Slower growth in Malaysia's online hiring activity for HR jobs

Online employment in Malaysia has slowed down this year, with HR and admin roles reportedly the lowest growth occupations in the country.

That was one of the findings of the latest Monster Employment Index (MEI), which measured online job posting activity in the country, as well as the industries and occupations with the highest and lowest growth in recruitment activity.

It highlighted an a overall decline in online employment locally, dropping by 23% between April 2014 and April 2015.

Across the 12 occupation groups surveyed by MEI, HR and administration jobs were the lowest growing occupations year-on-year, with -23% growth in April 2015.

This was followed by customer service and software, hardware, technology roles.

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The findings echoed in Singapore, where despite a slight increase from March 2015, online recruitment still recorded an 8% decline this April, when compared with the same month in 2014.

“The Monster Employment Index Malaysia has registered an annual decline of 23%, although month-on-month online recruitment has seen positive growth of 9% in April 2015,” said Sanjay Modi, MD of Monster.com (India, Middle East, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong).

“The volume of job advertisements in the Asian market on the whole has eased up, indicating cautious effort of recruiters to hire.

"A shortage of qualified and skilled candidates and higher salary demands has prompted this slow down in hiring activity in the local market."

On the other hand, Malaysia’s banking, financial services and insurance industry showed the highest online activity at 12% year-on-year, followed by logistics, courier/freight/transportation, shipping/marine at 10%.

The advertising, market research, public relations, media and entertainment industry had the lowest year-on-year growth, at a low -27%.

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