HR Challenges in 2011

Singapore’s employment market in 2011 will experience a Shortage of Skilled Specialised resource, candidate’s mobility and social media will be the issues most HR will be experiencing.

Skills shortages

Singapore’s jobs market is now healthy with levels of movement across different levels of management and administration fluidity, with our current strong economy and new companies coming on line it is time to look beyond the handy “carrot” of compensation and benefits would do for you.

A diminishing pool of talent in many specialist areas is the biggest threat to growth, which is why the ability to overcome skills shortages, particularly in the Banking, Engineering, Marine and IT industries, will become the defining characteristic of the employment market in 2011.

The pressure in transferring/ hiring resource from other parts of the world is the catalyst for many of the other issues we expect to dominate in 2011, like salary inflation, increase in counter offers and recruiting from overseas.”

The current employment issues for 2011 will be:

1. Skills shortages

A strong financial hub and Shenton Way filled with good quantity of qualified banking professionals. This professional group of people will be expect an increase of calls from headhunters representing rival companies in the Asian markets. It is time for employers to assess and rethink what they can offer in order to attract and retain their talents.

The IT industry will be booming in the next 18 months. With more companies from the US and Euro setting up their Regional Headquarters and outsourcing their Data Centres needs in Asia which further saturated the market talent pool; software engineering personnel will be very difficult to find.

There will be various strategies implied to overcome the skills shortage in 2011; and every success will saturate the candidate market further, which will have consequences for all employers looking on unorthodox ways and programs to recruit.

2.Salary Inflation

Salary expectations of employees are rising along with a strong economy and a strong employment market. Employers may respond to the growing increase in shortage of skills with a greater willingness to review salaries and employ foreign resources. Headhunting will be adding to salary inflation.
The professional talents with skills in demand will expect a healthy salary increase in 2011.
Otherwise, they will enter the jobs market.

3. Counter offer
Employers will have to do better to retain their talent in the face of a talent shortage market.
A successful counter offer involves more than just money – employers need to address the underlying issues of why their employee decided to look for a new job in the first place and usually is the environment, clear communications in career path planning and the fringe benefits that played the part in their options to leave. However, there will be chances of that new employee you just hired would back out at the last minute after inking the offer letter.

4. Recruiting from overseas
Employers will need to rely on recruiting foreign resource for their increasing list of skills in demand, especially in the IT industries for networks and call centres. However, there remains a lot of reluctance about this particular strategy for helping to overcome skills shortages. Employers will need to re-work their budget and plans by another 20% increase in spending to overcome their problems

5. Prevention

A slow increasing number of skilled Singaporeans are heading overseas for work following improvements to the international markets.
China, Australia and Europe in particular is a clear attraction.


Employers in Singapore need to start looking beyond just salary and benefits to retain their staff, A solid career development plans and a conducive workplace environment is key too.
As the employers in that part of the world are using attractive bonus program, family health and life insurance, transportation reimbursements, stock options and personal well-being benefits program to attract talents
It is time to get more creative when it comes to workforce retention in order to hold onto key management staff


6. Growing influences of Linkedin and Facebook
The use of social media will be become more mainstream in 2011.
Savvy employers will use social media to cross-reference candidates’ or attract potential employees.
Furthermore, a lot of employers are using this media to freely advocate about their attractive corporate environment when recruiting.
Hence, in 2011 it will be not just job seekers that need to ensure their online profile remains professional and constantly update with latest happenings, but all employers too.

The War for Talent is ON

With the current world economies on its way to recovery, the hiring activities have since change from its lukewarm campaign to an all out war for manpower due to the increase of customer demands and business deals that have been halted due to the flailing economy are revived from its abyss again. Suddenly, all those candidates there were there during the credit crunch are not there anymore, to make matters worse, they joined your competitors.

For most HR professionals, the market have begun pick up to face demands from their business users/ Hiring managers; for Business Development for the sales force and project related staff are in the pipelines, there is your programmers, project managers, business development and engineers etc… to core of the engine for their organization.

Before most HR professionals go on a shopping spree or aggressive an advice they need to heed before embarking on the path to war.

We live in an economy in which all work is becoming knowledge in which intellectual capital is important for company success.
The value in the capital markets, there is an assumption that “the company with the best talent wins.” This war for talent imagery overlooks the fact that it is often the case that effective teams often outperform even more talented collections of individuals, that individual talent and motivation is partly under the control of what companies do, and that what matters to organizational success is the set of management practices that create the culture.

But it is not just that the war for talent is the metaphor for organizational success. Fighting the war for talent itself can cause problems.

Companies that adopt a talent war mind set often wind up venerating outsiders and downplaying the talent already inside the company, set up competitive, zero sum dynamics that makes internal learning and knowledge transfer difficult, activate the self-fulfilling prophecy in the wrong direction, and create an attitude of arrogance instead of an attitude of wisdom. For all of these reasons, even fighting the war for talent may be hazardous to an organization’s health and detrimental to doing the things that will make it successful.
There was certainly no lack of talent at some companies but it collapsed. The economic problems of the world today are caused largely by investment banks; whom were known to hire to best people who were paid the highest salaries. It turned out the high salaries didn't buy integrity...it didn't even buy competence and a basic sense of responsibility. It was this collection of "talents" with a lot hubris that brought so much economic pain the world…
Look around you - do you see any other group of talents that are just as arrogant...believing they are the only talents in our society
Not anymore after the credit crunch. The talents nowadays realize that the best companies are the ones stable and flexible during the crunch. Companies that have been busy at cutting off whoever they can offload during the trying times got to work on their image. The market knows.. oh yes..the market knows..

Most HR professionals should be mindful that they better be careful because talents too will bring you pain.
We all want the best talents for our organization to do what we do better but we have to be careful not to foster a culture of arrogance that can breed hubris. There is one thing I observe in people - passion, honesty and hard work can overcome the lack of talent. If we as a society believe that results can be bought with money, just pay money to solve our problems with human resource- we are guaranteed to end up like one of the banks that brought the credit crunch.

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What happens in a war for talent?

There is:

• An invariable emphasis on individual performance (rewarding the individual stars), thereby diminishing teamwork, creating destructive internal competition, and retarding learning and the spread of best practices inside the company;

• A tendency to glorify the talents of those outside the company and downplay the skills and abilities of insiders, leading to a loss of motivation on the part of those inside the firm and to their turnover(thereby ensuring that the recruiting challenge will be even greater asthe company tries to replace those that has inadvertently sent packing elsewhere);

• The creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy where those labeled as less able become less able because they are asked to do less, given fewer resources, training, and mentoring, and become discouraged, in the process ensuring that the organization has way too many people who are in the process of dropping out of the competitive fray;

• A de-emphasis on fixing the systemic, cultural, and business process issues that are invariably much more important for enhancing performance, as the company seeks success solely through getting the right people in the door;

• And finally, the development of an elitist, arrogant attitude—once you have successfully competed in the war for talent, you have the best people—an attitude that makes building a wise organization almost impossible; in wise organizations, people know that they know and they know what they don’t know. Companies that think they are winning the war for talent think they are so full of smart people that they know everything!"

1. Take time to identify what you're really talking about. In a world of platitudes, high potentials, excellence, star performers (fill in your favorite), it's easy to overstate what you need. I'm not talking about lowering standards; I'm talking about raising the reality factor.

2. Do your recruiting systems make it easy for candidates or discourage them?
Online applications are the norm. Yet I can tell you from first-hand experience that many of the websites are clunky, user-unfriendly, and periodically inoperative. I've watched job candidates go through numerous screens, fill in data, and 30 minutes later watch it disappear when they clicked "submit." But it wasn't submitted. It disappeared.

3. Get people in front of people. Fine, you want online applications that are screened by keywords? Then stop telling the world that you are looking for "that unique individual who will add to our diverse workforce." Unless of course you are looking for binary people. Look, we all know that relationships matter. If it takes a month for a candidate to see, or even talk to, a real manager or recruiter, they're gone. If you at least call me right away and ask me interesting questions and tell me about your organization, I'm still interested even though I may get a call from some other firm.

4. If you're recruiting on campus or at a job fair, actually take and use the resumes given to you. Then follow up.
One of my lessons is that a situation when your star player leaves is quite often a good thing after all. You're forced to reorganize the team because chances aren't good that you'll find another person which exactly suits the gap. Quite often you end up with healthier organization, of course the prerequisite is to have changes implemented wisely.

Another lesson, which is general but applies in talent recruitment too, is that you should always use the common sense. There are positions where I need talented and rather complete person, although I prefer to employ people who are yet to be formed as employees. It all depends on the situation, the role in the team, the timeline, the person, the product etc.


Last but not least I leave you with this thoughts to ponder –

There are two dangerous things that I've observed amongst the War for Talent ideas. First is the idea that talent is some kind of undifferentiated value. Talent will only work for your company if you recruit the talent that will fit your culture.

Superstars are over-rated, but systems are under-rated. There's plenty of research pointing to the fact that even the most talented folks can't do great work in a lousy system.

Teams don't get talked about much in War for Talent, but business is a team sport. War for Talent recommends forced ranking procedures and reward systems that are toxic to good teams.