BLOGStreet, from JobStreet.com

Wanted: well-rounded candidates with leadership skills

As the labour market tightens, organisations worldwide are strengthening their employer value propositions to appeal to young talents, writes SUZIEANA UDA NAGU in The New Straits Times this week.

She quoted British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad (BAT) human resources director Cheryl Wong as saying: "In the spirit of diversity, BAT prefers hiring a mix of foreign and locally trained Malaysians. We believe that diversity brings better solutions, which translate into better business sense. People with different experience will bring something unique to the table."

She comes across impressive local graduates among the shortlisted candidates. However, she admitted that they were getting harder to find. "We want well-rounded candidates who possess the leadership skills we look for, as well as good academic qualifications and effective communication skills. Being a multinational company, we do need people who communicate well in English," says Wong.

She feels it is a shame when some local candidates show "impressive track record in academic and extra-curricular activties but cannot express themselves well."

Wong is not the only employer faced with the challenge of finding suitable candidates. Despite the global recession and the weakest employment outlook in decades, employers worldwide are still finding it difficult to hire young people to fill positions which require critical skills such as leadership, teamwork and problem-solving.

The newspaper article quoted the United Nations as stating that "one of the top three socio-economic issues facing the planet is the lack of talent despite population increases,"  underlining the worry that talent shortage is indeed a global concern.

In the United States, human resource experts predict a critical skills gap in organisations in the next five years. Possibly by 2014, there would be a 30 per cent decline in young workers entering the workforce and a 50 per cent growth in retirement of skilled knowledge workers. Their concern was that as the situation grew more serious, it could threaten "the engines of world economic growth and prosperity." Governments globally are taking measures to mitigate the impending shortage such as improving educational and vocational training provisions, adopting strategic migration policies and encouraging experienced older workers to remain in employment.

JECI poll, Aug 2009

Confidence in the job market in this region continues to improve in Aug 2009.

• In Malaysia, the JobStreet ECI trended higher for the sixth consecutive month by improving to 50.2 points, an increase of 0.5 point over the July index of 49.7 points. Since February this year, the JobStreet ECI for Malaysia has gone up by 7.1 points.
• The JobStreet ECI for Singapore has been relatively stable in the past three months, remaining almost unchanged since June when it registered at 43.5 points. In July, the index was at 43.4 while the August index for Singapore settled at 43.3 points.
• Stability is also observed in the JobStreet ECI for the Philippines where the August index ended at 56.9 points. In July, the index was at 57.0 points, which was a small drop of 0.1 point from the previous month.
• There seemed to be a lot of confidence in job market for Indonesia as their JobStreet ECI continued to move up in recent months. For August, their index rose by a further 0.8 point to 52.8 from the July index of 52.0 points.
• However in India, we noted a slight softening in their employment confidence for the second consecutive month. For August, the JobStreet ECI declined slightly to 57.2 points, which was a drop of 0.3 point from the 57.5 registered in July. In June, their index level was at 57.9 points.

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The JobStreet.com Employment Confidence Index (ECI) is a measure of job seeker confidence in finding a job in the countries where we hold our monthly polls.

Get Instant Access to your job matches with JobStreet RSS feed

Everyday when I log in to my computer and open my Firefox browser, I can just click on ONE button and see the new jobs for the day - that matched my requirements.

You can do that too easily, with the RSS feed feature provided by JobStreet, supported by most internet browsers (that we call IE, Firefox, Chrome etc).

Here's an example of how you can set it up on your Firefox browser.

Step 1

Login to your MyJobStreet account, look under My Jobs - LiNa Job Alerts.  Assuming you have already setup your Job Alert profile, just click on the View Jobs link.

Step 2

Look for the orange color RSS button on your browser, to the right of the box where you enter website addresses (URL).  Click on that button and you will see this page:

 

Click on the Subscribe Now button.  And watch your job matches magically appear on your Firefox like this:

 

Note that you can also make use of the RSS feed while you are just searching for jobs on JobStreet.com - you can create an "RSS Feed" instantly.

Another little example of how to do it using Internet Explorer.

Step 1

When you search and found the list of jobs you like - click on the orange RSS button on your toolbar:

 

Step 2

Click on the "Subscribe to this feed" link.

And now you can access the latest jobs on your IE

 

And they are many more ways you can make use of RSS feed. Stay tuned and we'll show you how to create a "New Jobs for me Alert" on your iGoogle home page (like this):

Getting hungry on the job

There's a debate going on that says local graduates are not hungry enough to look for work and their attitude could be a reason for the high unemployment among this group of people.

According to a report in The Star in Nov 2005, there is truth in the observation that local graduates are less competitive when it comes to looking for jobs. Even those who have found employment are often not serious enough in their work and they expect quick promotions because they are graduates. Thus, many employers are put off by some job seekers who expect good pay and perks when they should be trying to convince the management of the advantages of recruiting them.

Employers are choosy as they must be sure that their prospective employees meet the company’s requirements and can make positive contributions once hired. But some fresh graduates are choosier than the employers because, coming from a middle-income background, they can afford to be out-of-work longer as their families have the financial means to look after them.

On the other hand, there are many graduates in desperate need of jobs. They need to look after themselves and their families or to repay loans they borrowed to finance their education. But due to their shortcomings, they are unable to convince companies to hire them or to give them a chance to prove themselves.

Lack of communication skills and a weakness with languages, especially English, are among the handicaps faced by many applicants. Even though the government pours in millions to retrain them over a few short months, these handicaps cannot be overcome easily.

The newspaper suggests that instead of worrying about their global rankings, local universities should be more concerned with providing the right courses to make their undergraduates more marketable and competitive. There is still no light at the end of the tunnel, the newspaper commented, and the public universities must start serious work in dealing with it. It added that a sure sign of success would be that local graduates could fit into both the local and foreign job markets and those involved in such a project must make this happen as quickly as possible.

What makes you more employable?

Two recent overseas surveys posed questions to employers to find out what they want from their graduate recruits. The consensus is that employers want intelligent and enthusiastic individuals who can organise and plan their work and interact with others effectively. Some of these skills are already honed in the university or college, but others will need to be developed outside your studies. Your applications will be more convincing if you can point to a range of situations in which you developed the skills the employers seek and make yourself more employable. Here then are the highlights of the surveys.

University of Central England’s Employer Satisfaction survey
Recruiters were asked to rank 60 skills in order of importance. The top 12 listed as most important were:

    * Willingness to learn
    * Commitment
    * Dependability/reliability
    * Self-motivation
    * Team work
    * Communication skills (oral)
    * Co-operation
    * Communication skills (written)
    * Drive/energy
    * Self-management
    * Desire to achieve/motivation
    * Problem-solving ability

Yet another research gave the picture of a complete graduate as requiring another set of skills which are rather similar to the UCE survey.

Read more here!

Internships and how they helped today’s successful CEOs

The importance of internships have are often overlooked, but for a lot of CEOs who would eventually make million (or billion) dollar decisions, it was the starting point of something bigger.

Making full use of their internships, some were hardened by their experience, gaining resilience and persistence along the way. Others gained insights into the industry and realized what they were truly passionate about. Those fortunate enough to work under visionaries and revolutionaries in their field, learned lessons in both personal and professional areas, lessons which will guide them throughout the rest of their lives.

Click here to read the Forbes.com story of CEOs and their internship experiences

P.S: If you know someone who is looking for internships, send them this link. Just click on the links below for internships on JobStreet.com

Malaysia | Singapore | Philippines | 

How much can you save?

We are presently running a poll on our Malaysian website to ask job seekers to estimate how much they could accumulate in their Employees Provident Fund (EPF) by the time they retire. The EPF is a statutory body in Malaysia which collects monthly contributions from both employers and employees, and an employee can only withdraw from his account under special recognised circumstances. Normally, when a person retires, he should be able to withdraw the whole lump sum in his account.

The results of this poll indicated that a vast majority of employees only have a vague idea of their accumulated savings. About a third of the respondents believed that they would have less than RM200,000 in their EPF Account, while about 28 percent said that their saivings would be between RM200,000 and RM500,000. Another 17 percent thought that their accumulated savings would be between half-a-million to one million ringgit, while only 22 percent firmly believed that they could get at least RM1 million from their savings.

Considering that an average person would be working between 30 and 40 years during his lifetime, an accumulation of RM200,000 or less would be a gross underestimation. Just check for yourself: take your present annual salary, work out what's 20 percent of it (consisting of both employer and employee contributions) and multiply by 30 years. it's already a healthy sum and this does not even consider your annual increments and the interest that is compounded on the savings.

Happy new networker

Networking, according to Will Kintish, is vital to our career and commercial success, but few of us do it naturally. He says that being a confident and effective networker will set us apart from the crowd. It raises our profile, helps us feel more in control and creates more opportunities for us to advance and develop our interests.

In 2005, a survey found that 60 per cent of the reason why individuals rose to the top in large organisations was because they were seen more often by more people.

But most of us find it a challenge because it's a question of fearing to be noticed. How visible are you, he asked. Are you doing a great job but stay hidden within the confines of your department? When you are at the coffee machine, do you strike up conversations with other colleagues from other departments?

He puts the fear down to three factors: the fear of failure, the fear of rejection and the fear of leaving your comfort zone.

Click here to read the full article from Will Kintish.

Would you be helping to organise your company's social event?

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Is this a sign of our cultural strength (or cultural weakness, depending on how you want to look at it)?

Recently, when we thought up this poll to find out how the members would react when their companies organise a social event for the staff, we were surprised by the deep differences in this region.

The vast majority of people in the Philippines and Indonesia indicated that they would wholeheartedly contribute to organising their company's social event: 71 percent of those polled in the Philippines and an astounding 81 percent of Indonesians.

In Singapore, only 34 percent of those polled said that they would happily chip in to help but in Malaysia, the percentage sank even lower at 28 percent. We are wondering why the attitude of Malaysians and Singaporeans is so different from the Indonesians and the Filipinos. And incredibly too, 35 percent of Malaysians polled said that they would give excuses not to go to the event. In Singapore, it was only 10 percent.

Mother's Day contest winners show Mum they care

If you have been participating in our Mother's Day contest last month, we'd like to thank you for your participation. We had asked you to share with us on how you spent Mother's day and what it meant to you. We received many entries: some were funny, some were cute while others were very touching. Here are our picks for the blog:

By Nurul Faizah Binti Mohd Salleh

Setiap tahun saya dan adik beradik seramai 11 orang semuanya (termasuk dua orang kakak ipar), pasti akan menyambut setiap Hari Jadi, Hari Ibu Dan Hari Bapa serta menjadikan setiap perayaan tersebut untuk mengeratkan hubungan kekeluargaan antara kami.

Namun bagi tahun ini, Abah telah dimasukkan ke hospital empat hari sebelum Hari Ibu berikutan darah tinggi yang kronik. Selama Abah berada di hospital, Mama tidak pernah letih menjaga abah siang malam bagi memastikan keadaan abah pulih seperti sediakala.

Untuk menceriakan keadaan yang tiba-tiba suram akibat kerisauan terhadap keadaan abah, kami adik beradik telah membuat perancangan untuk membuat kejutan untuk mama.

Jam 8.45pagi pada 10 Mei 2009, kami telah tiba di wad abah ditempatkan. Walaupun belum tiba waktu melawat, Along telah berjaya memujuk pengawal yang bertugas untuk membenarkan kami 11 orang. Setelah masuk, mama yang sedang memberi sarapan kepada abah agak terkejut melihat kehadiran kami. Kami terus salam dan memeluk mama sambil mengucapkan 'Selamat Hari Ibu'. Dari riak wajah mama, dapat saya lihat wajah terharu beliau. Namun pada kami semua itu belum cukup untuk membalas jasa mama kepada kami dan keluarga ini.

Mama, terima kasih atas budi dan jasamu. Kami sayang mama.

Yang Ikhlas,

Anak-anak Zainap 

 

By Firdaus

My mother is illiterate but she is the best. During my growing years, she woke up early to prepare breakfast and cater to our needs.  Without fail, she whispered encouragement words before we went to school.

When I was in Standard One, I had to complete a full page of alphabet ‘S’ as my school homework of which I was clueless.  Being a small kid, I cried.  Neither my mother nor father could help because both are illiterate! My mother consoled me and said nothing is impossible in this world. That windy night, she brought me to our neighbour’s daughter who taught me and finally I completed my homework.

‘Nothing is impossible in this world’ is part of my principal in life.

She instilled more values in me but due to limited space, I have to stop here.

Mother, you are my inspiration.  Thanks for all your soothing advice, love and patience.  It is my moment to shower you with the greatest love.  End of this month, you will undergo another eye cataract operation.  Let me be with you again similar to last year and we reflect back those sweet memories that mould me to be who I am today....

By William Ng

Mothers are unique, irreplaceable and indispensable". This was the message I uttered to my mum on this very special day. This year, the celebration was very different from usual. It is my first time away from home studying abroad but the thoughts for Mother's Day still remains in my heart.

As pure as it may sound, a little card, though tiny sums up all my messages is what she did not expect to receive on Mother's Day this year. We missed the constant "arguments" we used to have back home but her gentle voice over the telephone sheds tears and laughter whenever we misses each other. Nonetheless, my mother is who she is. She is sweet, simple and loving.

Thanks very much once again for participating and sharing with us!

PS: Father’s Day is just around the corner. Take time to tell him you care :) From all of us here at JobStreet.com, thank you!