What went wrong in Singapore recruitment in 2012

What went right in 2012 for recruitment / staffing in Singapore

· Growth in outsourcing – Singapore continues (as much of the rest of the world) in adopting outsourced solutions as part of positive business practices. A recent report by the Everest Group tipped global RPO to have grown significantly in 2012.

· Desire to bring more talent back to APAC from the rest of the world

· Increasing in employer branding – we’re seeing far more organisations in Singapore talk about themselves to their candidates and networks, and leverage their own employer brands to attract the right people that fit their organisation.

· Social media usage – Singapore has once again proven itself ahead of nearest neighbours in the uptake of social media systems as part of regular recruitment activities – when we surveyed recruiters across Asia Pacific, Singaporeans came out tops in their breadth of use, frequency of use, diversity of use and effective use of social media as a resourcing tool.

This innovativity can’t be underplayed and we certainly weren’t surprised to see Singapore in the top 3 innovative nations in July!

What went wrong in 2012 for recruitment / staffing in Asia

· Ever decreasing use of recruitment agencies. There have been real pain points for recruitment agencies across APAC recently and it’s in part driven by the ongoing evolution of HR as a reactive tactical department to a proactive strategic department.

As mentioned above, we’re seeing far more organisations choosing to do their recruitment directly to candidates and cut out the middle man rather than go through recruitment agencies who charge a fee for placement.

When HR and recruitment teams own something on behalf of their companies, they do it very well – and combined with the efforts on expanding employer branding, it’s no surprise that companies are engaging directly with the people that they want to hire.

We live in a day and age where there is unheralded opportunity to connect directly with large communities of people, and we’re seeing organisations move rapidly to take advantage of that.

What was surprising in 2012

· The slow uptake of social and mobile by HR teams in APAC – there are tens of millions of people walking round capital cities in Asia holding a personal computer to their ear.

Singapore in particular has seen significant growth in mobile usage – 77% of Singaporeans said they could not leave home without their mobile phones, and 60% say they want mobile websites to be as easy to use as computer websites – yet HR has been very very slow to ensure that candidates who use mobile are fully accommodated.

· Continued low use of cloud computing techniques – IT and technology departments, who are often quite slow to pick up new technologies, have embraced ‘the cloud’ and virtualisation.

HR has certainly not followed suit. While some of the resourcing technologies and HR technologies have moved into cloud-based systems, there are few – if any – virtualisations of HR tasks, where many could be implemented.

Top 5 things we expect to happen in 2013 – general landscape of business and recruitment in 2013

· Increasing use of technology – yep, we say it every year, but there will be an increase in the levels of technology being used – across the board – across the park.

· Increasing import of marketing skills into HR functions – realistically, HR is a people marketing service, and progressive HR departments will keep ‘borrowing’ tactics and strategies from the marketing world.

· Increasing specialisation of task – the growth of roles such as the sourcer across APAC – there’s no such thing as an HR generalist any more, as HR crosses into so many areas.

· Further shift to direct hiring from agencies – linked to the above evolution of HR as an owner / driver of the people agenda – HR and recruitment are now much more hands-on and practical about the touchpoints in the candidate lifecycle.

For many, this means using recruitment agencies as an enhancement to their direct hiring programmes, rather than previous models where agency usage is the norm.

Top 5 things to aim for / achieve in 2013 – general ideas of what companies should be doing – both candidates and enterprise perspective

(see above)

What you need to ‘get to grips with’ in 2013 – brave new world kind of stuff

· Mobile!

· Social media as it evolves

· Experiential marketing to bring a brand to life

· Employer brand embedded throughout the lifecycle