KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 5 — More companies in the country are hiring again as earlier concerns over the financial impact of the new Goods and Services Tax (GST) ease, the latest quarterly survey by international recruitment consultancy firm Robert Walters showed.
Sally Raj, the Robert Walters Malaysia’s managing director, observed that better job prospects was illustrated by companies filling up positions which were previously left vacant in the first quarter of 2015.
“Employment in Malaysia saw a better Q2 after market apprehension around the GST implementation in April cooled off. Generally, positions which were put on hold in Q1 also saw fruition this quarter due to the lesser economic tensions,” she said in a statement today when commenting on the firm’s Asia Job Index.
She also observed that Malaysians’ quick adaption to the price hikes caused by the GST had helped the fast-moving consumer goods sector to be fairly resilient to the introduction of the broad-based consumption tax.
But Sally noted that investor confidence had been shaken by Malaysia’s twin major challenges, namely a weakened ringgit and falling crude oil prices that took a direct hit on the export-reliant country.
This led to a majority of new hires either for replacement roles or for expansion of existing firms, instead of due to demand from new entrants into the Malaysian market.
In Asia Job Index for 2015’s second quarter that was released today, Robert Walters also found that employers in Malaysia were keen to retain their employees, with a huge demand for human resource professionals as companies sought to prevent talents from leaving.
Compared to last year’s second quarter, there was a 43 per cent jump in advertisements for human resource professionals, especially those specialising in talent management, compensation and benefits, the firm said.
As part of efforts to stop the brain drain, employers tightened policies to hire and retain workers with more flexible benefits for their staff, Robert Walters said.
Two sectors that saw higher demand by employers in Malaysia are procurement professionals and those skilled in information technology (IT), with more advertisements for such roles growing by 24 per cent and 12 per cent when compared against the same period last year.
Robert Walters attributed this to the need to achieve cost efficiency as multinationals relocate the base of their purchasing functions in Malaysia, as well as the ongoing growth of the e-commerce industry which required more back office technology infrastructure.
But amid the growing job prospects for the various sectors, Robert Walters noted that advertisements for positions in the “traditionally active” legal and compliance industry dropped by 12 per cent when compared against last year.
This was due to a job market that was becoming stable and a low occurrence of employers choosing not to replace those who had left the industry.
In the Asia Job Index tracking job advertisements in the leading job boards and national newspapers in ;six markets, Malaysia had one of the more active job hiring activities, with a nine per cent growth in annual job volume when compared to last year.
The country with the highest annual growth in demand for new staff is Japan (26 per cent), followed by South Korea (17 per cent), Hong Kong (9 per cent), China (4 per cent), while Singapore was the only market that showed reduced demand by 3 per cent.
According to Robert Walters, the general 11 per cent growth in Asia’s job advertising figures was buoyed by the increasing number of multinationals entering the region.
The positive demand for new recruits also meant that the job market was driven by the candidates, and with most companies in Asia focusing on attracting the best and preventing the loss of their top talents to rivals, the consultancy firm said.
