There’s a problem sitting in the middle of Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain that we need to talk about.
If you make the equipment, the materials, the chemicals or the subsystems that go into a fab, then your biggest customer is also your biggest talent competitor. The company you invoice this year is training the engineer you want to hire next year. And you are probably not going to outbid them.
I know how that sounds. So let me put some numbers behind it.
A joint report from the 104 job bank and ITRI put the semiconductor sector’s shortfall at roughly 34,000 people. Between 2010 and 2024, Taiwan’s IC output value roughly tripled, while the number of babies born each year fell by about a fifth. TSMC plans to hire about 8,000 people this year. Master’s-level engineers there average around NT$2.2 million in total compensation. C.C. Wei has said publicly that water and power are not his most pressing problem. Talent is.
When the anchor customer of the entire ecosystem says that out loud, everyone downstream of it should be paying attention.
Figure 1: Semiconductor suppliers often need a second reason to win talent when pay alone is not enough.
The Quality Trap, but for hiring
We wrote a while back about The Quality Trap, which is what happens when a company builds its whole commercial story on quality. Every factory shows the same certifications, the same clean equipment, the same claims about tolerances. Quality stops differentiating and becomes the entrance fee. The only remaining variable is price.
The hiring version of that trap is almost identical, and it is everywhere.
“Competitive salary. Comprehensive benefits. Excellent development opportunities.” Open twenty job listings in Hsinchu and you will see those three lines twenty times. Every word is true. Every word is reasonable. And every word is useless, because the largest player can say the same thing and put a bigger number underneath it.
Of course you have to pay well. That’s not the argument. The argument is that if pay is your only story, you’ve chosen a game you are structurally designed to lose.
So what works instead? Below are three companies we worked with over long engagements. All three are global names in semiconductors. All three needed to recruit in Taiwan. And all three ran into the same basic issue.
ASML: nobody had translated it
ASML is the leader in lithography, headquartered in the Netherlands, with its Taiwan headquarters set up in Hsinchu back in 2003. Our work with them began in 2017 and ran for several years.
I assumed a brand that formidable would carry itself locally. That was wrong, and it’s a lesson a lot of multinationals learn in Taiwan. Awareness is not recruitment appeal. Everybody knew ASML was important. Everybody knew what it did. But a powerful global B2B brand does not automatically become a local employer value proposition. ASML had a value proposition, the 3Cs: Challenge, Collaborate, Care. It was solid. It just had not been made real for the people they were trying to hire.
That’s a communications problem, not a values problem. You can’t recruit anybody on a value that only lives in a slide deck in global headquarters.
So the work was fairly practical. Interview employees. Build content that carried the 3C idea in a local register rather than as a translation exercise. Make Facebook, LinkedIn and LINE sound like one voice instead of three. When the pandemic shut down campus recruiting, we built the Online Campus Recruitment Seminar as a live format, which across 2020 to 2022 pulled in around 190,000 views and 14,000 engagements. We then took the same model into Southeast Asia with a targeted landing page campaign.
Figure 2: ASML Taiwan’s online campus recruitment format helped localize its employer brand for Taiwanese engineering talent.
The second dimension here was proximity to the frontier, made real by people who looked and sounded like the candidate we wanted to reach. ASML has since raised its Taiwan hiring target for the year to 1,000, up from an initial 600. You do not support that pace of growth by waiting for the talent pipeline to appear. You build the content before you need it.
Full case: ASML Taiwan
Figure 3: ASML Taiwan case materials helped candidates understand culture, frontier technology and local career development.
Applied Materials: thirty-five years nobody knew about
Applied Materials has been operating in Taiwan since 1989. Thirty-five years, built into the local ecosystem practically from the beginning.
Most candidates had no idea.
That’s an enormous amount of equity to leave sitting on the table. Applied wasn’t a foreign company with a Taiwan office. It was a company that had grown alongside Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. For someone deciding where to spend the next decade of their career, that distinction matters.
The anniversary campaign we built around that idea was designed to make the length of that relationship visible rather than assumed. That meant turning 35 years into something a candidate could actually read: the evolution of technology and industry, the role of the local team, employee perspectives, and pride in belonging.
Figure 4: Applied Materials Taiwan’s 35th anniversary campaign made a long local history visible to candidates and employees.
Over two years the follower base grew 127% and total reach grew 228%, with the anniversary campaign generating more than 520,000 impressions. The numbers matter, but the deeper point is belonging. A company that has been here for thirty-five years already has a story. Someone just has to tell it.
Full case: Applied Materials Taiwan
Figure 5: The campaign key visual connected company history, talent stories and brand recognition in one communication system.
Edwards: the report they were showing to the wrong people
Edwards makes vacuum and abatement equipment, the systems that help fabs cut their carbon footprint and use resources more efficiently. It is headquartered in the UK, has more than a century of history, and employs over 7,000 people in 30 countries.
Before July 2022 they had no real Taiwan presence to speak of, in a market where Facebook penetration sits near universal and where semiconductor talent is constantly being courted. From a candidate point of view, Edwards looked like an equipment company.
That badly undersells what’s actually on offer. An engineer who joins Edwards is working on the environmental side of the semiconductor industry. In an industry that keeps getting attacked for water and power usage, that is not a compliance footnote. It is a reason to get up and go to work in the morning. And almost nobody in the talent market knew it.
Figure 6: Edwards Taiwan used employee stories to show service work, technical expertise and the purpose behind the role.
We built the Taiwan presence from zero around three pillars: employee stories, industry leadership, and sustainable manufacturing solutions. The page went past 10,000 followers with a post interaction rate above 35%.
The second dimension was purpose. And the raw material for it had been sitting in the sustainability report the whole time, read by investors and activists, but not by the 28-year-old engineer who should have seen it as a reason to join.
Figure 7: Sustainability material can become a recruiting asset when translated into a reason engineers can understand.
Figure 8: Ongoing social content helps candidates understand company culture before they apply.
Full case: Edwards Technologies
What all three had in common
None of them invented anything.
This is the same thing we keep running into, whether the client is a textile mill in Taoyuan or a lithography company in Hsinchu. The difference already exists inside the company. It just has not been named, organized and exposed. Most of that work happens upstream, not in the post.
I’d also say the channel matters far less than people think. Facebook was the right platform in Taiwan at the time. LinkedIn now carries more of the load. LINE still matters. Something else will matter next year. Channels change. The second reason matters: when money is similar, what else makes this place worth choosing?
This isn’t a semiconductor problem anymore
The equipment suppliers hit this wall first because the squeeze reached them first. It’s now working its way through every corner of Taiwanese manufacturing: precision components, specialty chemicals, industrial automation, electronic testing. Every company is quietly trying to hire the same thirty-something, technically fluent, internationally competent person.
I’ve had this conversation many times, and it usually starts with a chairman telling me the problem is that young people don’t want to work hard anymore. Meanwhile those same young people are working just as hard somewhere else because another company gave them one coherent reason to do so.
Now here’s the part I think belongs on a CEO’s desk rather than an HR manager’s.
In equipment and industrial services, your engineers are the product. The service engineer who walks into a customer’s plant at 2am is the brand experience. Not your website. Not your brochure. Not your booth at SEMICON. Him.
Which means employer brand and customer brand aren’t two budgets. They’re ONE asset, funded twice, and usually funded badly both times. If you cannot keep engineers, your service brand degrades, and customers will notice before you do. Stop treating recruitment marketing as charity and start treating it as brand infrastructure.
Figure 9: In equipment and industrial services, engineers often become the customer’s most direct brand experience.
Three questions worth sitting with
What would your best engineer say if a friend asked why they stayed? Not the exit interview answer. The answer they’d give over a beer on a Friday night. If you can find that sentence, you have your employer brand.
What can you legitimately claim that your biggest customer can’t? Breadth of exposure. International mobility. Proximity to a specific technical problem. A mission that sounds different at 9pm on a Wednesday. It has to be real. It has to survive comparison.
If an engineer searched your company name tonight, what would they find? If the answer is a job posting and a product catalogue, you already have an employer brand. You just do not own it.
The shortage is the weather, not the strategy
None of this makes Taiwan’s talent shortage go away. The demographics are what they are, and no amount of storytelling invents engineers who were never born.
But everybody in the supply chain is standing in the same rain. The shortage is the condition you operate in, not a strategy and not an excuse. The companies that win the next cycle of talent will be the ones that can answer one question without flinching:
Why here, and not there?
If you can’t answer that in one sentence, your competitors are answering it for you.
| Service Note Geber Consulting works with B2B manufacturers and technology companies in Taiwan on brand positioning, employer branding and operational modernisation. If this article makes you uncomfortably aware of a gap in your own talent story, get in touch: service@geberconsulting.com. |
Source Notes
104 Job Bank and ITRI reporting on semiconductor talent demand in Taiwan.
Public reporting on TSMC’s 2026 hiring plan, engineer compensation and C.C. Wei’s comments on talent shortage.
Geber Consulting project materials for ASML Taiwan, Applied Materials Taiwan and Edwards Technologies.
Richard deVries Founder & CEO, Geber Consulting
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