People Advisory & Mobility
HR Consultation Vietnam
HR audits, labour regulations and pay structure advice for employers in Vietnam
One side of the practice reviews and rebuilds the employment documents and the practices sitting behind them. The other designs pay and benefits structures. We write; your team decides and implements. Projects, retainers, day rates, or a scope built for the situation.
24+ years
of group HR-adjacent practice across SEA
Licensed in Vietnam
Enterprise Code: 0314966034 - recruitment-grade depth informs every HR engagement
Confidential
NDA-governed engagements - findings shared only with authorised stakeholders
4 engagement models
project · retainer · day rate · custom
How it works
1
Discover
It starts with one closed conversation, usually with whoever has been handed the problem. The useful question is what changed. Occasionally it is an inspection. More often it is that internal labour regulations were registered years ago and no longer describe the company, or that pay grades have drifted far enough apart that nobody can explain them, or that a parent company abroad has started asking for numbers nobody has. We also want to know what has already been tried internally, since that determines what will get accepted. Scope, deliverables, timing and fees are recorded in an engagement letter before diagnosis begins.
2
Diagnose
Diagnosis is reading the documents, then testing them against what actually happens. Internal labour regulations as registered, the labour contracts in use and whether definite-term ones have been renewed past the point they should have been, how overtime and allowances are really calculated, whether social, health and unemployment insurance contributions reconcile against payroll, how PIT finalisation has been handled, and what past terminations looked like in practice. Findings arrive severity-rated. On the pay side it is benchmarking your grades against comparable employers, checking where the regional minimum wage has compressed the lower bands, and locating where internal equity has broken. Under NDA throughout.
3
Design
Design produces usable documents. Internal labour regulations redrafted and ready for legal review and registration. Every policy change annotated with the reason for it, because somebody will have to justify it later. An audit report ordered by exposure rather than by topic. A grade and pay structure with the workings visible and the regional wage floors modelled in, so it survives the next adjustment. Benefits proposals that make sense alongside the compulsory schemes rather than duplicating them.
4
Handover
Endings differ. A project closes with a working session for your HR team, help planning how the changes are communicated, and a documented handover. Retainer clients simply carry on talking to us. And implementation reliably surfaces something the design phase could not anticipate, normally when a new structure meets a real payroll run for the first time. That gets picked up separately, by the day or as a small fixed fee.
HR consultation in Vietnam, built on 24+ years of watching HR actually work
Vietnamese employment practice puts more weight on internal labour regulations than most employers arriving here expect. Above a modest headcount they have to be registered with the labour authority, and once registered they are the yardstick: a dismissal is judged against the process you wrote down and registered, not the process you followed in practice. Around that sit obligations most foreign-invested employers meet late rather than never, including a periodic labour dialogue with employee representatives and a labour usage report. The other recurring problem is pay structure. In a market where people change employers every two or three years and salary expectations rise with each move, an internal band built three years ago is usually below what you now have to pay to replace the person who just resigned. Our advisory work runs through People Profilers Services Vietnam Company Limited, and what it adds is the operational lens: we also recruit, run payroll and act as employer of record here.
What our HR consultation engagements cover
The practice covers two things. Reviewing and rebuilding employment documentation and the practice behind it, and designing pay and benefits structures. There are four commercial shapes because the work genuinely differs: a bounded project, continuous access on retainer, a day rate where scope keeps moving, and bespoke where none of those fit.
HR audits & policy
- ✓HR health checks & gap diagnostics
- ✓Employee handbook development & revision
- ✓HR policy reviews & gap remediation
- ✓labour compliance audits
Compensation & benefits
- ✓Salary banding & structure design
- ✓Market benchmarking by sector & region
- ✓Benefits structure & total rewards philosophy
- ✓Internal equity analysis & remediation
Engagement structures
- ✓Project-based fixed fee (defined scope)
- ✓Monthly retainer (ongoing advisory access)
- ✓Day rate (specialist consulting)
- ✓Custom-scoped per engagement
Our part ends at advice and drafting. Decisions and implementation stay with you, deliberately, because a policy your own managers did not put in place tends not to survive contact with the organisation. If what you want instead is the function operated for you, from payroll through to statutory reporting, look at HR Shared Services.
When HR consultation makes sense in Vietnam
Advisory work on top of an internal HR function, rather than instead of one. Three triggers account for most engagements here.
Internal labour regulations that no longer describe the company
Rules inherited from a parent company, translated once, registered years ago and never revisited. The gap shows up in disciplinary cases, where what you registered is the standard you are held to. Rewriting and re-registering them is unglamorous and repeatedly the thing that decides an outcome.
Pay bands that lost touch with the market
Salaries here move with job changes rather than with annual reviews, so the band that looked competitive when it was set is often below the offer your leaver just accepted. Benchmarking against what employers in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and the industrial provinces are actually paying, then rebuilding the structure, is a different exercise from an inflation increase.
Something external is about to look at you
A labour inspection, a client audit of your employment practices, or an acquirer's due diligence, where registration status, contract types and insurance records are all in scope at once. Independent verification beforehand costs far less than remediation afterwards.
Where you need ongoing HR delivery rather than advice, that is HR Shared Services. Where a restructuring will involve departing employees, Outplacement handles the transition.
How advisory engagements work
HR audits, internal labour regulations and handbooks, organisational design and pay benchmarking, aligned to the Labour Code and drafted to be registrable in Vietnamese. We advise and build; your team owns the decisions. Engagements run from a defined project scope through to retained advisory.
Recruitment Licence 6208/2024/20/SLĐTBXH-VLATLĐ · Part of a Southeast Asia HR group operating since 2002 across five markets
Industries & Functions We Cover
Sector decides most of the answer. Overtime and shift exposure dominates in manufacturing and electronics, site allowances and rotation in construction and energy, variable pay in banking and technology, and each reads the same rule differently once it meets a real payroll. Our consultants come out of recruiting into these industries, so that context is the starting point rather than the first month's work.
Aerospace & Aviation
Aircraft maintenance technicians, avionics and component specialists, ground operations and aviation supply chain roles around Tan Son Nhat, Noi Bai and Long Thanh.
Automotive
Production and quality engineers, supplier development, sales and aftersales management for assemblers and the growing EV and component base.
Banking & Financial Services
Relationship managers, credit and risk analysts, compliance and AML officers and operations specialists across Vietnamese commercial banks, insurers and securities firms.
Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical
Regulatory affairs, QA and validation, medical representatives and market access roles for manufacturers, importers and distributors.
Chemical
Process and production engineers, plant supervisors, HSE officers and technical sales across the southern and central industrial zones.
Construction & Civil Engineering
Project and site managers, civil, structural and M&E engineers, quantity surveyors and safety officers on Vietnamese infrastructure and property projects.
FMCG & Retail
Brand and trade marketing managers, key account and modern trade specialists, and retail operations across a fast-growing national footprint.
Healthcare
Clinical operations, nursing leadership, medical representatives and regulatory specialists for private hospital groups and device companies.
IT & Telecommunication
Software engineers, DevOps, product managers and data specialists across the Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang development centres and outsourcing firms.
Logistics & Transportation
Freight forwarding, customs and import-export specialists, warehouse and distribution managers around Cat Lai, Hai Phong and the border crossings.
Marine & Offshore Engineering
Marine and subsea engineers, yard and vessel operations, project managers and HSE specialists across shipbuilding and offshore support.
Media & Publishing
Account management, content and performance marketing, creative and production roles across agencies, platforms and publishers.
Oil & Gas
Process, drilling and project engineers, HSE coordinators and commercial analysts for upstream operators, service companies and refineries.
Real Estate & Property
Development and project managers, leasing and property managers, facilities leads and investment roles for Vietnamese developers and funds.
Semiconductor
Process, test and packaging engineers, equipment and production specialists across the assembly and testing plants in the northern and southern parks.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between HR Consultation and HR Shared Services?
One ends; the other does not. Consultation finishes when the documents are with you and your team starts using them.
Shared services runs continuously. Payroll, the compulsory social, health and unemployment insurance contributions, PIT withholding and finalisation, joiners and leavers, and the periodic labour reporting, month after month, done by us.
Companies almost always arrive wanting the first. A minority conclude, partway through an audit, that the second is what they actually needed, and that conversation goes better once the documentation exists.
How is HR Consultation priced?
Four arrangements. What matters is matching the arrangement to how bounded the work genuinely is.
Bounded work takes a fixed fee. Redrafting internal labour regulations, or benchmarking a defined set of grades, has a start and a finish, and pricing it any other way only creates disputes later.
Continuous but unbounded work takes a retainer. It suits a company with competent HR administration but no senior adviser, where the value lies in being able to ask before deciding instead of afterwards.
Work that changes shape as it goes takes a day rate. Restructuring support is the clearest case, since each finding alters the next step.
Genuinely complicated work is quoted on its own terms. Several provinces with different wage regions, or an integration where the confidentiality itself constrains the method.
No diagnostic work begins before the fee sits in the engagement letter.
How long does a typical HR Consultation engagement take?
Estimates rather than promises, and worth understanding why each moves.
Three to five weeks for a health check, provided documents reach us. Retrieval, not analysis, is what usually holds this phase up.
Four to eight weeks to redraft internal labour regulations before legal review. Correcting an existing document is far quicker than replacing one that was never fit for the company.
Six to ten weeks for benchmarking plus a pay structure rebuild, which is the one that catches people out. Comparable local data is slow to assemble, and the model must be tested against your actual payroll and every wage region you operate in before it can be approved.
Retainers continue until ended, with a review at six or twelve months.
None of these become fixed dates at kickoff. Discovery finds things, and when it does the engagement letter is amended openly rather than the schedule slipping quietly.
How do you handle confidentiality on sensitive engagements?
An audit produces a written list of what is wrong. Pay work produces something more sensitive still: what everyone earns and what you intend to do about it.
Nothing therefore moves before an NDA is signed. Circulation stays within the people named in the engagement letter, and we neither reference engagements in marketing nor discuss them with other clients.
Some engagements require more. An unannounced transaction, or separations still under consideration, get a restricted team, controlled document exchange, and a project code name where that helps.
What deliverables do we get from an engagement?
Documents that can be used. Anything your team could not pick up and act on should not have been produced.
From an audit: findings rated by severity, remediation sequenced with effort attached, and a condensed version for whoever briefs the board or the parent company.
From policy work: the redrafted regulations, annotations explaining each change, and a plan for announcing it.
From pay work: benchmark data at role level, an equity analysis, a grade and band structure with its workings exposed, benefits proposals, and a phased path from the present structure to the proposed one.
The standard is whether your HR director could take any of it into a room alone and defend it.
Can you support implementation after the advisory work?
Yes, scoped separately once the advice has landed. It takes one of three forms.
Short hands-on help, by the day or as a small fixed fee: launching new regulations, sequencing a band rollout across sites, briefing managers on what has changed and why.
An ongoing retainer, which is what most project clients choose once they find the questions did not stop when the report arrived.
Or handing the operation over, where the audit has shown the function is not viable in house. Since everything is already documented, that transition moves considerably faster than a cold start.
Explore our other services
Need something different? Browse our other broad service categories.
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