Hire A Developer In Vietnam From Australia Before You Screen Another Twenty CVs

Yes, and the case for it is no longer the wage bill. You can hire a developer in Vietnam from Australia without opening an entity there, employed through an employer of record, which is a company that legally employs the person in their country and invoices you. The reason to look sits in Australia's own recruitment data.

Outstaffer employs people in Vietnam, so take the next part as disclosure rather than pitch: the country explorer exists because this question gets asked weekly.

The Australian market is deep in applications and short on skills

Jobs and Skills Australia released a spotlight on IT recruitment from its Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey on 26 September, reported two days later by the Australian Computer Society's Information Age. Thirty-two per cent of the IT employers surveyed recruited across 2025-26, against a 49 per cent average everywhere else.

Then the figure that should change how you read your inbox. Thirty-four per cent of the IT employers who were recruiting received twenty or more applications per vacancy, against a 19 per cent all-industry average. Five per cent named a shortage of applicants as their difficulty. Fifty per cent named a shortage of technical skills.

Ten employers stuck on the skill for every one stuck on supply.

What a shortlist is actually costing you

Outstaffer publishes the number everyone else buries: the agency tax on a single hire runs $10,000 to $30,000. Hold that against twenty-plus applications already arriving unprompted.

Where does the fee actually go?

At the floor of that range, twenty applications works out near $500 each, paid for the part the market is already doing for free. Finding someone who can build the thing is the 50 per cent problem, and the fee does not touch it.

Why will the person you want not apply?

Because the market has stopped bidding for them. In the same survey, 45 per cent of more than 700 IT professionals had received no pay rise in twelve months and 19 per cent had taken a pay cut. Sixty-four per cent went sideways or backwards in nominal terms.

People in that position do not gamble on a 30-person company's ad. They sit still.

Pick the country the skill lives in, not the one with the lowest floor

Vietnam is interesting here for a reason that has nothing to do with being cheap. It is one of seven Asia-Pacific markets where Outstaffer employs directly, so the engineer is your employee on your team, statutory entitlements paid locally, no entity for you to register.

Our read on how the Philippine and Vietnamese wage floors moved this quarter landed on predictability rather than price. The same logic holds for skills: you are buying a different pool, not a discount.

Get advice on your own structure before you move anyone, because how you engage the person decides the classification risk, not where they sit.

The honest case against doing any of this

The sample is small. About 100 IT employers answered, out of more than 10,000 across the survey, and a reading built on 100 firms deserves scepticism. Lack of demand as a reason not to recruit also jumped from 8 per cent in 2023-24 to 43 per cent in 2025-26, which says plenty of IT employers are quiet because there is no work.

And the country rarely is the problem. We argued exactly that last week: when a first attempt fails, the specification is usually what broke, not the map. Fix the role first.

Related reading

• You can hire staff in Malaysia from Australia, and the employer load is capped
• The first warning sign for a fake IT worker is a discount

What I would do this quarter

Stop treating application volume as evidence. Write down the one technical capability the role must have, then ask whether twenty Australian applications have ever carried it. If the answer is no, hire a developer in Vietnam from Australia or wherever the skill actually sits, and start a role properly rather than running the same ad again.

The question I keep coming back to: how many of the twenty applications on your desk did you reject for the skill, and how many for the covering letter?