Singapore - It's not all doom and gloom on the recruitment front, as companies still have room for growth.

Speaking at the JobsDB Career Expo 2009 last Friday, Steven Seek, managing director of JobsDB Singapore said the 5,000 immediate job vacancies at the fair indicates that companies, especially small and medium enterprises, are still looking to hire. However, Seek noted, the number of jobs available this year is indeed smaller than 2008.

But with civil service jobs such as MINDEF at the career fair, are the jobs mainly driven by the public sector? Seek said, "There will always be job opportunities in the civil service and public sector. However from our statistics that we've done in the past few months, there are easily more than 4,000 unique private companies who have immediate hiring [vacancies]. And that excludes about 400+ headhunting firms and the public sector."

Other companies represented at the career fair included Standard Chartered, Comfort Delgro, KFC and Nestle.

Josh Goh, senıor corporate servıces manager of The GMP Group, said some of the 200 jobs vacancies available at the recruitment agency's booth included white-collar accounting and finance positions, as well as blue-collar retail vacancies. "We do have IT and engineering positions as well," Goh added. 

Seek admitted that the job fair, which drew about 50,000 jobseekers, probably drew a higher number of retrenched workers. Even at noon on a Friday, Seek says he has observed that the fair comprised of many local faces - probably the ones who have been affected by the job market. "Otherwise a lot of them [jobseekers] would come in the evening after work," he added.