Key Territory – Asia-Pac
Employers in Hong Kong find it
to be extremely costly having to invest time and money to train and bring graduates up to the standard needed.
Bridging The Great Divide…
A recent McKinsey study found that while 72% of educational institutions believe that recent graduates are ready for work, only 42% of employers agree. These findings are not unique to the UK; the professional accounting organisation CPA Australia’s 2012 Hong Kong Human Capital Survey indicated a wider global trend, indicating that 54.9% believe that ‘Hong Kong’s Gen Y lacks the right technical and soft skills to sustain and drive the city’s growth’. Nishilla McKeogh, Director of the Hong Kong Association of Graduate Recruiters (HKAGR) shares her insights into what employers in Hong Kong are doing to tackle this issue.
and those that are actually demonstrated. In addition to McKinsey’s study, the Association of Graduate Recruiters’ UK (2012) survey also found that two-fifths (40%) of the 200 employers surveyed could not fill up to 5% of their vacancies. The main reason employers gave for struggling to recruit the right numbers of graduates was that “candidates are normally academically proficient but lacking in soft skills”. They also said that even though the number of applications they received allowed them to meet the requirements of the business in terms of numbers, the quality of applications was “not always up to standard”.
R 32 Graduate Recruiter |
www.agr.org.uk
ecent surveys and articles have found a deep disconnect between the skills employers would like graduates to have,
Peter Lee, divisional deputy president for Greater China at CPA Australia stated that “There appears to be an unbalanced emphasis on academic success in Hong Kong that can come at the cost of a real- life skill set that includes interpersonal skills, practical knowledge and a sense of responsibility,”
This “lack of skilled talent” has a detrimental effect for businesses that hire entry level talent. Employers in Hong Kong find it to be extremely costly having to invest time and money to train and bring graduates up to the standard needed. One of the other knock on effects that we have seen in Hong Kong is that companies end up recruiting from and making offers to the same small pool of ‘skilled’ candidates. A number of our
HKAGR members have reported that these highly sought after candidates accept more than one offer and then ‘drop-out’ close to the start date of their employment. This shortfall means that we end up having to do ‘last minute top-up recruitment’ or our organisations are left with unfilled graduate places at entry level.
For most organisations, regardless of whether they are in Hong Kong or elsewhere, building and maintaining a successful talent pipeline is extremely important. As employers we need to work with the educational institutions on bridging the gap between the practical experience and skills required by graduates to survive in today’s working environment, and their academic and
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