Answers written for Hong Kong, not translated into it

No — not to search, not to apply, not to be shortlisted, and there is no paid tier that pushes your application up a pile.

Under Part XII of the Employment Ordinance Cap. 57 a licensed employment agency in Hong Kong may charge a job seeker no more than the prescribed commission — 10% of the first month’s wages, and only after a placement actually succeeds. We treat that as a ceiling nobody should be walking towards, so our figure is zero and it is written into our terms rather than a marketing page.

If anyone contacts you claiming to be from HKjobs and asks for a placement fee, a “training deposit”, an agency fee or your bank details, that is not us. Report it and we will suspend the listing before we reply to you.

A monthly HKD band is a required field on HKjobs. The small number of listings without one are roles where the employer applied for an exemption — usually a director-level search or a role tied to a client mandate that has not been signed — and the exemption reason is shown on the listing itself rather than left blank.

You can remove them from your results entirely: on the jobs page, turn on “Only show disclosed salaries”, or set a minimum monthly figure, which does the same thing implicitly.

“Double pay”, 雙糧 or “13th month” all describe an end-of-year payment on top of your twelve monthly salaries — usually paid before Lunar New Year. The words on the ad matter enormously:

• Contractual — written into your employment contract. Under the end-of-year payment provisions of the Employment Ordinance Cap. 57, a payment that is not expressed to be gratuitous or entirely at the employer’s discretion is an entitlement, and a pro-rata amount is payable if you have been employed under a continuous contract for at least three months of the payment period and were not summarily dismissed.
• Discretionary — legally a gift. It can be zero in a bad year, and it usually is.

HKjobs asks employers to say which one they mean in the salary note, so you can compare an offer of HK$38,000 × 13 against HK$41,000 × 12 before the second interview instead of after it.

For most listings, yes — the employer expects you to already hold permanent residency, right of abode, a dependant visa that permits employment, or a valid employment visa. Listings tagged Visa sponsorship are the ones where the employer is willing to make the application with you.

The routes candidates most often arrive on:

• IANG — Immigration Arrangements for Non-local Graduates, for graduates of local programmes; no job offer needed to get the first visa.
• GEP — General Employment Policy, the standard employer-sponsored route for professionals.
• ASMTP — the equivalent scheme for Mainland talent and professionals.
• TTPS — Top Talent Pass Scheme, which lets you arrive first and find the role afterwards.
• Dependant visa — holders are generally free to take up employment without separate sponsorship.

Only the Immigration Department can decide your status. Use the filter to find employers who have sponsored before, and confirm the specifics with them early.

Sometimes not — but you can see the odds before you spend an evening on the application. Every employer profile shows two figures, calculated over a rolling 90 days and not editable by them:

• Response rate — the share of applicants who received any human reply within seven days.
• Median response time — how long the middle applicant waited.

Employers with fewer than twenty applications show no rate at all rather than a flattering one built on three data points.

Every listing carries a district, and every district is mapped to its nearest interchange along with the lines that serve it. Filtering by district in the New Territories, for example, quietly removes the roles that would put a 70-minute each-way commute in front of you.

Hybrid and remote roles keep their district because that is where you will be on the days you are in — the work-mode filter is separate on purpose.

It is shorthand for a continuous contract under the Employment Ordinance Cap. 57: employment with the same employer for four weeks or more, working at least 18 hours in each of those weeks.

Crossing that line matters. Employees on a continuous contract are entitled to protections that part-timers below it do not get — including rest days, paid statutory holidays, paid annual leave, sickness allowance and, where the conditions are met, severance or long service payment.

Part-time listings on HKjobs state hours per week for exactly this reason. If the hours are on the boundary, ask before you sign.

Not if you are hiring for your own organisation — a company advertising its own vacancies is not operating an employment agency.

If you place candidates with other employers, you are operating an employment agency and need a licence issued under Part XII of the Employment Ordinance Cap. 57, administered by the Employment Agencies Administration of the Labour Department. We ask agencies for the licence number at sign-up and show it on the listing.

A standard listing runs for 30 days from the moment it is approved, and every price is published — there is no “contact sales for a quote” step. Subscription plans include a monthly allowance of live listings plus the employer console, the pipeline board and structured screening.

See the full pricing table, including the pay-as-you-go rate for a single role.

Every listing is reviewed by a human before it goes live. The four reasons that account for almost all rejections:

• No salary band and no exemption reason. This is the big one.
• Criteria that engage the anti-discrimination ordinances — sex, pregnancy or marital status Cap. 480, disability Cap. 487, family status Cap. 527 or race Cap. 602. “Young and energetic”, “Chinese only” and “no family commitments” all fail here.
• Any requirement that the candidate pays money — training bonds, uniform deposits, agency fees.
• A business registration we cannot verify, or a contact address that does not match it.

Rejections come back with the specific line that failed and a suggested rewrite, usually within four working hours.

No. You can apply for an exemption, and if it is granted the listing displays the reason you gave instead of a band — which candidates read as an answer rather than a blank.

Before you ask: across the board, listings with a published band draw materially more qualified applicants than the same role without one, and far fewer applications that fall apart at the offer stage over money.

It is the share of applicants in the last 90 days who received a human reply — any outcome, including a rejection — within seven days, shown alongside the median time to that reply. You cannot edit it, hide it or pay to suppress it.

You can move it, and quickly. Sending the rejection on day three counts exactly the same as sending an offer on day three.

Anything genuinely job-related: right to work, notice period, language level, a licence or qualification the role requires, expected salary. Structured questions are answered in the application and shown on the pipeline card, so your whole panel scores the same information.

What you cannot ask: age, marital or family status, pregnancy or plans to have children, race or nationality beyond the right-to-work question, disability unrelated to the inherent requirements of the job. Our editor flags these as you type.

No. There is no percentage of first-year salary, no success fee and no per-CV charge. You pay for the listing and the tooling; whether you hire one person from it or five, the price is the same.

Only an employer you have applied to, and only for that application. HKjobs does not run a searchable CV database that recruiters can browse, and we do not sell or license candidate lists.

Your saved jobs, alerts and application history are visible to you alone. Employers see the answers you gave to their screening questions, your CV and the contact details you chose to include — nothing else from your account.

Yes. Add them to your blocked-companies list in account settings and your profile becomes invisible to every user on that company’s organisation — including subsidiaries you name — and their listings stop appearing in your recommendations.

Blocking is silent. The employer is never notified, and no “this candidate blocked you” signal exists anywhere in the product.

Under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance Cap. 486 you have the right to ask any organisation whether it holds personal data about you, to receive a copy, and to require correction of anything inaccurate. In Hong Kong this is called a data access request, or DAR.

Write to privacy@hkjobs.demo from the email address on your account. The Ordinance allows 40 days to comply, and permits a fee that is not excessive — we do not charge one. You can also export your applications and saved jobs yourself from account settings without asking anybody.

• Applications and the messages attached to them: 24 months from the last activity, so you can prove what was said.
• Account profile and CV: until you delete the account, then a 30-day grace period in case it was a mistake.
• Encrypted backups: purged on a rolling 90-day cycle after deletion.
• Billing records for employers: seven years, because Hong Kong tax and company law requires it.

The detail, including who processes what on our behalf, is in the privacy policy.

Only if you say yes first, and you can withdraw at any time at no cost. The direct marketing provisions of the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance Cap. 486 require an organisation to tell you what it intends to use and to obtain your consent before it does — we treat that as opt-in, per channel, with the opt-out link in every message.

Job alerts you created yourself are not marketing. They stop the moment you delete the alert.

Account settings → Delete account. It takes effect immediately: your profile disappears from the product, alerts stop, and saved jobs are removed.

Applications you have already submitted are a shared record between you and that employer, so they remain in the employer’s pipeline unless you withdraw them first. Withdraw, then delete, if you want a clean break.

No. There is no premium candidate tier on HKjobs and no plan to add one. Every feature a job seeker can see — search, alerts, the salary guide, the application tracker — is free and stays free.

Everything is billed in Hong Kong dollars. We accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express, FPS, and bank transfer for annual plans. Invoices carry our business registration number and are issued the moment a listing is approved or a subscription renews.

No. Hong Kong does not levy VAT, GST or a general sales tax, so an HKjobs invoice shows the net amount and nothing else. If your finance team asks for a tax line, that is the answer to send them.

Overseas employers hiring into Hong Kong are billed the same way; any tax treatment in your own jurisdiction is between you and your accountant.

• A listing that has received no applications can be cancelled within 14 days for a full refund.
• Once applications have arrived, we credit the unused portion of the 30 days to your account rather than refunding cash.
• Annual subscriptions can be cancelled within 14 days of the first charge if no listing has been published.
• A listing we reject is never charged for, and any pre-authorisation is released the same day.

You get a seven-day grace period. Listings stay live, the console keeps working, and we email the billing contact on days one, three and six.

After seven days listings are unpublished rather than deleted — applications already received stay in your pipeline, and republishing takes one click once the payment goes through.

Publish the gross monthly salary — the figure before the employee’s own contribution. That is what candidates compare, and it is what your offer letter will say.

For context: under the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Ordinance Cap. 485, employer and employee each contribute 5% of relevant income, subject to a maximum relevant income level of HK$30,000 a month — so HK$1,500 each at the cap — with employees earning below the minimum level of HK$7,100 a month not required to make their own contribution. Employers must enrol a new employee in a scheme within the first 60 days of employment.