Nearly half of Singaporeans bearish on hiring activity in the next 12 months

The future of employment seems bleak as some sectors have already scaled back on hiring.

Morgan McKinley surveyed financial services professionals in Singapore and Hong Kong and found that global economic uncertainty was a concern in both markets, a mood also identified in Nielsen’s latest consumer confidence index. Comparatively it appeared to be slightly less of a concern for Singaporeans with 63% indicating they felt it would impact Asia Pacific as a growth market, compared with 75% of financial services professionals working in Hong Kong.

More than two thirds (69%) felt that market conditions regionally and globally would be the greatest determinants of hiring levels in their organisation over the next 12 months – a sign that the impact of global market instability and eurozone debt issues have definitely started to have a negative effect on business performance in Asia Pacific.

Headcount allowance or restrictions (61%) was the next most significant concern for the hiring market in Singapore, while those surveyed in Hong Kong identified these factors in reverse as key issues. Internal changes such as growth and restructuring were also ranked higher by 40% of Singaporean financial services professionals for their impact on the recruitment market, compared with external change factors such as M&A activity – one of the least significant factors (3.4%).

Recruitment Prospects
A third of survey respondents working across financial services in Singapore are confident that the next six months will see a focus only on hiring within their organisations. Pleasingly, only 5% anticipate that there will be no hiring in that period while HR staff and hiring managers prioritise reducing staff numbers instead. The greatest proportion of respondents (45%) felt there would be a combination of both hiring and headcount reduction. This was a larger number than those surveyed in the Hong Kong market, where only 35% expect there to be a mix of both hiring and reducing employee numbers and 30% expect to see only recruitment take place in the banking sector in the next 12 months.

Hiring is very likely to be focused on permanent roles, while over a quarter (27%) expect fixed term contracts to be released to the hiring market in the next six months. Furthermore, 63% of Singaporeans in financial services feel that the priority will be on replacing vacated positions with 42% also expecting project roles to be significant – potentially some of these being the fixed term contracts referred to earlier. The sizeable number anticipating fixed term contracts and project work indicates some lack of visibility for very significant levels of permanent hiring activity. The expectation at this point is that contract hires may plug the gap created by restrictions on permanent headcount increases.

When asked whether they expected hiring activity to rise or fall in the next 12 months compared with the past 12 months, overall the feeling in Singapore was that hiring in financial services will remain similar to last year (57%), however over a quarter feel that it may be lower. This outlook is in line with the forecast from the Monetary Authority of Singapore which said in October 2011 that employment growth is “expected to slow further this year across the country as the economy cools.” MAS also highlighted that certain sectors such as financial services have already “scaled back hiring and this may potentially intensify and broaden across other industry sectors.”