Latest HR News from Indonesia

The Chapman Consulting Group (ChapmanCG) has just returned from Jakarta where it took part in two key HR Leader groups in the Indonesian market. ChapmanCG believes it is important to bring together HR leaders to share best-practice ideas on the latest HR trends.

The Quarter 2 2013 HR Updates where hosted by Antam and Cargill. More than 30 HR leaders took part in each session, with everyone in attendance holding key HR roles with local and multinational companies. Amongst the 60 HR leaders that were met over two days included the best and brightest from the likes of Unilever, Energizer, Chevron, Citigroup, RBS, HSBC, 3M, Heinz, ANZ, Jones Lang Lasalle, Ericsson and many more.

At Antam, Wiwik Wahyuni, HR Head of Campbell Arnotts, gave a very interesting presentation on building a strong employee brand. Effendi Ibnoe, Head of Talent for Bakri Brothers, talked about the importance of building a strong leadership curriculum for high potential talent and spoke about how the organisation is successfully defining its top 100 talent. Achmad Ardianto, HR Director at Antam, gave a short presentation about Antam’s HR structure and the importance of encouraging the development of HR leaders with a strong business acumen.

At Cargill, Bagus Setiagung, HR leader at Cargill, talked about Cargill’s HR structure and talent strategy. He talked about the creative ways the organisation fast-tracks high potential talent and focuses a lot of attention on this. Marta Jonatan, HR Head at Microsoft, talked about driving talent value within the organisation. Microsoft is a lean and successful organisation in Indonesia, and appears to be doing well in retaining staff in a competitive market. Murosan Wiguna, Director HR and Human Affairs, at Tudung Group, spoke at length about how they are building better business brains within their HR team.

Some key observations, in summary, on the latest HR trends at play in the Indonesian HR talent market include:

1. Local companies continue to exert their influence over HR talent. It is interesting to see the growing trend of HR leaders from multinational companies moving across to large-scale local roles.
2. More and more local companies are offering multinational talent the opportunity to take on board regional roles, as these local companies “become multinational” in expanding their operations across the world.
3. The quality of local and multinational search firms in Indonesia is not keeping pace with market demands, as a result more companies are responding by doing smarter talent sourcing through linked-in and proactive networking.
4. HR salaries continue to “explode” and HR leaders and upcoming HR talent continue to see large annual jumps in salaries. More companies, particularly multinational ones, are using multiple retention bonuses to lock key staff for the future.
5. More HR leaders are taking “risks” on non-HR talent, given the critical shortage of HR educated practitioners emerging from universities. HR leaders are taking bright internal talent from areas like marketing, law and accounting, and testing their capability in HR.