Kelly Services is an established, award winning recruitment agency that provides permanent and contract staffing, payroll outsourcing and headhunting services and operates in more than 30 countries worldwide, including Malaysia. CallCentres.net is an online publishing, news and research company specializing in the call centre industry and with focus on the Asia region.

There is a lot of information, facts and findings in the report. Here are 7 interesting facts you may find it interesting:

1. Malaysia has the largest number of contact centres compared to other countries

With 19 contact centres, Malaysia has the largest number followed by Singapore (9), India (8) and Philippines (8).

Clearly, companies prefer to set up their call centre in Malaysia than others. The fact that Malaysia can provide multi-language support enhances the country’s reputation as a preferred call centre destination. As reported by AT Kearney, Malaysia is ranked the 3rd most attractive outsourcing destination after India and China, but when it comes to call centre set up, Malaysia has the better advantage over the two.

However, in terms of growth (Recruitment Index), India has the best percentage at 12.7%, followed by Malaysia (7.3%) and Singapore (7.0%).

2. The 2 top industries where call centres are set up are:

a. Banking, finance and insurance
b. IT, telecommunication and media

As you can see, for these 2 top industries, the need for call centre operation is prevalent. Some examples of the many countries with established call centres are:

Banking, finance and insurance – Citibank, HSBC, OCBC, Maybank, CIMB and Hong Leong

IT, telecommunication and media – IBM, Hewlett Packard, Maxis, Digi, TM, and Dell

3. Top reasons why call centres find it difficult to recruit people:

a. Shortage of skilled staff
b. Shortage of candidates in the marketplace
c. Uncompetitive salary
d. Location of contact centre

4. Primary skills sought by the call centres when recruiting:

a. Verbal communication skills
b. Customer service techniques
c. Contact centre experience
d. Written communication skills

5. More than half (56%) of recruitment exercise occurred due to resignation. The rest is expansion. The 56% means that the turnover (or attrition) rate for call centre employees is very high. The report found that the average ‘life time’ of an employee working with a call centre is only about 15 months (1 year and the half). After 15 months, they either join another call centre or quit the profession altogether.

6. More than half of new possible recruits (63%) rejected offer from the call centre. There is no reason established but I speculate this is mainly due to disagreement with the package.

7. 43% recruitment in Malaysia is done through recruitment agencies. That represents almost half of the total recruitment exercise. Hence, if you’re looking for jobs in the call centre environment, always keep your choices open and do not close your doors to apply through recruitment agencies.

Click here to download the original Asian Contact Centre Industry Recruitment Index 2006 report (PDF).

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From our own perspective point of views, this is largely due to lack of their power in attracting top employers to advertise with them. A little search done to find top companies like Petronas, DiGi, Ericsson, DHL, Maxis, Genting, Sime Darby, CIMB and Shell (done today at 10:50am) resulted in zero search result. While the newspaper version of the Star Job advertisement projects an astounding success, the online version tells us they still have a long way to go.

To make it more frustrating, many of the jobs are advertised by ‘The Advertiser’. Now, under the usual job market circumstances, these can possibly mean two things:

1. Someone in an organization is to be replaced, or a restructuring is deemed to happen

This often refers to a key position in an organization. For some reason, the board or the management decided to remove someone from the position he is holding, perhaps because of his ineffectiveness in his job and lack of performance. However, the company does not want to make it clear to him that they do not want him, as yet. But instead, they choose to find a potential replacement first. Once a replacement is found, only then this guy is handed the ‘You’re fired!’ letter. Imagine, if the position is advertised under the real company’s name, then the guy who is holding the position being advertised will be left asking, “Why aa?” and will possibly go berserk, resulting a much worse organizational crisis.

2. It is advertised by a third party, or a headhunter, who does not want to be known

For this point, the advertiser does not seem to be interested in branding their company or name. Perhaps the headhunter or agent is a one-man operation, who is more interested in the commercial value of the job rather than reputation.

In our case here, it looks like the ‘Advertiser’ jobs in StarJobs are unlikely to fall into any of the 2 categories. The Payroll Executive and Junior Quantity Surveyor positions are not key positions that wisely grant the company to advertise under the ‘Advertiser’ banner. So the likely case is that they are being created by them as an effort to capture visitor’s interest to register with the website.

So are you saying these are dummy job positions? Some of you ask.

The answer is, we do not know to be exact. One thing for sure, only a few people will be attracted to apply for the jobs advertised by ‘Advertiser’. Top employees are very much likely to stay away from them. First, they never know who the real person or organization. And secondly, what if the advertiser happens to be their own employer? Kantoi.

What’s happening to the Star Jobs is too bad considering that the overall system running for the website is pretty cool and user friendly. The user registration is simple, fast and convenient. You also have an option to complete your resume during the registration or skip it first. I like the registration system better than other job portals.

If they intend to corner the job market away from the likes of Jobstreet.com, JobsDB.com and others, then more aggressive marketing needs to be done to capture the interest of top employers and the imagination of job seekers. Otherwise, they will remain as just another mediocre job site.

Talking about mediocrity, there is this one Malaysia job portal which was established under the MSC flagship in late 90s. They also have a recruitment team supposed to assist the MSC-Status companies, the government-linked companies (GLCs) and corporate clients to capture market talents, especially in the IT and technology market. What sounded like a promising venture eventually faded away as the company’s performance turned from good to bad to worse. The job portal is still running but almost with a non-existent presence. Which job portal we’re talking about here?

This will be covered pretty soon, but if you are a savvy job seeker, you probably have an idea about who they are.

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