While internal mobility has always been important, the current climate has steered recruiters to focus more on the existing talent within their region(s), and Asia-Pacific is leading this trend. Last year, the average rate of internal mobility in the Asia-Pacific region grew by about 15%. COVID-19 has seen organizations rapidly shift to remote working and adopting more technology to meet the many new demands and fill in the gaps presented by the global pandemic. The health crisis has also become a catalyst for more internal mobility in Asia.
Here are the latest talent acquisition trends in Asia-Pacific you should consider in 2021 and beyond.
Data analysis by LinkedIn determined that Asia-Pacific surpasses worldwide patterns in the pace of internal mobility. Globally, internal mobility rates between April and August 2020 were 19.5%, however, several Asia-Pacific countries rank higher than the average global amount and witnessed a predominant increase in internal mobility rates when compared to the last five-year average. With a 24% rate of internal mobility, Indonesia is the regional lead, led by New Zealand at 22% and Singapore at 21%. In addition, China was the only country that recorded a decrease, with internal mobility rates falling by 2% from their five-year average.
Various factors influence the divergence in trends between countries in Asia, such as heightened demand for generalist roles, transferable skills and easy adaptability to different sections or demands of a business as a result of the pandemic, or the dominance of certain industries or functions depending on the location of a country. While most HR teams already possess a good understanding of their existing internal talent pool, identifying new areas that assist with adjusting to the trend can benefit the efficiency, flexibility and accuracy in integrating internal processes.
Internal hiring can reinforce an employee’s dedication to your company, but if done poorly, can also weaken it. Data from The Global Talent Trends Report 2020 supports this, as it found that companies that excel at internal mobility are able to retain employees nearly twice as long as those that struggle with it. When an internal recruitment program is conducted at a slow speed or if handled poorly, internal candidates can easily abandon the process, resign or be left with a bad impression of the business. In this regard, being able to provide an optimized candidate experience can make a big impact in determining whether your organization meets its hiring goals.
As a global firm that specializes in background screening and compliance solutions, partnering with Cisive can help you optimize your internal onboarding processes, improve your critical hiring strategies and ensure you have the hiring advantage. We help reinforce candidates’ trust in your organization by ensuring they are met with a highly accessible and positive candidate experience. Cisive’s onboarding solution, for example, provides a real-time view into the status of current and past background checks and offers a customizable dashboard that enables HR teams to easily manage tasks associated with the new-hire process.
Asia’s strengths, specifically in digital and mobile technologies, have played a significant role in the region’s early response to COVID-19. While technology-enabled responses were rooted in capabilities developed prior to the pandemic, many businesses in Asia are still leveraging their digital capabilities in order to remain competitive and sustainable as well as minimize the impact on the functionality of their workforce.
Video conferencing applications, such as WeChat Work, Zoom, and Slack, have increased almost fivefold since the beginning of last year. For interviewers and interviewees, tools such as digital interviewing mark a new era of interviewing and have become the new norm in meeting candidates. At Cisive, for instance, we’ve started using video interviews to create a more flexible process for candidates.
The RGF International Recruitment’s Talent in Asia Report recently assessed hiring trends in 2020 across 11 countries in Asia. They gathered the perspectives of employers and job seekers within different markets and found that 52% of respondents cite more frequent video calls with the team as a key way to help increase productivity. In addition, 57% of respondents in Mainland China and 40% in Taiwan and Vietnam cite that one of the top hiring solutions for employers is to partner with a search firm or recruitment agency.
In order to future-proof employees for business change, the majority of employers in Asia are focused on ways they can help their employees become more adaptable and believe that providing more frequent and clear communication on business strategy is essential—as over 70% of respondents in Mainland China, Malaysia, India and Vietnam held this perception. Alongside this, providing frequent internal and external training and development, implementing enriching employee engagement programs, and investing in technology to make current processes efficient are amongst the other top measures that Asian organizations value.
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