Talent expectations are changing due to the pandemic. More and more talents are now looking at jobs and industries that not only provide them financial security but also health safety and work flexibility. Even after the pandemic ends, companies offering these benefits are predicted to continue becoming jobseeker’s number one choice. Beyond that, students are also expressing keenness on taking scholarships that can provide them jobs after graduations. For these reasons, hiring managers must come prepared with long-term resourcing decisions, as well as prepare a strategy to attract and retain future talent pipelines.
Here’s what Managing Director of CareerBuilder Singapore Vinay Dua has to say about what future talent’s demand and what the HR team needs to prepare.
From my perspective, effective communications are key to managing teams in challenging situations. It provides us with the opportunity to create alignment around goals and objectives. When these are set, it becomes easier to review our progress. It is also critical that our teams have the right systems, resources and tools to carry out their work effectively and seamlessly.
We continue to move away from the activity-based model towards an outcome-based model; providing team members with the flexibility to operate with comfort and improves efficacy. In order to keep focused on outcomes, we make use of review frameworks to keep channels of communication open, and to encourage focus.
Based on the recent Budget 2021, we see the Government opting to take agency and work through the pandemic and angle recovery for the best-case scenario, or to rely on back-up plans if the pandemic turns more negative. There is a focus on ensuring that businesses will not only survive but thrive. It will be even more important that businesses and managers are reassured about future growth or earnings and use this time to focus on jobs, increase employee capabilities and remove skill mismatches.
At CareerBuilder Singapore, we continue to focus on upskilling and cross-skilling our existing team in preparation for upcoming platform and product milestones. We are also focusing more on soft skills, agility and data literacy, which we hope will become even more important during recovery and post-pandemic.
From our perspective, job creation is critical and we see 3 ways this can happen.
Employers need to be able to showcase job stability in whatever industry they are in, through different programmes such as digitalisation and automation, or upskilling. This is especially true for the hospitality sector, where some companies have shown the ability to pivot, and create creative avenues to ease recovery.
The hospitality industry can prepare its workforce for digital and technology trends such as machine learning and automation, for example, by training them as planners and operators. Once the recovery timeline becomes clearer, hospitality brands that are better prepared can build momentum quicker and differentiate themselves to customers with different digital and technology offerings.
CareerBuilder has the expertise to help employers create the optimal job seeker experience and support building the talent pipeline. For 13 years, the BrightSparks Scholarship & Education Survey by CareerBuilder continues to serve educators, the public and private sectors by partnering with them to manage strategy, resourcing and talent management through the provision of information about the career choices and preferences of young Singapore talent as they build their skills and competencies and navigate their way towards becoming career-ready.
Organisations that are looking to hire can use our survey findings to help with mid-term planning and resource allocation modelling and decisions related to their building and managing their talent pipeline.
CareerBuilder can work with talent acquisition teams and scholarship providers with tools such as BrightMinds, JobsCentral, and search through a registered jobseeker database as well as tap on virtual job fairs. We also provide access to JobsCentral Learning to help with employee upskilling, and other HR-focused tools such as Broadbean and CareerBuilder ATS.
Job security and stability continue to be hot topics, especially in the current environment. We noticed this trend already in 2019 with youth preferring stability through the industries and jobs preferences they shared.
By the time they enter the job market in 2025 – 2026, today’s graduates are looking for careers that offer career growth and opportunities, interesting job scopes, and job security. Youth are aware of their environment, and would have seen the impact of the pandemic on their family, as well as Government messaging on keeping job numbers and working capital stable through policies enacted.
It was not surprising to us to find that our youth have an eye on the ball, and are aware of the consequences of choices despite their relatively young age. They understand that in a post-pandemic world their ideal career path is determined by the value and capabilities they can bring to the table for their employer. They have every opportunity to be optimistic, given the right choices now to build their capability and value to future employers.
90 percent of JC, IB, and polytechnic students are furthering their education. We view this choice of further studies as capability building in a pandemic recovery market. This will help open doors to more potential industries they can join, and increase their value to prospective employers in the future.
Interestingly, even those that do not qualify for scholarships are still keen to pursue further studies and they are looking to their families, or pursuing part-time jobs, or using a MOE-funded tuition loan in order to pay their way. Scholarships are important for them to realise their future ambitions and aspirations by providing career growth and opportunity as well as an interesting job scope.
Organisations that are looking to hire can use our findings to help with mid-term planning and resource allocation modelling and decisions related to their building and managing their talent pipeline. We hope that employers and organisations will go through the findings around preferences for industries, sectors as well as the attributes talent is looking for in a career and act upon them.
Scholarship providers and employer organisations can seek to understand the environment their future talent is being shaped in, and work to attract these talents with the right mix of values and attributes that will help them employ, develop and retain them. Moreover, providers and organisations can create an employment brand and an engagement model. For example, the first step is to ensure that there is a consistent digital job seeker experience. Having an optimised career-site with an easy search and application process is critical.
What’s important in a strong talent market such as Singapore is to start building pipelines from an early stage with talent, and scout and monitor for potential high performers across multiple variables that go beyond academic performance. This can be done through a structured multi-year internship programme with conversion opportunities.
Employer organisations can look at the key attributes and values that talent have shared as important to them, and build a workplace culture and environment that recognises these priorities and align them with the organisation’s mission and goals. Look at building employee advocacy and referral programmes. We find this a highly effective channel and tactic to focus on.
About Vinay Dua:
Vinay Dua is the Managing Director of CareerBuilder Singapore. He has over a decade of experience with CareerBuilder, holding various strategic and leadership positions within the company. Vinay has the proven ability to create strategic priorities and methodological execution to drive transformation and growth. Before assuming his current role in 2019, he was managing the Human Capital Software Business for CareerBuilder India and was responsible for scaling it from the ground up.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
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