Hiring cheat sheet for Singapore businesses

It takes a village to raise a child.

Similarly it takes a lot of people to run an organisation well. You can spend so much on automation and technologies but you would still need human talents to manage the business.

In its 2015 Talent Shortage Survey (TSS), global workforce expert ManpowerGroup surveyed 41,700 hiring managers in 42 countries and territories.

It shows that the top five positions to fill in Singapore are accounting and finance talent, sales representatives, engineers, secretaries (including receptionists and administrative assistants), and marketing, public relations, and communications specialists.

In their Annual Global CEO Survey, PwC found that the lack of key skill sets is the biggest barrier preventing firms in the finance sector from growing. It doesn't help that CEOs now look for a much broader range of skills when hiring than they did in the past.

And on the IT front, companies are struggling to keep up with the new demands for cybersecurity consultants. FireEye’s center of excellence, a collaboration with Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority, noted that the number of cybersecurity professionals in Singapore fell to 1,200 last year from 1,500 in 2012.

This represents 0.8 percent of the city’s total information technology workforce, according to Bloomberg calculation using data provided by the authority.

And given the rampant cases of hacking happening around the world, delays in adopting cybersecurity capabilities could result in a loss of $3 trillion in economic value by 2020 globally. This is according to The World Economic Forum in a January 2014 report.

Getting talents to meet demand

It is apparent we are having many opportunities coming to Singapore from different directions but fulfillment might increasingly become a problem. If this goes on, the opportunities could easily hop elsewhere and no one will end up on the winning table.

Although there are measures announced by MOM to strengthen the Singaporean Core workforce, you probably don't churn out a cybersecurity expert in days.

Without the benefit of a time machine to go back 30 years in time and remind everyone to have more babies, the only realistic way is to expand the talent pool and look beyond Singapore's shore.

The following table shows the legislative challenges companies face in hiring foreign labour and opportunities they can tap on to solve their talent shortage.