BLOGStreet, from JobStreet.com

JECI poll, July 2008

It was as expected. Though the effect was delayed, we anticipated the JobStreet Employee Confidence Indices could dip in July, and they did so in three of the four countries where we run our JECI poll monthly. Job seekers are generally getting more concerned about the impact of higher consumer prices on the job market in their respective countries.

In Malaysia, the JobStreet ECI dropped to 47.9 from a month earlier. The decline had been felt slowly since March but this drop came in the wake of the increased fuel and food prices. In Singapore, the JobStreet ECI settled at 53.5 from 54.0 a month earlier. In India, the decline in employee confidence continued with the JobStreet ECI registering a drop to 66.1 index points. The only country to buck this trend was the Philippines where job seekers expressed more confidence in the employment market in July than in June, pushing the index up to 57.3 points.

The JobStreet.com Employment Confident Index is a measurement of job seeker confidence in finding a job in the countries where we hold our monthly polls.

An unlikely recruit

Every now and then, we come across some quirky news from around the world. For example, there's this news that a drawf, standing barely 1.2m in his socks, had been recruited - yes, recruited - by a gang of burglars!

Of course, the recruitment wasn't done in the normal channel that we will expect from every law-abiding company but nonetheless, it set off wide grins here in the office when we read about it. Don't, please don't, use JobStreet.com for such activities, okay? Perish the thought, ha ha!!

Here's the picture of the news report that appeared in the Telegraph:

You can read the full story here.

I love my job photo contest

Hot on the heels of the I Love My Job contest in Malaysia, we are now running the contest in Singapore! If you haven't submitted your photo entry yet, why not do it today? You could just walk away with a brand new Nikon DSLR D80!

All you need to do is send us your digital photograph with a caption describing why you love your job. The picture could be of you at your workstation, in your office, together with your office mates or whatever you feel that best portrays the contest theme.

Participation is FREE OF CHARGE and you stand to win a host of exciting prizes.  You only need to be a JobStreet.com member, regardless of whether you’ve found your job through us or not. So, hurry and submit your photo before 15 Aug 2008.

For more details of this contest, click here.

Alexa's traffic tracking tool

I haven't been visiting the Alexa.com website for quite a while. Possibly, it had been almost a year ago that I went to check how Alexa was tracking visitors to JobStreet.com. But last week, something prodded me to revisit Alexa.

If you don't know much about Alexa Internet Inc, it's a company that provides web traffic information to users. Alexa itself is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. The web traffic data changes daily but over a medium term, it provides a relatively good picture of a website's popularity or usefulness. Some say that Alexa's statistics is not accurate but many people still continue to use Alexa statistics as a benchmark or yardstick. This becomes very useful when you want to make relative comparison between different websites.

For example, when I was visiting Alexa earlier, I could actually view the graph that tracked visits to JobStreet.com over the past year. I could view the traffic history according to reach, rank and page views. What's more, I decided to make a comparison between JobStreet.com and another online recruitment website. As you can see from the picture, it's a real cool comparison tool.

Alexa also gives information on how a website ranks in popularity among Internet users. Taking JobStreet.com again as an example, I see that our overall ranking in the world is 820, meaning this is among the top 1,000 websites globally.

BTW, Alexa provides a very nifty toolbar that you can instal into your browser software. Once installed, you'll see a small unobstrusive graph at the bottom corner of the browser that gives the latest tracking information. So far, I see it working only on computers that use Internet Explorer and FireFox. Download this toolbar and give it a try if you're using any of these browsers.

Jerry Seinfeld's three rules of life

Jerry Seinfeld, the American stand-up comedian, was featured on a talk show that I was watching briefly yesterday as I darted in and out of my living room. I don't know whether you have heard of his Three Rules Of Life? He was talking about them yesterday and I thought to myself, yes, they make very good sense!

So what are they, Seinfeld's three rules of life, and how can they apply to us in our everyday lives?

First rule: bust your ass. What he was trying to say was, live your life to the fullest. Whatever you do, try your hardest. Just give it your best shot. Be exceptional in what you do. Follow your passion. Just work your darn hardest.

Second rule: pay attention. Pay attention to everything that is going on around you: the details in your work, the way you learn, the way you talk and communicate with others. Understand the bigger picture and how you fit into the grand scheme of things.

Third rule: fall in love. Make the world a better place. Everything that you do, fall in love with them. Fall in love with life - your job, your business, your customers, your services and products, your families. Cause people around you to fall in love with their lives. Fall in love with the environment and bask in the glory of nature.

JECI poll, June 2008

June was not a particularly good month for countries in the South and South-East Asian regions as the spiralling price of fuel began to impact on the cost of living of the people.

Nevertheless, the impending rise in inflation does not seem to have adversely affected the job market yet.

In the four countries where JobStreet.com has been running our monthly Employment Confidence Index (JECI), we noticed that the indices are still relatively holding stable.

In Singapore, their JECI held at 54.0 points, only a 0.1 point down from the previous month.

In the Philippines, their JECI was also relatively stable, ending the month at 56.4, down by 0.3 points.

In Malaysia, their JECI also dropped by 0.3 points to 48.9 in June. Their JECI has been in a slow decline since March when the index touched a year-high of 51.8

In India, their JECI has also been slowly declining since January. For June, the index had settled at 67.8.

The JobStreet.com Employment Confident Index is a measurement of job seeker confidence in finding a job in the countries where we hold our monthly polls.

Outsourcing rankings

We've just noticed a blogsite that quoted an A.T. Kearney research paper to rank the top outsourcing countries in the world in 2007. The ranking was based on three factors: financial attractiveness (costs outsourcing); people score (availability of skilled workers) and economic/political environment.

The ranked list, according to A.T. Kearney:
India - 6.9
China - 6.6
Malaysia - 6.1
Thailand - 6
Brazil - 5.9
Indonesia - 5.9
Chile - 5.8
Philippines - 5.8
Bulgaria - 5.8
Mexico - 5.7

Regional JECIs hold steady in May despite uncertainties

Here are the latest graphs for the JobStreet Employment Confidence Index (JECI) in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and India, as at the end of May 2008.

The JECI in Malaysia held steady in May 2008, dipping just 0.5 index points from Apr 2008.

In Singapore, the JECI has been in slow decline since Feb 2008 but in May, it improved slightly over the Apr data.

The JECI in the Philippines has been showing some volatility in recent months as it hovers between a tight range of 3.0 index points since the beginning of the year.

And in India, employment confidence remains high despite the slight monthly fluctuations.

Can this be a First on JobStreet.com?

Today's blog item is NOT a publicity promotion for any organisation. It's just that we couldn't help wondering whether it's a first for JobStreet.com.

We noticed this advertisement by a Malaysian political party which is looking for suitable candidates to fill various positions for its party newsletter.

It just goes to show that when it comes to filling positions, Internet recruitment methods are coming more and more into the mainstream. Today's employers are feeling more comfortable with recruiting through online methods than, say, five years ago.

Graduates of overseas universities fair better than local grads in salary scale

A study that we conducted recently revealed that of the 100,000-plus JobStreet.com members in Malaysia who hold a Bachelor degree and are currently working in the country, graduates from overseas universities on average earn about 12 percent more than local graduates.

The salary gap is most apparent among those with up to five years of work experience where overseas graduates are earning a significant 20 percent more than their local counterparts.  Even after 10 years or more of work experience, the gap is still more than 10 percent.

In terms of job specialization, the biggest salary gap between overseas and local graduates is in business-related fields such as management, economics, finance and marketing where overseas graduates earn about 15 percent more than local graduates.

In the engineering and IT/Computer fields, salaries are about 11 percent higher for overseas graduates.

We also did a similar study among 20,000 JobStreet.com members in Singapore and we observed that there is no significant difference between the salaries of graduates from local Singaporean universities and overseas universities even after five or 10 years of work experience.

In conclusion, a Malaysian who graduates from a local Malaysian university earns on average a lower salary than those who graduate from an overseas university. There were no significant difference in salaries that exists among graduates in Singapore. 

Note: For this research, the term “overseas” refers to the top three most popular overseas destinations for tertiary studies - Australia, Great Britain and United States - and includes twinning programmes.