No night-shift premium is high enough to offset the gig economy pulling workers away and a super-aged society shrinking the pool. When you genuinely cannot hire, the night shift can only be covered by redividing the work.
What WorldTrend said on camera
The interviewee was Gao Yu-Heng, Associate Vice President of Planning & Development at WorldTrend Security. He used the company’s own position to show the scale of the gap: there are currently around 50 open positions, more than 30 of them night posts, and for those night posts a day can go by without a single application. The situation, he said, is severe.
On solutions, Gao pointed out that patrol is the most labour-intensive part of the night shift. WorldTrend has introduced an AI video patrol platform that connects every camera at a residential or commercial site into the AI Eagle Eye video analysis system.
This shortage is not the security industry’s alone
The report also interviewed a job bank and a convenience store operator, which fills out the picture.
An Chih-Hsien, a job bank PR manager, noted that there are close to 30,000 night-shift openings nationwide. On supply and demand, in categories such as semiconductor equipment operation and maintenance, each opening attracts an average of only 0.2 applicants — the supply of night-shift workers is extremely tight.
In the past, she explained, most people would trade sleep for a higher night-shift premium. But with the rise of the gig economy — delivery platforms, ride-hailing and other flexible-hours work — younger workers have been drawn away, and a super-aged society makes night rostering harder still. The result is a double squeeze: young people are unwilling to take it on, and older workers are not suited to doing it long term.
The pressure on convenience stores is just as real. Wang Ying-Chien, a senior PR manager at one chain, said around 2,800 stores now offer self-checkout; in areas with high digital payment use or simple basket contents, the better-performing stores see self-checkout account for as much as 30% of transactions. Her arithmetic is concrete: every customer who uses self-checkout saves a clerk one minute, which the clerk can spend making coffee, handling parcels or restocking. The two major chains differ in approach — FamilyMart focuses on in-store self-checkout for efficiency, while 7-ELEVEN is expanding outward into unmanned stores and 24-hour vending.
An also cautioned that while automation does relieve some entry-level night-shift pressure, work requiring close human interaction or complex judgement remains hard to replace — and it creates fresh demand for technicians to maintain the equipment and fix faults.
WorldTrend’s position: filling the gap, not replacing people
WorldTrend began applying AI video recognition to end-point electronic security in 2017 and launched the AI Eagle Eye Cloud Patrol Team in 2022. The direction has been consistent: not replacing guards with technology, but handing the job of staring at a screen waiting for something to happen over to a system, so that people are concentrated where human judgement and response are genuinely needed.
For clients this takes two practical forms:
Guards stay by day for parcels, visitors and admin; at night no one remains on site and the 24-hour monitoring centre watches remotely. Staffing costs fall by roughly 30–50%.
Night staffing drops from two shifts to one, with a dedicated monitoring platform on site backing up the monitoring centre. Staffing costs fall by roughly 20–30%.
The point is that fewer posts does not mean less watching. The instant a sensor triggers, live footage reaches the monitoring centre; the operator reads the picture and, on a confirmed intrusion or fire, calls the police or 119 immediately, or logs and closes it if it reads as a false alarm. Nothing waits for a patrol car to arrive before the response begins, and every event leaves an auditable record with a thumbnail, a description and a timestamp - something RFID checkpoint patrols can never produce.
If you are facing the same problem
Residential management committees, factory administrators and property managers share the same position: night staff can neither be found nor afforded, while management fees and budgets have not moved. Rather than holding out until there is nobody left and the post simply goes empty, it is better to redesign night-time protection early.
- Your existing CCTV usually does not need replacing - if it supports standard streaming, it can be connected directly.
- Pricing is a monthly fee with no upfront hardware purchase, which is far easier to pass at a management committee meeting.
- You can start with selected hours and selected cameras, confirm the result, then expand.