Singapore – Taking up a more hands-on and personal approach when looking to hire has led to Gemalto cutting out the need for middlemen recruiters.
With a culture of hiring a majority of fresh graduates and promoting from within, Gemalto takes up an active role by meeting graduates directly in their universities when recruiting. Usually, the recruitment team will consist of the R&D human resources manager, a R&D recruiter who previously managed an R&D team and one or two R&D members. Marc Ribas, vice-president of HR (Asia) for smart cards and digital security products vendor, says, “To us, recruiting is the most important of the human resources tasks, simply because the people we recruit today will shape the future of our company.”
While Ribas believes that recruiting is no longer an exclusive HR function, he adds, “We are also very careful about involving operational people; with no HR experience whatsoever, to the recruiting sessions.”
Currently looking to hire 100 R&D engineers for its R&D centre, Ribas foresees no major challenges in meeting the company’s substantial growth demands, as recruitment will be extended to the whole Asia region. Looking to hire a mixture of foreign and local talent, Ribas says, “If we had chosen to recruit only graduates from Singapore universities, we would have had to screen about half of the Singapore computer sciences graduates in a given year.”
However, despite the great potential and expected continuous growth in the R&D industry, attracting and retaining talent remains a huge issue as fresh graduates are not actively applying for R&D positions. Ribas remarks that the trend for the last two years was “university fresh outs applying to positions within financial institutions, regardless of their degrees”. However, with more companies setting up their regional R&D centres in Singapore, Ribas predicts the changing of trends, “fundamentally because the economy is strong and innovation is a key differentiator for any industry.”
Ng Lay Hoon, head of the professional and technical division for Kelly Services, agrees, citing the healthy pipelines in the construction, marine and offshore engineering industries in Singapore and also throughout Asia. “As a result, there is a high demand for engineers with specific skills with increased hiring in oil & gas, waste water treatment and construction [sectors].”
Furthermore, with a R&D talent crunch in the local and regional IC design, power management and energy sectors, Ng says “talent with six to seven years of experience can expect a salary range between $7k and $9k”.
