Opportunities in Asia
KEY FACTS The event was attended by
Dona-Mirelle Battat, executive director, HR recruiter Digby Morgan Steve Carter, director, global temporary and contract services professional recruiter Morgan McKinley
Naomi Chakwin, European resident director-general for the Asian Development Bank
pressure than government pressure that was driving change in the market, because expats are “just so expensive”. And there were other drivers behind this trend, he said, citing Singapore, which had become “a relatively self-sufficient place”. Not only did it have good education system, he continued, but also its borders were “pretty much closed” to expats. Carter said this raised questions over whether it has any future as a market “where you can just place Westerners into Western businesses”. No longer was it possible, for example, for recruiters who had failed in London to simply head East. “The reality is that Singapore is well wise to that,” said Carter. Carter added that that while the firm was doing well in placing mid-level candidates into local Singaporean companies, “we are not making much money at all from Western businesses”. Read pointed to the difficulties in moving nationals between countries, for example, a Chinese or a Singaporean into Korea. And even within China, he said movement from the countryside into the cities was constrained because medical and pension benefits were tied to people’s home villages. For Fowlston, many of the challenges facing clients were mirrored in Roberts Walters’ own business. As he explained, while hiring local people and “growing our own talent” was part and parcel of the firm’s strategy, the top positions tended still to be held by people from the UK or Australia. Carter suggested there was an inevitability that “more developed, better educated markets” such as Singapore will export talent within the region. Increasingly, being British or Australian was not a passport to an executive job in Asia, he said. However, Chakwin questioned whether the quality of the education system was capable of producing what Asian countries needed. She identified India as having a particular problem, claiming that of the 250,000 engineers who graduate each year, “240,000 are basically not qualified to be engineers”. And while she lauded the quality of the very best
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Paul Clark, founder and chief executive of telco and IT recruiter Penta Consulting Matthew Eames, founder of insurance, banking and professional services recruiter Eames Consulting
Toby Fowlston, managing director London of professional and executive recruiter Robert Walters
Lawrence Hargreaves, MD, technology recruiter Nicoll Curtin Technology Paul Huntingdon, founder of technical and IT staffing company Advance Resource Managers
Joost Kreuelen, CEO of specialist recruiter Empresaria Group Graeme Read, group MD of specialist recruiter Antal International Ian Temple, chairman of specialist recruitment business Hydrogen Group
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