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    The Reskilling Revolution: How Asia-Pacific is Leading the Charge in the Future of Work

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    The landscape of work is undergoing a dramatic transformation across the globe. But in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, something truly remarkable is brewing. Here, innovation, flexibility, and a willingness to embrace change are shaping the future of work in exciting ways. This article explores five key trends that will define the APAC workplace and how talent acquisition, recruitment, HR, and employer branding professionals can navigate this evolving landscape.
    1. From Routine to Revolution: The Rise of the Innovation-Driven Workforce
    Gone are the days of rote memorization and repetitive tasks. APAC is experiencing a rapid shift towards a workforce that values creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. A McKinsey & Company report predicts that by 2040, China and India will contribute a staggering 50% of global GDP. This economic boom is pushing APAC companies to automate routine tasks at an unprecedented rate.
    The focus is now on upskilling employees for roles that require a different skillset – one that prioritizes digital fluency, analytical thinking, and the ability to solve complex problems. Singapore’s ambitious goal of achieving a 50% job transformation rate by 2025 (as highlighted by LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise Report) underscores the urgency for innovation-driven skill development. Leading companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei are at the forefront of this movement, heavily investing in R&D and fostering dynamic cultures of innovation.
    Actionable Insights:

    Conduct skills gap analyses to identify areas where your workforce needs upskilling or reskilling.
    Partner with training providers to offer relevant courses and workshops on topics like data analysis, problem-solving, and digital communication.
    Encourage a culture of continuous learning by providing employees with opportunities to attend conferences, workshops, and online courses.

    2. Bridging the Gap: The Rise of the Hybrid Workforce Model
    Remote work isn’t a perk anymore; it’s a reality for a significant portion of the APAC workforce. A recent M Moser Associates survey reveals that a staggering 45% of Asian employees prefer a hybrid work model, significantly higher than the global average of 37%. Companies like Fujitsu, with their “smart work” policy, and Grab, with their “flexible work” program, are recognizing this shift and proactively responding to employee preferences.
    This flexibility allows them to attract top talent in a competitive market while catering to the evolving needs of their existing workforce. However, creating a seamless integration between remote and on-site teams, fostering employee engagement in a hybrid environment, and navigating legal and logistical hurdles remain crucial challenges that HR professionals need to address.
    Actionable Insights:

    Develop clear policies and guidelines for remote work arrangements, including communication protocols, expectations around performance, and data security measures.
    Invest in collaboration tools and technologies that facilitate seamless communication and teamwork between remote and on-site employees.
    Organize regular virtual and in-person team-building activities to maintain employee engagement and company culture in a hybrid environment.

    3. The Human Touch in the Age of Automation: The Skills of the Future
    As automation and artificial intelligence (AI) redefine job roles, the need for a blended skillset becomes paramount. While technical expertise is important, the World Economic Forum emphasizes the growing importance of “soft skills” in the APAC region, particularly analytical thinking and design/user experience.
    AgileHRO predicts a rise in demand for skills like data analysis, problem-solving, and digital communication, coupled with empathy, emotional intelligence, and the ability to build strong human connections. This focus on “soft skills” positions Asian workforces to excel in an environment where building rapport and adapting to change are key differentiators.
    Actionable Insights:

    Integrate soft skills training into your employee development programs, focusing on areas like communication, collaboration, and emotional intelligence.
    Encourage teamwork and cross-functional collaboration to promote idea exchange and the development of essential soft skills.
    Recognize and reward employees who demonstrate valuable soft skills such as leadership, problem-solving, and adaptability.

    4. Beyond Borders: The Rise of Borderless Talent Acquisition
    The intense competition for talent in Asia is pushing companies to think beyond national borders. With a whopping 90% of the APAC workforce open to remote or hybrid work arrangements (as per PWC Asia Pacific’s Time report), the talent pool is expanding exponentially.
    Singapore, for instance, with its diverse talent pool and thriving startup ecosystem, attracts tech talent from across the region. Companies like Sea Group and Razer leverage this advantage effectively. AgileHRO predicts a rise in “borderless talent acquisition” strategies, where companies utilize remote work flexibility and invest in reskilling and upskilling programs to attract and retain top talent from a global pool. This not only bridges the skills gap but also future-proofs the workforce.
    5. Well-being at the Forefront: Prioritizing Mental Health in the Evolving Workplace
    Compared to other regions, Asia grapples with significantly higher rates of low work productivity, anxiety, and depression. A TELUS Health report highlights this as a “growing concern” for workplace well-being in the region. With a work productivity score of just 47.2 compared to the global average of 58.2 (and significantly lower than the US and Europe), prioritizing mental health is no longer optional for APAC organizations.
    Companies that create supportive work environments that prioritize employee well-being will have a significant competitive edge. Implementing flexible work arrangements, offering comprehensive mental health resources, and fostering a culture of open communication are key to achieving this. Certis’ 2022 Employee Assistant Programme, which provides mental health resources and support to all employees and their families, serves as a commendable example.
    Actionable Insights:

    Implement flexible work arrangements that cater to individual needs and help employees achieve a healthy work-life balance.
    Offer comprehensive mental health resources, including access to employee assistance programs (EAPs) and confidential counseling services.
    Foster a culture of open communication where employees feel comfortable discussing mental health challenges without fear of stigma.
    Promote healthy habits and well-being initiatives, such as mindfulness training and stress management workshops.

    Conclusion
    The future of work in Asia-Pacific is brimming with exciting possibilities. By embracing innovation, agility, and a human-centric approach, talent acquisition, recruitment, HR, and employer branding professionals can navigate this transformative landscape and build a future-proof workforce that thrives in the years to come.
    AgileHRO is a leading provider of innovative HR solutions, empowering organizations to build, manage, and engage a global workforce.
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      5 Automation Habits of Highly Effective Recruiting Teams 

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      In a talent-short market, having a consistently engaged talent pool sets recruitment firms apart from their competitors. Thankfully, cutting-edge automation tools are helping recruiters to engage, nurture, and, ultimately, place top-level talent into new roles at the pace and scale demanded by their clients. In fact, according to Bullhorn’s aggregated data, agencies that use automation have a 64% higher fill rate and submit 33% more candidates per recruiter than those completing tasks manually. How are firms making the most of automation to see these incredible results?
      Here are five habits of Bullhorn customers who leverage automation to create an engaged talent community that is excited to work with them in the short and long term.
      1. Engage regularly with talent
      According to our recent survey of 2,000 candidates, the number one reason talent becomes frustrated with recruiters is poor communication. Automation enables recruiters to manage communications more effectively and to keep candidates informed at every stage of the process.
      Many firms already use automated emails, surveys, and text messaging in the recruitment process. However, recruiters need a tightly integrated tech stack to guarantee that they’re able to gather handy information across every channel, as this is essential for personalization and for generating reliable talent insights.
      Recruiters can send occasional feedback requests through automated messages to new hires, those nearing the end of their contracts, or people that have been in a job for a while. These timely interactions will ensure recruiters stay top of mind and will pay dividends once candidates start looking for new jobs – without the burden of conducting manual ‘busywork’.
      Furthermore, AI-based automation can significantly improve the matching process by intelligently recommending candidates for jobs and jobs for candidates. This is particularly useful for temp or contingent workers, whom recruiters can quickly redeploy into newly available positions as soon as their contracts end.
      It’s also important to note that most recruitment firms have numerous candidates in their databases with whom they don’t engage regularly. Using AI, you can stay in touch with them over time and give them content by suggesting jobs, articles, and tips. It’s also a way to notify them that you want to keep their personal data in your database. However, under GDPR, you need to delete their data if they request it since candidates have the “right to be forgotten”.
      2. Improve data health
      Recruitment teams will always have to collect, store, and analyze data in order to succeed – and it’s something to avoid doing manually, especially on a large scale, as siloed, error-filled data can create just as many problems as unified, clean data can solve.
      With the right automation, recruiters can streamline data management and compliance tasks. These include anonymizing candidate records and updating job, company, and contract status for all the records within the applicant tracking system (ATS).
      Declutter your ATS by using automation to identify outdated records, people with no contact information, or records without activity to speed up searches. To make sure you are GDPR-compliant, your ATS must have all its processing activities governed by a contract under EU legislation.
      Don’t forget that internal reminders are an integral part of data collection – remind recruitment teams to send an early message to new contract starters to get feedback on their well-being and work conditions. Unlike traditional recruitment methods, automation simplifies mass communication with candidates.
      3. Stay organized
      Automating simple tasks within the ATS like notes and alerts gives recruiters back valuable time to spend on building candidate and client relationships. With so many candidates competing for so many vacancies, this solution is invaluable for staying organized.
      It also helps recruiters to set interview reminders and let applicants know whether they’ve been accepted or rejected. Importantly, if a candidate has been offered a position and it falls through for whatever reason, you can contact other suitable job seekers and fill the job quickly if your database is up to date.
      4. Streamline onboarding
      The ability to automate paperwork eases the process of onboarding talent. This is especially relevant for recruitment firms working across different locations and industries, where there might be different laws on taxes and compliance. Companies also have different policies on harassment, pay, benefits, company culture, and other aspects they want extra documentation on.
      A well-defined, automated onboarding system tailors processes to different types of hires and mitigates hiring risks. Back-office mistakes not only distract from an employee’s productivity, but mistakes like worker misclassification also carry the potential risk of fines and penalties.
      5. Scale up marketing
      Automating marketing campaigns to candidates and clients across channels like web, mobile, email, and social media is extremely helpful. Equally helpful is the ability to automatically personalize your content to better communicate with specific groups and ensure everyone receives relevant and interesting offers.
      Determine the segmentations you want to use in your marketing workflows and create lists. This will help to target specific contacts with relevant content. The workflow doesn’t just engage prospects initially but is critical to establishing a sustained interaction with them. As a result, you can expect better engagement scores (and closing ratios) from clients or candidates who are actively being nurtured, instead of those who aren’t.
      Nurturing sales prospects with valuable content enables a recruitment agency’s sales team to focus on engaged leads while automatically engaging with not-ready-to-buy prospects. Some of the metrics to track include engagement score (points are added to prospective candidates’ profiles on the database each time they engage with content), pipeline revenue (income generated through lead conversions), and new lead close rate (the percentage of leads that turn into conversions).
      By Jason Heilman, Senior Vice President, Automation, AI, and Talent Experience, Bullhorn.
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      Why AI Recruiting is Key to Growth in 2022

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      Business priorities in 2022 have all shifted to center around talent. Primarily, finding it. The Great Resignation, or the Great Reshuffle, or the Big Quit — whatever you want to call it — continues to dominate headlines and highlight the ongoing shortage of labor. But companies need to understand that the skewed supply and demand ratio for talent is here to stay. One study even predicts a global human talent shortage of 85 million workers by 2030.
      Despite this trend seeming to look like old news at this point, many organizations’ hiring programs were still completely caught off guard over the last year. In a report by Hiretual, 61% of recruiters said sourcing talent was their biggest challenge in 2021. At the end of 2020, when asked about their biggest anticipated concern, sourcing talent didn’t even make it to the top three.
      That same report found the second and third biggest challenges for recruiters surveyed went to candidate engagement and employer competition, respectively. Again, when recruiters were asked the same question the year before, neither of these obstacles was high on the list.
      What these responses signal is a shift in priority from inbound to outbound recruiting. That is, rather than relying on workers to go out and find jobs, companies are now having to sell available jobs to workers — and doing so at scale is proving difficult. While companies and recruiters may be beginning to understand this, the amount of LinkedIn posts we’re still seeing from leaders exclaiming, “We’re Hiring!” — expecting qualified prospects to go out of their way and click through to a boring careers page — shows not many have adapted to compete.
      As organizations around the world refine strategies for the future, now is the time to commit to growth, and adapt to achieve it. Companies that do will stand to benefit from a final post-pandemic jolt to productivity, setting themselves up for a more sustainable future. But with more jobs available than there are workers to do them, those that fail to change their recruiting strategy will see their workforce — and success — atrophy.
      Getting More Human With AI
      The pressure is on for talent acquisition, but changing priorities brought on by the pandemic will require recruiters to do more than fill jobs. Going forward, recruiters must offer opportunities that meet heightened needs from talent (such as more inclusive cultures and more flexible work schedules) and align with refined company objectives (like scaling skill sets and leading product innovation).
      To do that effectively, recruiters need to be able to spend more time doing the more human aspects of the job, to provide a better experience to candidates, and better qualify talent for the needs of the business — now and for the future.
      If 2021 investment data is any indication, talent acquisition tech stacks are getting reevaluated. In fact, 62% of companies increased their investment in talent acquisition technology last year, according to Aptitude Research. Because something has to give, more companies than ever before will look to AI recruitment technologies to give themselves a competitive advantage. Here are a few ways AI will help companies address key recruiting challenges in 2022.
      Revealing Blind Spots
      Not all talent is accessible in the same places, and many recruiters are looking for candidates with too narrow of a view into the available talent pool. Usually limited by a handful of disparate job boards, with limited search functionality or candidate profile visibility, talent acquisition pros end up missing access to a large share of qualified talent.
      AI recruiting tools will broaden the scope of available talent. By pulling candidate profile data from multiple talent pools, hiring teams can access significantly more of the total talent population and search from a single source. Some platforms are approaching access to almost a billion candidates. Companies that need to scale growth will have more options, and more opportunities to hire.
      In addition, AI will help recruiting teams remove limitations to how they find talent by mitigating unconscious bias from the process to make more equitable hiring decisions. This works by automatically matching candidates based on the skills relevancy of what a recruiter is looking for, rather than focusing on any other candidate’s features. For example, blind searches can be conducted to remove attributes like gender or race, or even education, to help remove bias and lack of diversity in the hiring process.
      By managing diversity in the outbound phase of the recruiting process — as opposed to scrubbing data in ATSs or CRMs — organizations can take a more proactive approach to make equitable hiring decisions.
      Meeting the Need for Speed
      To reach goals for scale, hiring teams need to shorten the time it takes to bring the right jobs to the right people. With AI, organizations will begin to automate more of the transactional and respective aspects of the hiring process. This will give recruiters more time to focus on building relationships by engaging prospective talent in meaningful ways.
      Without the right technology, recruiters will spend less time adding value to the process. Automation will free up the time it takes for recruiters to facilitate communication by removing manual tasks like bulk outreach, scheduling, and managing candidate pipeline data, so they can spend more time consulting with talent to place them in roles that best fit their interests, ambitions, and experience.
      Teams leveraging AI will encounter fewer obstacles with potential candidates in misaligned job expectations and broken feedback loops, resulting in faster time to hire and smoother onboarding experiences.
      Establishing a Foundation for Growth
      For many candidates, contact with a recruiter is the first moment of exposure they have with an organization. That first impression has the potential to create interest by offering the candidate valuable and relevant experience. It also has the potential to diminish the brand in the eye of prospects and their peers.
      With the help of AI, organizations will set up hiring teams to showcase their brand to candidates in the best light and build a workforce that better supports company objectives for the long run. By engaging talent with a more inclusive approach, increasing the speed and ease of the hiring process, and broadening the scope of talent they see and consider, only organizations leaning on AI will overcome today’s hiring challenges to build workforces that grow.
      Shannon Pritchett is Head of Community at both Hiretual and Evry1 (which she co-founded in 2021). 
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      3 Reasons Why Recruiters Should Invest in Marketing Automation

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      When the world is extremely busy online, ensuring that a carefully crafted piece of email content doesn’t end up straight in a candidate’s ‘delete’ folder, should be a high priority for a recruitment agency’s marketing department.
      But when over 300 billion business emails are sent globally every day, it can often seem an uphill struggle when trying to cut through a vast amount of digital noise. However, industry professionals can give themselves a competitive advantage and ensure they’re speaking to the right people about the right jobs opportunities when they plug in intuitive marketing automation.
      That’s because it’s designed to not only make life simpler but, in this instance, liberate marketing campaigns for recruiters who want to create and send humanized content that engages recipients with content they want to read via their preferred channels.
      Here are some of the reasons why more recruitment agencies and their marketing teams should be turning to automation if they want to interact with candidates on a more granular level and improve their overall conversion rate…
      1. Every piece of digital comms can be hyper-personalized
      With savvy technology at their fingertips, marketers can analyze millions of pieces of critical data that tell them all about a candidate’s of-the-moment job interests and needs. From this insight, they can then begin to build up a more complete picture about their recipient and know the type of ultra-personalized content they will interact with.
      When an enigmatic and energetic recruitment agency is keen to engage with a jobseeker about a relevant role, the last thing they want to do is be seen as another cold caller who sends the same tired – and often irrelevant – message to hundreds of other candidates that are ultimately received loosely by all. Not only is that a waste of time but can damage brand reputation immeasurably because those candidates will soon go to a competitor who understands their specific career requirements.
      2. Have a problem with email deliverability? Not any more…
      The latest news bulletin full of job roles has gone out but it’s received little to no engagement or had a vastly low engagement rate. If a marketing team experiences these problems, there could be an issue with deliverability.
      Utilizing automation, marketers can begin to draw out the data that links to why engagement is low – for example, it could be that bot traffic is to blame or the bounce rate is high because the recruitment agency’s CRM isn’t automatically updating ‘dead’ email addresses when people leave their jobs and move on. Being equipped with this information, and acting on it, should help recruiter brands to stop these recurring issues at the earliest opportunity and ensure they’re sending emails to the right candidates.
      3. Jobseekers feel they’re being supported throughout
      A cold email sent without thought is likely to either be deleted straight away or ignored altogether by the recipient because a recruiter isn’t taking the time to get to know them – and it shows.
      It’s important to help candidates throughout their next career move – and marketing teams can assist that nurturing process from start to finish. Not only will it build trust, but it’s an additional level of support that will endorse positive word-of-mouth and build brand loyalty.
      A great way to foster a relationship with a jobhunter is via a five-step marketing automation email sequence, which is:

      The ‘introduction’: explaining who the recruiter is and why they’re getting in touch
      Next is ‘gain’: underlining what the candidate will achieve by taking up the recruiter’s services
      Then there’s the ‘fear’ of missing out: designed to detail what would happen if the recipient did not act on the advice of this particular recruiter
      The fourth stage is ‘social proof’: evidencing other candidates’ experiences through testimonials and case studies
      And finally, ‘urgency’: requesting readers to act now before the opportunity goes to someone else.

      By following this framework, recruiters and their marketing departments should begin to build up a bank of highly nurtured candidates who are receiving relevant roles for them.
      It’s important to stress that automation shouldn’t do all of the work when it comes to the relationship between a recruitment brand and a job seeker. There have to be lots of human interaction throughout – after all it takes six touchpoints before someone is truly engaged. However, this technology should enable a deeper understanding of what every candidate is interested in at that specific moment in time while saving marketers several hours each week because they’re creating emails in seconds to strengthen their overall digital comms delivery. 
      By Adam Oldfield, CEO of marketing automation platform Force24.
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