Singapore – Online recruitment platform Bossjob has initiated the ‘Boss Big Bonus’ campaign worldwide as a move to attract new users and enhance employer retention by introducing a $500,000 cash reward. 

The campaign period will run from August 1 to October 31, 2023 and participants can share the cash reward by completing specific tasks on the website, with each task corresponding to certain points convertible to cash. A maximum of 10,000 points, equivalent to $100, can be obtained for completing a single task.

Bossjob’s campaign targets all registered employers on the platform who are qualified after company verification.  

Some of the tasks included in the campaign are onboarding tasks, engaging in conversations, and inviting new users. Basically, the more active employers are in hiring and making recommendations, the greater the cash rewards they receive. 

Bossjob’s co-founder, Kiat How, believes that Bossjob holds advantages in terms of talent, products, and efficiency. 

The online recruitment platform introduced online chatting into the recruitment scene, leveraging cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence algorithms and big data to recommend highly suitable candidates to companies and jobs to job seekers, thereby enhancing the matching precision for both sides, reducing information asymmetry, and consequently improving job search and recruitment efficiency.

Bossjob is the first online recruitment platform to promote the direct hiring model globally. The model has been successful in the Philippine recruitment market, with a registered user base of over 3.5 million. Currently, Bossjob is expediting its global expansion into Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and other locations.

Bossjob’s global strategic layout in places like Japan and Singapore is progressing smoothly. They plan to enter Hong Kong in the third quarter of this year and cover over 30 million users in Southeast Asia by 2026.

Mumbai, India – Communication strategy consultancy Pitchfork Partners Strategic Consulting has launched a specialised talent engagement practice, which aims to hone client capabilities to effectively communicate, build and retain trust among existing and potential talent.

Through the practice, Pitchfork Partners will offer consulting services to develop talent engagement, both internally and externally, create recruitment and retention campaigns, internal communique, as well as tactical actions meant to support the company’s overall talent objectives. 

Moreover, the consultancy likewise aims to simplify and streamline client requirements and deploy targeted strategies to meet client objectives in widening their aspirant pool and appealing to the best candidates. Its team of experts in communication strategy, public relations, social media, digital, and internal communication will also help firms embark on a 360-degree talent approach.

“Finding and retaining the right talent is not always easy and remains a primary concern for many organisations. While traditional motivations such as pay scales and benefits are important, the current workforce seeks inclusive and impactful experiences at the workplace too,” said Pannkajj D Desai, chief operating officer at Pitchfork Partners.

He added, “A winning strategy to make one’s firm attractive to potential and current employees is what will determine whether the employer will be successful or not.”

Last year, Pitchfork Partners has also been appointed by digital music firm Believe as its communication counsel to manage its brand strategies in India.

Singapore – As part of its vision to be one of the leading digital career platforms in the Asia-Pacific, tech company SEEK that owns recruitment marketplace platforms JobStreet and JobsDB, has announced investment amounting to US$48m to JobKorea, a South Korea-based online recruitment platform.

The investment entails SEEK having a 10% stake of JobKorea, as well as having Peter Bithos, CEO of SEEK, to join JobKorea’s board.

For Bithos, said investment partnership is a big win not only for SEEK and JobKorea, but more importantly for all jobseekers and employers in Asia, adding that with JobKorea, they can now touch the lives of an additional 25 million jobseekers and 5 million employers in one of the largest economies in the world.

“Through this investment, we look forward to helping JobKorea with our market-leading insights into big data, how to leverage AI, and our commercial and technical experience building the leading jobs and career marketplaces across APAC. We also look forward to learning from JobKorea as it continues to build on its leadership in one of Asia’s most dynamic, sophisticated markets,” he said.

This investment will provide an opportunity for SEEK to add value to JobKorea’s market-leading position, while SEEK focuses on its operations, fast-tracking its ongoing transformation and growth of its existing Asia businesses. SEEK’s digital teams continue to make major inroads in building products and solutions driven by AI and market data, which combined with SEEK’s deep local insights and resources in each location, differentiate it from other international players.

Meanwhile for JobKorea, this partnership will provide an opportunity to leverage SEEK’s experienced management team and their significant expertise in operating global online employment and human capital management platforms.

“We are delighted to have a partnership with SEEK, a company with a wealth of experience in the global online employment market. We believe that this relationship will be an opportunity for JobKorea to make a quantum leap to the next level. With competition becoming ever fiercer to hire talented people such as good managers, developers or tech specialists, JobKorea will move toward a global HR platform that connects the Korean employment marketplace internationally,” said Yoon Byung-joon, CEO at JobKorea.

At present, 90% of JobKorea is owned by Affinity Equity Partners (AEP), a global private equity player and the largest in Korea. AEP acquired 100% of JobKorea back in May 2021.

SEEK in Asia has also seen some corporate moves as well recently, with the appointment of former HOOQ marketing head Jane Cruz-Walker as its chief marketing officer.

Auckland, New Zealand – The recruitment service of the Auckland University of Technology has announced a rebranding from ‘AUT Internz’ to ‘AUT talenthub’.

The recruitment service works by offering a diverse range of roles for recruited students in various sectors, including project management, software development, communication, creative technology, events and business.

The rebranding endeavor comes as the university aims to bring further focus to recruitment and placement of graduates, as well as internships into the paid New Zealand market.

“Businesses come to us because we can look after their graduate and internship recruitment for them. We give employers a free and easy way to access the large pool of graduates and do the time-consuming work for them of advertising and screening their roles, then providing a shortlist of candidates who have been well-prepped for interviews,” said Jade Bradley, candidate manager for AUT talenthub.

Meanwhile, Rachel Shareef, relationship manager for AUT talenthub notes that AUT talenthub has been widely used by organizations in the local market due to the reputation of past students recruited by the service, and at the same time AUT talenthub aids organizations to help them in the recruitment process of potential work candidates.

Some of the services AUT talenthub offers is its AUT Employability service, which helps students upgrade their CV and LinkedIn profiles and develop stronger interview skills through interview practice.

“Students tell us they like talenthub because we take the pressure off their job search and give them advice about the process of looking for their first job, whether an internship or a graduate role,” Bradley added.

For now, a focus on local graduate and internship opportunities will be prioritized by AUT talenthub to create a greater demand in the local market, according to Anna Williams, director for employability, international and recreation at Auckland University of Technology.

“This is a unique student service within the New Zealand university space, one that really gives our students unique opportunities as they enter into their careers,” Williams stated.


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If you want to land that job, you better start thinking like an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur sees the job posting as a company’s way of generating leads for new employees, perceives the resume as a sales brochure they give to an interested customer or client, views the interview as an exploratory discussion about how the candidate and employer can work together, identifies the salary negotiation as a measure of each other’s value propositions, and recognizes employment as a partnership to help the organization thrive in a competitive market. 

In the same way that companies behave that way about their business dealings, so should job seekers towards employment opportunities. So how do top entrepreneurs acquire the best opportunities in the market? Simple–personal branding.

What is personal branding?

Personal branding is many things. It is a story, a vision and mission statement, an image, a perceived value, and much more. Whether or not you are consciously developing your personal brand, chances are there is already a clear picture of who you are to other people. If you want to do an audit on your ‘Personal Branding score’ you might want to consider checking what your network and even what your digital footprint is saying about you. There are many ways to check but a simple Google search will suffice most of the time. 

Attracting opportunities and job offers with personal branding

Personal branding is a soft and inbound form of selling and marketing. In this case, you will need that just to get your foot in the door in job applications. But it is not as grand as you think. In reality, employers do not really care about your badges and certifications, what they care about and what they usually ask themselves to evaluate you is “Will this person really deliver value to my company?” “Can he increase revenue or reduce cost, or perhaps increase our stakeholder value?” You have to prove it with what you know and it has to show in that interview and even in as simple as your LinkedIn profile, posts, likes, shares, and comments. 

How does one start building their personal brand? 

You may be wondering about the ways people are able to build their personal brand. Certain ways include working on your wardrobe, makeup, body language, and also your aura. But with the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, wherein the separation between the digital, physical, and biological world blurs, more and more people are resorting to also building their personal brand online. Such ways to do so are through social media platforms like LinkedIn as well as the traditional websites. 

There is a whole lot of process in building one’s personal brand online, but you cannot really make a solid one if you do not work on drafting your purpose, or in sales or marketing terms, your ‘value proposition’.  

Maybe you are wondering where to get the inspiration to position yourself as someone of value. Because you will actually have to produce a lot of content whether online or offline to demonstrate this. Here is a tip – evaluate your identity and everything else attached to it so you can convince employers that you are clear with your intentions and so they can ultimately hire you. 

What was your life story like and how did it influence the way you interact with the world? What life-changing experiences did you have and how did they inspire you to make specific decisions today? Do you see the world in numbers or is it very abstract to you? What advocacies do you have? What would you say are your talents and skills? 

The answers to these questions will help you craft a sales pitch about you and your talent as well as how this can provide value to people. That way, it will be a lot easier to market and sell your brand so you can get the job you need.

What comes next after finding my ‘purpose’? 

Once you have jotted down your ‘purpose’ clearly, you can now identify the features of your talent to support your personal brand.

Here is one example – someone had just discovered that his purpose is helping organizations in reducing poverty. If you think about it, there are many ways to support his brand with this image. Perhaps he would like to position himself as an educator who wants to make his students more employable so that they can have a decent source of living. Maybe he would want to become an entrepreneur who is growing his business to create additional jobs in the market. He might also want to brand himself as a politician wanting to create policies to improve the conditions of the job market. The choice is entirely up to him and is dependent on the option he has the competency to do. Regardless, whichever he chooses determines the next step.

The next step looks like this: If he chose, for example, to position himself as an educator, he might want to consider flashing credentials focusing on his academic background and teaching experience. That means awards, research papers, teacher volunteer work, and high grades are important. 

If he goes for the entrepreneur route, it may be a bit more different. Who he knows and the amount of skin in the game he has is more important to effectively position himself as such. Now if he opts for being a politician, he might want to also consider establishing the existence of his vast connections and how genuine he is in providing quality public service. Only after making his choice was he able to make a clear messaging online about who he is and how valuable his service and talents are to people.

Why personal branding? 

At the end of the day, it is not really much about bragging who you are and what people think about you. personal branding is ultimately a means to communicate your value and how this value can help solve problems and change lives. In truth, jobs did not exist just for the sake of producing jobs in the market. They were created to solve problems, and if you are able to prove that you are capable of effectively solving the pain points of organizations in need of your talent, then you can truly get the opportunities that match your needs.

The author is Danica Octa, president, and CEO of Metamorphosis Group.

Metamorphosis Group is a career coaching firm supporting job seekers, career explorers, and career changers into new opportunities.

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