. Your dedications and prompt executions help ASML Taiwan Facebook stay a leading position among semiconductor employers.”

Shawn Liu, Communications Manager, ASML Taiwan

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