In recent years, Malaysia has advanced significantly in talent management, as well as providing professional workforce for both domestic and international corporations. As a result, the battle for staff retention and recruitment also becomes really harsh, especially in spearhead industries like offshoring. Below are collected trends you need to know before recruiting suitable candidates in Malaysia, based on Jobstreet’s surveys.

The greatest concerns for employers

As expected, a recent survey of over 400 HR professionals reveals that valuable staff retention is the greatest concerns in Malaysia (38%), regardless of sector, company size or organisational values. Closely followed are three other factors, namely increasing employee engagement and teamwork (24%), maintaining employee productivity (23%) and recruiting new top performers (15%).

Personality over Qualification

Another interesting trend in recruitment in Malaysia is: companies prefer personality to qualification. In the long run, interviewers love to merge qualifications into skills and find suitable candidates with 5 traits: Leadership skills, Technical skills, Multi-tasking Skills, Communication skills and Interpersonal skills. They also look for top attributes in potential employees, such as: reliable, trustworthy, positive, independent and hard-working.

The employees’ expectations

In return, Malaysian staff always consider specific aspects when choosing to work (or stay) in a company. Three top factors in descending order are: convenient work location, good relationship with colleagues, working in a reputable company. Besides, bonus also plays an important role in staff retention with 75% of surveyed employees expecting a bonus, mainly because they believe that they have fulfilled work performance and management’s expectations.