How do job boards differ in southeast Asia?

[00:00:09] Welcome to the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast. I'm Stephen Rothberg, the founder of College of Cruder Job Search Site. At College of Cruder we believe that every student and recent grad deserves a great career. And I'm Peter Zolman, founding principal of the aim group,

[00:00:26] the leading global business intelligence service for marketplaces and classified advertising companies. We consult with recruitment marketplaces companies and publish aim group recruitment intelligence and a free weekly digest. We also host the annual global recbuzz conference.

[00:00:44] This is the podcast for you to learn more about how to create, manage and work with general, niche and aggregator job boards and recruitment marketplaces. Hey Peter, it is great to be with you if it's a today. It must be a podcast.

[00:01:00] You sound like a program reminder for one of the big morning shows in the United States today, you know? Tomorrow on today, the only one of those people I can think of is the weatherman, Al Roker.

[00:01:14] I can't even think of the other people who do that show anymore, Matt Lauer, but he became a lesson in HR and talent, the acquisition. I think it's French persona, non-grata. Absolutely, and of course CBS had their own, so regardless, it's good to talk to you.

[00:01:36] It is good to bring people from in from all around the world. And you know, this is a fun thing we are doing here. I hope the audience finds it fun as well. There's always a little bit of gentle ribbing and we hope a few nuggets of knowledge.

[00:01:56] What more can you ask? Yeah, well, and a few nuggets of knowledge just for the benefit of the audience. This is one of those podcasts that was really difficult for us to schedule because there's a 13 hour time difference between

[00:02:12] between a couple of us and an only a 12 hour difference between between a couple of us. And you'll find out why, because today's guest is Joelle Pang. She is the general manager of Fast Jobs, Malaysia. Kind of hold onto your seats because she's got quite the impressive resume.

[00:02:34] I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed at how little I've done and how much she's done. Joelle has over 12 years of experience in technology startups. In a few different spaces, Ecommerce recruitment, mobile, and on demand.

[00:02:50] She was the founder of two startups, one of which she exited after leading it to become Singapore's leading fashion. Ecommerce platform. I can be qualified to do Ecommerce but not so much fashion. We can see you're clothing today, definitely not fashion.

[00:03:08] Yeah, nobody has ever accused me of being fashionable. Although that looks like the Zolensky Drab Olive T-shirt. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. I can't see the video but I am wearing a plain, all-of-green t-shirt and I would like to say it was in support of Ukraine.

[00:03:29] It's not, it's just what was cleaned in the closet. So Joelle's company Fast Jobs, Malaysia and its sister site, Fast GIG, Malaysia. They focus on helping to connect low-wage job seekers to meaningful employment opportunity.

[00:03:46] I'm really looking forward to learning more about that. Joelle, welcome to the inside job boards and recruitment marketplace's podcast. Thank you for having me. We appreciate that you've got up and stayed up. It's only 8 p.m. in your area.

[00:04:02] So we didn't ask you to stay up too late. We tried this once before somebody had a microphone problem. I won't say who but it wasn't seen. And that didn't work, but you had stayed up until midnight.

[00:04:14] So we really, and you would have been up till one in the morning. We really appreciate that. It is good to talk to you. We obviously saw you at the Amgroops Rap-Buzz Conference in Barcelona in 2019.

[00:04:31] This year we had a Quishon Lim spoke at the conference at Rekbuzz Amsterdam. Can you talk a little bit about the major differences between how job boards recruitment and what are the differences? How does that in terms of job boards.

[00:04:52] So for first jobs we focus on the low-witch or the non-assagative blue colour segment of the workforce. So everything moves really fast in Southeast Asia. And when we are talking about, you know, we are caught fast jobs for a reason.

[00:05:20] So in terms of the segment of the workforce that we are focusing on, a key difference really is that we are talking about hiring in huge volumes and in an extremely compressed timeline. So the kind of job seekers that we are helping to connect to our job opportunities

[00:05:38] are people who work in your retail, F&B, hospitality, warehousing logistics, customer service, administrative staff. And sometimes we are talking about hiring 100 or even 300 customers service or customer facing retail stores, associates to support and opening of an outlet.

[00:06:00] So definitely a lot of what we are looking at is very fast pace, high volume, urgent hiring. And I will say that that's a key differentiator because what we are also looking at is that we do have a high percentage of non-assagative jobs because over here in Asia.

[00:06:18] And in Malaysia itself, we have about 5% of our workforce falling within this segment of the workforce that we are connecting to job opportunities for. My co-host Steven also does a high volume hiring podcast. What's different about high volume hiring from

[00:06:40] one disease or five disease if I can make up a word? Yeah, so I think that that's a great question right because the vision for our set-fast call has always been to reduce the disconnect between the white quality recruiters.

[00:06:58] And also the blue-collar job seekers and this is actually false within the question that you are asking because if I were to ask you Peter or Steven, if you are looking to hire a senior marketing manager,

[00:07:10] maybe might say okay it will be really optimistic if I get a great candidate to join me in two months time and after serving gull Notice maybe three months time. But if I'm a restaurant owner looking to open three outlets in the next month,

[00:07:26] I'm talking about hiring 100 front of a front of a kitchen, back of kitchen, kitchen, kitchen helpers, service crew and I meet them here in two weeks time so that they are going to be trained and ready for the grant opening.

[00:07:40] And if I do not get the sufficient number of candidates or workers in my organization or my restaurant in time we're going to be talking about rental, we're going to be talking about operational costs

[00:07:52] that's going to be incurred and we're going to be talking about missed economic opportunities simply if we do not hire in time. Yeah that is really insightful and very much the same in North American Europe that the speed to hire, not just the

[00:08:07] how long it takes you to fill in the application form but just when you get back to the candidate, when you extend the offer how fast you're able to train and onboard them. The fastest employers win.

[00:08:19] One of the things that I think plays into the speed that really helps fast jobs and fast gig is that if I understand correctly your mobile first, and in North America and Europe there are certainly mobile first job boards and recruitment

[00:08:36] mark places but they're unusual. The vast majority of new sites either have no mobile app at all or it's hardly used. The most of the job boards and recruitment mark places, all the action is on the website.

[00:08:53] Give a feeling for why there's that difference is it is it just a fast jobs and fast gigs thing or is that common in Malaysia Singapore?

[00:09:04] I would say that on height, I would say that if you were to analyze the usage of technology by Jobsegas here in Singapore and Malaysia, it would make a lot of sense to be more robust and I think it's a really easy to quote mobile first, right?

[00:09:21] But what it actually means is that we actually released and introduced fast jobs on a mobile app even before we had a website, a web platform for Jobsegas to search for jobs. So that's really what we learned in mobile first.

[00:09:36] And I would say that there is something that's extremely unique for fast jobs as well because we spent a lot of time speaking with Jobsegas.

[00:09:45] I'll say that because the Muslims are looking to serve before we even designed and introduced fast jobs as a platform to connect Jobsegas to employers in this space.

[00:09:56] And why we have actually selected this strategy is because we do notice that internet penetration and smartphone penetration especially is extremely extremely high in Southeast Asia and in Malaysia.

[00:10:08] In fact, we are talking about high 90% plus of smartphone ownership, some even on three to formal backgrounds to a job goal, multiple business streams and workflows.

[00:10:21] And what this is a means for our segment of the jobsegas where most of them are lower-witch income earners is that the usage of the ownership or smartphones as compact to laptops are their stops is four times higher.

[00:10:35] So if you're looking to meaningfully connect this lower-witch shopsegas to no gainful employment opportunities, we definitely need to put this opportunities on devices that they are more like E2 to own.

[00:10:48] So with this strategy of mobile phones, we are actually able to place thousands of job opportunities in the power of the hands as long as they are able to afford a very, very basic smartphone.

[00:10:58] I'm still hung up on the notion of having three or four smartphones when I was in Hong Kong somebody explained to me why somebody would have three smartphones.

[00:11:09] One is the personal phone, one is the China phone that I use for calling people in China and one is the Hong Kong regular phone. But I don't know where the fourth one is.

[00:11:20] Let's talk how if you're trying to drive high-volume hiring, you also have to drive high-volume traffic and you have to reach job seekers, a lot of job seekers.

[00:11:37] How do you do that? Are you spending a ton of money on marketing? Are you bus cards everywhere? How do you drive the traffic? So that's a great question Peter and I imagine reminded of the very first question you asked.

[00:11:53] This might be something that's extremely unique to the Southeast Asian market where the non-executive operational customer facing job seekers really do make up a huge, same majority of the job seekers here in our part of the world.

[00:12:09] If you ask me how do we actually build our huge base of job seekers? For example, in just Malaysia alone, fast job sets over 1.5 million Malaysia base job seekers.

[00:12:22] If you were to add in our job seekers, we serve in Singapore for the business as well. We are talking about no close to 5 million job seekers.

[00:12:31] I'm sorry, we don't have a huge marketing budget but what we do have is I would say a very meaningful product market fit.

[00:12:39] If you think about it, the recruitment space for the blue collar job seekers has not been a very high-served, in fact, it has been undersevered hiring and recruitment space by technology for a really long time now.

[00:12:56] But you have platforms like LinkedIn and so on that take us to this white collar or in a managerial as active positions. A lot of this knowledge of non-executive job seekers have often had to rely on just walking around walls and also walking around shop blocks looking for vacancy hiring agent hiring sites.

[00:13:20] Sometimes going to a map-hour agencies where they have to approach a middleman just to be connected to a meaningful job opportunity. So the idea of just having thousands of opportunities that might be customized and catered to your preferences and your availability is definitely something very revolutionary.

[00:13:44] I would say that because it really does serve a huge market need. The moment we introduced that and just with a little bit of reach of line activities and online marketing,

[00:13:55] we saw our job figure base just grow and grow and it really just gained huge traction to the size that we are today.

[00:14:02] And even right now, a lot of our new jobs because getting about fast jobs to work off-math because the most important thing is to really in the profession of putting, right?

[00:14:11] That you use fast jobs and you get connected to a meaningful gainful opportunity with an employer that has been a vetate by us before they even start posting a job. We'll be back right after this break.

[00:15:02] When you and I met a few years ago at the, what was then, Reck Plus conference in Barcelona now, Reck Buzz and hopefully we're building the same room again in April and Berlin for the next Reck Buzz.

[00:15:17] I just loved the passion, the language, the meaningful employment and the example you just gave of somebody like walking around a shopping mall looking for help wanted signs. They can find employment.

[00:15:29] The likelihood that it's going to be meaningful, that it's going to be really well matched with their skills, with their ambitions, the hours that work for their families.

[00:15:41] It's just not nearly as good as if they can use a site like a fast jobs or a fast gig, where they can tap into a lot more jobs and find the best match. So much better for the candidate, so much better for the employer.

[00:15:56] I hope that you and the rest of your team every day, kind of keep that in mind that it's truly admirable, the work that you're doing and others in our space to help people.

[00:16:09] To help people find meaningful careers. Question for you, you know we've been talking about the business in Malaysia and in Singapore. It really seems like you guys really know what you're doing and are really listening to your customers, job seekers and employers.

[00:16:28] Are you planning on bringing that success to other countries? So definitely I think that our focus is on uplifting the livelihoods of this low-wish workers in Southeast Asia. So definitely we had a great start in Singapore, where we are hit-quartered.

[00:16:46] And Singapore has always been this unique mix where the ratio of blue color to white color jobs because it's about 50-50. And then of course our next market being Malaysia, that percentage of the market that we serve goes up a little to about 75%.

[00:17:03] And if you look at the opportunities in the other countries in Southeast Asia, Philippines, where they are also based or even Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia. We're talking about the blue color known as the different workforce taking up 90-90-plus percent of the total work force in the respective countries.

[00:17:23] So definitely huge huge opportunity. And when we talk about opportunity, it's not so much just, okay how can we grow up footprint or how can we get more customers, get more job seekers?

[00:17:36] But I think what really drives us as well is really the skill of the impact that we can make because our vision is really to uplift their livelihoods of this low-wish income earners in Southeast Asia by using technology.

[00:17:48] Sounds fair. You mentioned Vietnam, Thailand, those places would the same app and the same approach work there? I mean are you actively and aggressively looking at those markets or you just kind of thinking they might be good places to go eventually?

[00:18:11] And I don't want to ask you to give away trade secrets obviously. Oh, I do though. I do too, but on the podcast we do that for a group market place report. So just keep it between ourselves. Oh, yeah.

[00:18:27] So, no, let me just put on my head as a regional business developer. Right. I would say that you know, it isn't so much a trade secret or so much off, you know, are we just going to launch out wholesale?

[00:18:42] But what I would say is that in this non-executive blue-police space, recruitment itself is still very much a traditional industry.

[00:18:51] And what I have came to realize of all this yes is that the more I'll say the more traditional and industry, the more localization it will take in order for it to gain traction

[00:19:05] and to also build out a meaningful footprint in terms of both getting clients as well as shop seekers. So of course it is really sexy right to be saying that we are planning a flat here, we are planning a flat there.

[00:19:19] But I think what is most important for us is to find meaningful product market fit because first call as a company and with the ethos that we have. We're really here to build a sustainable business where doing good is part of doing good business.

[00:19:35] Sounds fair. So March 14th you're going to be opening. I'm just kidding. Sounds good. Are there any specifics about a gig platform on mobile that really work or really don't? And I think I got one more quick question after that.

[00:20:00] So I would say that beyond just talking about the features and what fast gate has to offer, I really love to talk about why fast gate was even introduced as a platform to complement what we do at fast shops.

[00:20:17] And it really just goes back to the why you know of fast shops itself and our vision has always been to create equal access to job opportunities for everyone. Including the low-wage workers, including the non-sicative jobs seekers.

[00:20:31] And what we have really seen is that you know, let us not forget the pandemic. I know we don't want to talk about that anymore but that has happened and it has really changed away we look for jobs.

[00:20:42] It has changed our relationship with jobs in just at two years alone. And what we have really seen is this huge shift in the hiring and job safety space.

[00:20:54] Is this increasing need for flexibility? And it's also a time where workers, not just quite colour but even blue colour, you know, job seekers all around the world finding and increasing need for you know flexibility.

[00:21:09] And it's not so much just a case of, oh, you know, one with life balance or all my priorities have changed. Of course those are reasons too.

[00:21:16] But a lot of times in the segment of the workforce that we help and support and hope to hope to out this, a big part of why do require a disability is because caregiving duties in a lot of their households have shifted.

[00:21:30] So, you know, jobs seekers who may use to be able to put up their time for a 16-week or full-time role which requires them to work 5-6 days a week is simply just not able to do that anymore.

[00:21:43] And instead of just discounting this entire group of job seekers who used to be able to work full-time and consider them as no longer relevant to our job seeker or our platform, we started thinking, you know, hey, circumstances may have changed.

[00:21:59] And also job seeking behaviors or requirements may have changed. But how do we as an organization keep in mind our vision to continue creating equal access to job opportunities even if the format of the job opportunity might have changed?

[00:22:14] And that is actually the genesis of ASKIT where we are also helping employers now to meet the operational needs because, you know, even in our part of the world it has became more and more challenging to hire post-pandemic.

[00:22:29] So, right now with ASKIT we are helping job seekers in whatever format and whatever available time that they have whether it be just weekends for some students or a few days a week for stable moms who still want to contribute and participate in a workforce.

[00:22:46] We allow them and give them the opportunity simply by providing flexible, no gatework that allows them to contribute whatever free time that they have to still earn a game for income for themselves with respectable and affordable employers.

[00:23:00] And of course, this is also where we are really thinking about how can we enable and also empower our employers to still meet the operational needs and also tap on what we call a hybrid workforce that is made up of both food timers as well as freelancers not only to meet the operational needs but also to help them to keep a lean and on demand workforce that is also supporting their daily operations because let us not forget that the recessionary

[00:23:30] crisis also booming in the background and I think this is really how we are really thinking not just about the solutions but really thinking about what are the problems that we exist to solve.

[00:23:42] Well, that also answered another one of my questions which was can you explain the difference between faster jobs and fast gigs and you just did very very well.

[00:23:51] I'm going to bring us full circle with a final question and then we'll wrap up because we're running a little long but that's always good. How many cell phones mobile phones do you have.

[00:24:02] There's a question. I used to have two and then similar to you, I was like how do I even juggle like how do I how do I let two devices run my life and I have come back to just one mobile phone with two SIM cards.

[00:24:15] Okay, so one ring tones for the family and one is for work or some variation there of.

[00:24:25] So my phone is so secret right my phone is always on silent because I want to stay in control of how I use my time and how do I how I stay focused. There you go. Well, so no ring tone.

[00:24:38] It's it's great to hear about what's going on in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and to hear you say our next markets are Vietnam and Thailand and no only kidding. I said those might be in the future so I don't want to put words in your mouth.

[00:24:56] But for people who want to find you, where should they find you and fast-co fast gigs, fast jobs and let's spell your name because Joelle could be spelled 16 ways from sunrise. J-O-E-L-L-E, ping with a P is fairly obvious.

[00:25:17] Find you on LinkedIn or email you or how do they find you? Definitely look for me on LinkedIn. I'm quite active there and you can look for me with just Joelle, ping or you can always drop me an email at Joelle at fast-co.bezier.

[00:25:33] Sounds terrific. Any last words, Steven? I would just really like to thank you. Thank you for being up a little bit on the late side. For the so that our listeners can learn more about the job markets and Singapore, Malaysia and how have fast-co helps them.

[00:25:51] For the record, I have one cell phone but it's not just my cell phone that controls my life, it's also my dog. The dog is your cell phone or the dog controls your life. The dog controls my life. God bless. God bless. Joelle, thanks very much.

[00:26:09] Thank you so much. You're so great. Inside job boards and recruitment marketplace is a co-production of Evergreen podcast, college recruiter and the aim group. Please subscribe for free on your favorite app. Review it. Five stars are always nice.

[00:26:27] And recommend it to a couple of people you know who want to learn more about job boards and recruitment marketplaces. Special thanks to our producer and engineer Ian Douglas.

[00:26:37] I'm your host, Peter's Olman of the aim group. The leading global consultancy in the field of marketplaces and classified advertising. Find out more about our reports on recruitment marketplaces, job boards and classifies, including our new recruitment marketplaces annual at aimgroup.com slash reports.

[00:26:58] I'm your host, Steven Rothberg, of Job Search Site College recruiter. Each year we help more than 12 million candidates find great new jobs. Our customers are primarily fortunate in 1000 companies, government agencies and other employers who hire at scale and advertise their jobs with us.

[00:27:17] You can reach me at StevenAtColage recruiter.com The Jim Stroud podcast explores the discoveries and trends forming the future of our lives. Brain to Brain Communication, robot bosses, Microchip implants for workers and artificial intelligence replacing human workers are all happening now.

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