Talent & Tech Asia Summit 2024
Winning Secrets: How innovation helped FastJobs reduce hiring time and communication gaps by 50%

Winning Secrets: How innovation helped FastJobs reduce hiring time and communication gaps by 50%

Lim Huishan, General Manager, FastJobs Singapore, shares what innovation means to the team, key business drivers that have helped deliver exceptional client and candidate service, and more.

While constant feedback is key for innovation, the team at FastJobs believes that innovative solutions are almost a by-product of the mindset that focuses on driving the right outcomes.

And it was with this mindset that the team achieved four wins at the Asia Recruitment Awards 2020, Singapore. They were, silver for Best Client Service by a Recruitment Solution Provider , Best Recruitment Portal by a Recruitment Solution Provider, and Most Innovative Recruitment Strategy; as well as a bronze award for Best Candidate Experience - Solution Provider.

In this interview, we hear from Lim Huishan, General Manager, FastJobs Singapore from FastCo, as she tells Priya Veeriah what innovation means to the team, key business drivers that have helped deliver exceptional client and candidate service, and more.

Q What does innovation mean to FastJobs, and how does the firm evolve with the recent innovations in the HR industry?

Innovation at FastJobs is an expectation of the way we work, to respond to the needs of the situation, instead of doing things the same way we have always done. We focus on driving the right outcomes, instead of blindly following processes, and innovative solutions are almost a by-product of that mindset.

We innovate by consistently seeking feedback to identify gaps and unmet needs. After the Circuit Breaker was eased in Singapore, we realised that our clients needed to hire in volume again. With social distancing still in place, and many of our clients unfamiliar with hiring in bulk online, we could tell there was a role for us to play.

We quickly put together a Virtual Jobs Discovery Fest by adapting our well-reviewed, pre-scheduled interview solution from our physical Jobs Fest to the online space. To ensure that coordination and technical hurdles could be addressed quickly and efficiently, we opted to go with a high-touch (virtually!) service with full facilitation by our team and our platform, to guide both our clients and jobseekers through this unfamiliar process.

We ran our first Virtual Fair in July, and in post-event debriefs with our clients, even those who were initially sceptical told us that the entire process was very smooth, and they would participate in similar events again.

Q Share with us your winning recruitment strategy. What were the key business drivers behind delivering exceptional client and candidate service?

Creating trust among our users is important to us. In the non-PME space, there are a lot of existing job groups on various channels and social media platforms but no one knows how credible they are because none of these jobs nor employers are verified.

To be effective, we have to bring both the employers as well as jobseekers on the platform. We discovered that a few things were very important in hiring rank-and-file workers - this includes communication, quick response time, transparency about job responsibilities, and salary. We built our product to address those needs, to empower jobseekers to use their mobile phones to look through opportunities on FastJobs where every two minutes there is a new job posted, and to apply for them by just one click. By focusing on our mobile interface, and fostering trust in the product, we were successful in reaching high adoption amongst the jobseekers, which made it effective for our employers to come onboard as well.

Q How do you align your organisational culture, mission and vision with your clients’ business goals in the field of recruitment and talent acquisition?

Our aspiration is to create equal access to job opportunities for everyone by focusing on how we can support our clients in recruiting.

Our culture is based on focusing on driving outcomes. FastJobs has a pretty flat organisational structure, which allows ideas and feedback to be shared regardless of seniority or hierarchy. We constantly ask why and seek to understand the needs of the stakeholders we interact with, and deliver on them. We experiment and test new solutions, measure their effectiveness based on data, and adopt measures that are useful.

We believe that the road to better hiring outcomes is by innovating recruitment processes with simple, effective and fast solutions. Ultimately, this is aligned with our clients’ business goals when they work with us, and we’re actively seeking better outcomes for them too.

Q What is one way your organisation stands out from others when it comes to helping your clients attract the right talent in the competitive landscape?

Our focus on rank-and-file workers gives us an edge over many of our competitors, as it allows us to really cater to their habits and needs. Unlike PMEs who have access to laptops and complex resumes, most rank-and-file workers are usually on the move, and do not even have access to a computer and might not know how to create a resume that is relevant to the job they are applying for.

We ensure that people looking for a job have access to an easy-to-use, one-stop portal to find jobs in a fast and simple way, in the device that they are using all the time - their phones. It’s easy to fill in all basic details employers need, making it helpful for both jobseekers and employers. Jobs on FastJobs are also available in Chinese, as there is a segment of jobseekers who are more comfortable in the language.

Speed is also key in rank-and-file hiring, much more so than for PMEs, which means smoother and faster communication between the jobseekers and employers is very important for us. Jobseekers would hardly pick up calls as they might be working during regular office hours, so the most convenient mode of communication was through messaging. Thus, we built in-app messaging, FastChat, to reduce the hiring time and communication gap by 50% between the employers and jobseekers.

By building and optimising a product that rewards responsive jobseekers, we reduce the complexity of recruitment for our clients, helping them attract & capture the right candidates quickly and effectively.

Q On to the most important part – results! How did you measure the ROI or milestones of your strategy, and what are you most proud of?

Based on the metrics that we obsessively track and those constant feedback sessions we do, we can tell that we have good traction with both clients and jobseekers. We have adoption from jobseekers amongst all age groups, ranging from the youth aged 18+ to mature folks aged 50+; 96% of jobs posted on FastJobs get their first application within 24 hours, and we drive over 400,000 job applications a month.

Ultimately though, I am most proud when our clients turn to us to help solve their hiring challenges. That really speaks to the trust that we’ve managed to build with them as well as the result of the team’s years of relentless customer focus.

Photo / provided

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