Here’s an excerpt from the conversation:
Sumita Tandon, HR director of APAC at LinkedIn:
What we are seeing is that nearly seven out of 10 people want to look for a new job, they’re planning to look for a new job this year. But the response rate that they’re hearing back from companies is much lower, which is leading to their frustration.
On the other side of the spectrum, it’s the employers who are just not able to find that right balance of technical skills along with soft skills. And the landscape of the job market is changing so much and so quickly, which is leading to this frustration and this mismatch.
Tiffany Ang, host:
So what are employers specifically looking out for? You talk about the hard skills and soft skills, but are there certain skills specifically that they are looking for?
Sumita:
What we are seeing is that this mismatch is partly driven by changes in the skills and the roles that the businesses need. So for example, globally, what we are seeing is that hiring for AI talent has surged more than 300 per cent globally over the last eight years. And in APAC, we are expecting skills to change by 70 per cent by 2030 due to Gen AI, compared to 52 per cent without it, this is a 18 percentage point faster pace of transformation.
Now if you look at overall economic landscape as well, companies are wanting to balance some of their hiring plans and what we are sensing is that they will invest in technology in upskilling and reskilling their existing workforce versus prioritising headcount growth. So what that means is that headcount is going to remain relatively flat.
