Laws of Attraction Brings Deep Talent Insights to Singapore
The ‘Laws of Attraction’ theory stipulates that one can attract whatever they desire into one’s life simply by focusing all your energy and attention on it. While that sounds like a great way to get what you want, HR leaders know the process of attracting the best candidates with the right skills takes a little more effort than this.
Manifesting the talent your organisation needs stems from fully understanding and appealing to the key drivers and motivations of potential candidates. The motivators differ depending on gender, age, and level of experience – among other things – as JobStreet discovered via its robust survey of Singaporean talent.
The findings from the study – the largest recruitment study conducted in Singapore – have been laid out in JobStreet’s Laws of Attraction, a free recruitment tool to help organisations across Singapore better understand what makes local talent tick.
To launch Laws of Attraction, JobStreet Singapore invited some of the country’s leading HR professionals to an event at M Hotel on 15 November, to demonstrate the power of the data, as well as an opportunity to hear from HR leaders on their challenges and strategies for closing the talent gap.
To kick the day off, Chook Yuh Yng, Head of Transformation at SEEK Asia, the parent company of JobStreet, welcomed the crowd of over 90 HR professionals and provided an overview of the talent landscape in Singapore. She highlighted that today’s candidates are sophisticated, competition is fierce and organisations find it challenging to attract talent. She also emphasised the importance of data-driven insights for the HR industry and how the insights available from JobStreet’s Laws of Attraction tool can help teams across the island nation adjust their strategies to attract talent with the right skills and the right culture fit for the business.
JobStreet.com Singapore’s Country Manager, Chew Siew Mee, fully introduced the audience to Laws of Attraction, showcasing the tool’s persuasive insights, based on a survey conducted by KANTAR. The survey received over 7,000 respondents, 96% of whom are Singaporean and Singapore permanent residents between the ages of 18–65 and are either jobseekers or actively monitoring for new job opportunities.
Considering more than one-third of Singapore’s job vacancies in 2019 remained unfilled for six months or more – and that it took an average of three months to fill a niche role – segmented insights into the top motivators for Singaporean candidates remain hugely beneficial for HR teams looking to boost their talent strategies as they head into 2020.
The data from the survey provides JobStreet’s users with deep, actionable insights that can be broken down by industry, job role, seniority level, gender, age group. This provides a granular view that can be easily curated by HR teams according to the data that best suits their needs.
Beyond this, Laws of Attraction also provides an easy way to compare and contrast information. For example, a talent acquisition leader could easily determine the motivational differences between men in different age groups and then use those insights to tailor their recruitment strategies for different generations.
On this note, the next speaker, Daniel Peh, JobStreet’s Field Sales Manager, presented the intriguing key research findings on how to engage a multigenerational workforce by understanding how each generation learns, how they are motivated, and how they respond to challenges and opportunities in the workplace.
He highlighted that the Laws of Attraction survey showed that while Gen Z look for career growth when considering a new job opportunity, Millennials value freedom and flexibility, and Gen X wants stability.
As for older generations, 1 in 4 Singaporean seniors are still part of the workforce – an increase of 14% from a decade ago – and with Singapore raising the age of retirement in 2030, it will become more common for a mixture of generations to be working together. It’s imperative that workplaces understand not just how to attract multigenerational talent, but to use insights to understand how these different generations can best work together.
After the individual speakers, it was time for a panel discussion about the potential of Millennials to create a harmonious working environment across generations hosted by Byravee Iyer of Mutant Communications. The panel included Stephen Yee, Assistant Executive Director at SNEF; Sandeep Mookharjea, Head of HR APAC, AIG; and Steven Lee, VPHR, PSA Corporation Limited, all of whom come from HR teams in different industries and brought different perspectives on the topic.
The main takeaways included the panellists pointing out that intergenerational harmony is possible, but that training – especially for those employees managing people older than them for the first time – and teamwork are imperative.
Millennials are much more vocal than their older colleagues, which often means they spearhead changes, especially around diversity and inclusions as well as in facilitating workplace conversation about topics such as harassment and bullying. Further, the panellists agreed that Millennials, along with Gen Z, are ushering in a movement of confronting topics that Gen X and Baby Boomers would have found taboo or uncomfortable to speak about publicly. They also agreed that managers and businesses willing to allow such conversations often find higher employee engagement.
Beyond speaking up, the panelists discussed how it can be challenging for teams to balance HR policies and benefits packages to suit such a diverse group of employees when they have different expectations and desires. However, the three speakers agreed that although approaches to technology, compensation and work-life balance are prevalent between the generations, respect and transparency are still paramount to everyone. Encouraging these practices is the best way to find harmony between generations in the workplace.
The final session was led by Christine Chong, Regional Hirer Lead, SEEK Asia. After walking everyone through how to navigate Laws of Attraction, she challenged attendees by presenting case studies and asking each table to work together using the Laws of Attraction tool to identify candidates that fit the case study. (Coffee and shopping vouchers were up for grabs here, which made for great motivation!)
As the event came to a close, prizes were awarded, lunch was served and the audience was able to network before heading back to their offices, ready to use Laws of Attraction to bolster their talent recruitment strategies.
To view event photos, please visit Laws of Attraction: Industry Launch
To explore Laws of Attraction, please visit JobStreet’s Laws of Attraction tool.
To aid your talent attraction strategies, please download our Laws of Attraction ebook: