KNOWLEDGE BASE Recruiting Employees In Singapore
The information on this page was current at the time it was published. Regulations, trends, statistics, and other information are constantly changing. While we strive to update our Knowledge Base, we strongly suggest you use these pages as a general guide and be sure to verify any regulations, statistics, guidelines, or other information that are important to your efforts.
Recruiting Employees In Singapore
There is definitely competition for educated and skilled employees in Singapore. The country is strongly pushing employers to hire locals and the unemployment rate is low. There is a lack of available highly skilled employees which leads to wage pressures, a mismatch between the skills needed and the unemployed talent, so there aren’t very many people from which to choose.
Finding employees on your own
Since you are probably still interested in finding those great people who can help make your company a success, let’s keep going. So, how do you find them, especially if you’re not familiar with Singapore? There are the obvious places such as online job sites such as Indeed.com, LinkedIn.com, Stjobs.sg, and JobStreet.com. You can also work with recruiting sites such as One-visa.com.
The Singapore government’s website, Workforce Singapore, provides a number of services to help with recruiting and hiring, including a Jobs Bank and ways you can find employees.
Singapore also features job fairs that are put on by groups of companies as well as larger companies. Many of the job sites will offer a list of job fairs and some larger established events are online. For instance, Jobs Central and STJOBS host job fairs.
Some of the less well-known ways to find good employees is to utilize Facebook Events, Eventful, Eventbrite and Meetup events for different types of business networking. Often these events allow job postings as well as job mentions during their events so you can meet more qualified and targeted prospects.
Other creative ways to find employees are to host meetups, panel discussions, and other business events or host/co-host attractive social events such as gallery exhibits, sports events, movie premieres, cocktail parties, and invite people you’d like to recruit that you’ve identified from LinkedIn as important prospects. These events will be more time consuming to put together but will cost less than recruiters and could be much more effective in getting attention, sharing your company culture, and standing out from the crowd.
Recruiters, also known as headhunters, in Singapore are certainly a great way to hire, especially for high-level executives. While you might have your own recruiter locally in your field, it’s probably a good idea to also work with local recruiters, especially if you’re not a well-known brand, because just as your recruiter has their strategies for finding great employees in familiar regions, the local experts will also have ways of opening doors.
Here’s a list of companies that we can recommend. If you’d like to send them an RFI or get connected with them, find them in our Marketplace.
PEO and other HR services
There are several other options for hiring people. One popular approach is contracting with a professional employer organization (PEO), and another is contracting with a temp agency. An advantage of going with a PEO is that it doesn’t require a company to create a business entity or have a bank account in the country.
A PEO firm will hire the employee for a company and thus take on the responsibility of health benefits, payroll, taxes and compliance management away from you to focus on your business. PEO firms will typically take a percentage of the employee’s salary or a one+ month fee out of a salary so the service is costly but much easier and less expensive than managing the international employment process.
The Globig Marketplace has several very reputable PEO firms listed for you to learn more about each company and explore hiring options.
Temp agencies
If you don’t need a full time employee for specific projects, specialized temp staffing is a good option. Several local and international agencies in the Globig Marketplace can be helpful to use in Singapore.
Singapore government’s Jobs Bank
Recruiters
Temp Agencies
KNOWLEDGE BASE Recruiting Employees In Singapore