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Corporate Singapore has emerged from last year’s gloom with a surge of confidence and optimism in 2010. The air of optimism is evident across most industries with employers prepared to replace their lost headcount and expand their workforce, whilst at the same time working harder to retain their existing talent.
As always, it is the Banking sector that has shown the strongest resurgence. Coming out of deep staff cuts in late 2008 and 2009, financial institutions are now looking to replace and expand their talent force to support growth plans in the region. While strengthening their Wealth Management teams remains the top priority for most banks, there has also been a significant increase in hiring within Sales roles in Wholesale and Consumer Banking, as well as within IT, Operations and support function roles. Robust hiring prospects are predicted within most other sectors, led by the Mining and Construction sector and closely followed by employers in the Services, Finance and Insurance, Real Estate, Public Administration and Education sectors. Most recruitment activity is for replacement hires but we are also seeing new jobs being created, particularly within companies that are setting up headquarters in Singapore in order to increase their focus on the Asia-Pacific region.
The FMCG and Beauty sectors never really experienced a downturn last year, and continue to grow strongly. The Sales, Marketing, and Brand Management functions remain the top priority for these organisations as they focus on building up their talent pool within the Singapore and ASEAN markets. Additionally, we are observing strong growth within specialist functions like Procurement, Forecasting and Demand Planning.
With the coming of two integrated resorts and a number of new retail developments along the Orchard Road belt, the war for talent in the Retail sector is in full swing. While hiring of front-end staff remains the biggest challenge for employers, we are also observing significant scarcity within the Retail Management function, with capable store managers being aggressively courted by most brands. We predict that this sector will continue to remain sizzling hot for the next 2-3 quarters, and companies will have to devise creative and competitive compensation packages to retain and grow their talent pool.
The IT sector had experienced a significant slowdown last year but is now seeing the return of optimism with the global recovery, and plans for increased IT spend within corporate budgets. Sales and Pre-Sales functions remain the top hiring priority for most organisations, followed by functional and technical staff. Whilst preference still remains for contracting arrangements, many companies are now willing to hire on a permanent basis for key positions. As we progress further into 2010 organisations will have to bring back their focus on building up their employer branding and putting strong emphasis on training and development, career management, and creative benefits and incentive structures, in order to retain and motivate their current workforce while attracting additional talent to support their growth plans for the year.
Deepali Chaturvedi
Country Manager
deepali.chaturvedi@reedglobal.com
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