Companies are facing bigger problems nowadays: attracting and retaining great talents.
A recent report we wrote highlighted this: according to a survey carried out by human resources consultancy firm Hudson in November last year, over 70% of Singaporeans are currently looking for a job and some 40% have job hopped in the last 2 years.
A similar pattern was also observed in Malaysia: according to the 2013/2014 Randstad World of Work Report, which polled more than 14,000 employers and professionals through an online questionnaire, 70% of Malaysians plan to leave their jobs this year.
Having exposed to more information than ever before, the new generation Y is looking for jobs that are challenging, as well as jobs that have clear career prospects. Other than looking for challenging jobs, the new generation joining the workforce increasingly wants more flexibility at work and they value work and life balance, according to PwC’s NextGen Global Generation Study 2013.
Increasingly with the ongoing talent war, the leverage shifts towards the job seekers, and companies have to now court great talents to join them.
Silicon Valley based 42Floors was the first company recently to make a bold and unprecedented move: to court a candidate Dan Shipper to join their company, its CEO publicly offered the sophomore a job, via the company’s blog. As the CEO Freedman mentioned in his post, the team believes that “hiring is dead.” If you want them, you have to court them.
That’s the reality of the current workforce now. Of course, 42Floors might be an extreme example, and not all companies can do that. What if there’s a platform that helps companies court talents?
This is where Forge Singapore comes in.
Scheduled to be launched in mid June, Forge is a platform that helps company highlight their individual company culture and the people behind it. Through Forge, you can get a unique look inside offices as well as testimonials from the employees working there.
Unlike traditional jobs site that lists out the job title and description, Forge aims to be this hipster site designed to offer a different search experience to the candidate, making job listings more interesting. One of the key highlights of the site is that companies can properly showcase their culture and work environment to attract would be employees.
For employees, Forge is a site where one can understand the company culture and values and also a portal to easily apply for jobs from carefully curated companies. According to Forge, the purpose of this approach is to reduce the guessing game when searching for a job, since most job listing sites only describe the job and company briefly, or are represented by headhunters.
Job Seekers can relish in an image heavy experience on the upcoming Forge website, taking a peak into offices and listening to 30-second video clips of their potential teammates sharing their work experience. A company’s social media updates will feed into their Forge profile page too, keeping the page up to date with the latest. Company events relevant to potential employees will also be hosted on their profile page, opening doors for job-seekers to meet the company and their future colleagues.
Increasingly, this is getting more important because the opportunity cost of joining the wrong company is very high.
We don’t know about you, but Forge definitely sounds like a better way for job seekers to look for a job. If you are interested to be informed when the site is launched, do head over to the official page to sign up to be notified.
Also read: 5 of the hottest internet companies in Singapore are hiring