HONG KONG, May 27, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the jobsDB Q1 2014 Hiring Index, 64% of Hong Kong employers intend to hire staff in the coming three months, up 2% and 5% compared to the previous quarter and the same quarter last year respectively. It reflects that employers are generally optimistic to the employment market in the second quarter of 2014 (See figure 1). On the whole, 41% of the respondents anticipated the recruitment market would be more active in the coming three months. Among these employers, 80% with over 500 staff and 53% with 201-500 staff happened to hold the same view. On the other hand, 39% of the respondents believed the employment market would remain unchanged in the next quarter.
Figure 1
| Hiring plan comparison (Quarterly) | |||||
| Q1 2013 | Q2 2013 | Q3 2013 | Q4 2014 | Q1 2014 | |
| We will hire staff | 59% | 59% | 55% | 62% | 64% |
| We will cut head count | 2% | 2% | 2% | 3% | 3% |
| We will freeze hiring process* | 17% | 21% | 19% | 23% | 17% |
| No plan yet | 22% | 19% | 24% | 11% | 17% |
* Questionnaire wordings changed from "freeze head count" to "freeze hiring process" from Q1 2014
jobsDB Q1 2014 Hiring Index is based on an online survey conducted in April 2014 to gather information on hiring intentions and office environment. A total of 120 companies participated in the survey.
Soaring Significance of Work-Life Balance
jobsDB Q1 2014 Hiring Index reveals that 72% of the respondents have their staff resigned in the past three months, among them 62% had staff retention. Amidst a myriad of retention strategies, "salary increment" is still considered as the most sought after one, 57% of the employers having staff retention adopted it, and the pay raise largely fell within the range of 6-10%. The second most popular strategy is "provision of better work arrangement", 54% of the employers adopted this option (See Figure 2). The survey result reveals both remuneration and work arrangement are equally significant to employees.
Mr. Justin Yiu, General Manager of jobsDB Hong Kong, said, "Working overtime has long been a common practice in Hong Kong, and it seems to be an everlasting phenomenon. Craving for a better quality of life, a good deal of employees would rather move on to a job with a lower pay but better work arrangement, instead of working long hours for a high-paid job. In the past, salary increment might be the best strategy for staff retention, but recently more and more people have been pursuing work-life balance. Some employees change their jobs because their new employers are able to provide better work arrangement, such as flexible and reasonable working hours, sensible workload, job rotation opportunities, to name a few. Not only can employees strike a balance between work and family, but they can also maintain both physical and mental well-being."
Figure 2
| Measures for retaining leaving staff | |
| % of companies | |
| By promotion | 43% |
| By increasing salary | 57% |
| By providing better work arrangement | 54% |
| By providing training / career development opportunities | 43% |
| Other | 6% |
Remarks: Multiple answers are allowed and sum of percentages may not equal 100%
Staff Turnover Upsurges in IT industry
According to the survey, the staff turnover rate of IT industry is found to be the highest among the others, reaching a record high of 33%, which far outpaces the second and the third highest ones - property management and consultancy (14.3%) and medical and pharmaceutical sectors (13.7%).
"The above figures reflect that IT professionals have been in great demand from diverse business enterprises recently. In the past only few IT professionals are needed in a corporation, however, today IT industry has been branching out into a wide variety of job disciplines. To keep up with the pace of advanced communications technology, some of the IT work entails substantial input of creativity, such as programming, software development, devising mobile platform, among the others. The demand of these creative IT professionals has been escalating."
The jobsDB Q1 2014 Hiring Index is available at http://hk.jobsdb.com/StaticContent/hk/hiring-survey/2014/Q1-hiring-index/hiring-index-Q1-2014.pdf