The Chapman Consulting Group Q3 APAC Staffing Heads Update

The Chapman Consulting Group co-hosted the Q3 Regional Staffing Heads update at the offices of Cisco in Singapore. Cisco were great hosts and a number of the APAC Talent Acquisition team joined us for the session. Attendees included APAC Staffing Heads from the technology, manufacturing, financial services and hospitality sectors. It was a lively and insightful session with plenty of knowledge sharing.

William Chin, Regional Head of Talent Acquisition at Qualcomm who attended the session, summarised some of the takeaways he took from the session on his blog: see
http://www.asiahrblog.com/2011/09/singapore-regional-staffing-leads-meet.html.

William was particularly interested in innovation occurring around internal mobility: ‘Line managers are always nervous about losing employees and down-time to finding a replacement. A leading bank had an innovative approach to managing internal mobility guidelines: 2+2 and 3+3. Work two years in a job, give two months notice or 3 years and 3 months before petitioning for internal positions. This is something every company should consider deploying. The rules are simple and easy to understand. There is no bureaucracy.’

Here are the top themes that we felt had evolved in the staffing space since the last quarterly update :

1. Mobility programmes are impinging more on in-house recruitment teams. Headhunting within your own company is becoming more of a viable avenue for talent, although there are still complications to be managed for this to succeed.
2. Referral programmes are being given more emphasis. Traditionally restricted to internal (current employees referring talent) referrals, some firms are experimenting with rewards for independent recommendations of talent.
3. Social Media is still a hot topic but a lot of leaders are still wrestling with the justification of cost versus impact. New features on LinkedIn, including the company job page filtering jobs to match the viewers background, were exciting to note.
4. We noticed varying levels of activity dependent on industry/company and no clear trend was market wide. Financial Services staffing leaders felt the next quarter would slow whilst Technology companies were hiring heavily.
5. Creative solutions to fill complex roles included tapping populations more open to flexible working. These included mothers who would prefer to work from home, bringing retired talent back into the workforce and hiring servicemen when they finish with the military.