Dream Job
We often hear people talk about their ‘dream job’ but seldom do we realise what constitutes to this idea. Some might say that it’s a self-journey that lets us explore our intrinsic passions or skills, flexibility on work-life balance, whilst others denote meaning to it through generous paychecks, expensive cars, or even that holiday splurge. The term ‘dream job’ is an ambiguous idea much left to one’s perception.
However, looking at the bigger narrative of one’s dream job, various constituents can be summarised into describing this broad term. Typically, a dream job fulfils our quest for knowledge, self-development and financial independence. In short, these ideas attribute to the traits or goals needed to attain ultimate job satisfaction.
Having a definitive outline of what a dream job entails, we now need to look at the bigger question of what individuals are doing to achieve it. Some questions that come into play are, ‘are job seekers actively reflecting on what their individual goals are? If yes, are organisations creating an environment that allows employees to reach these goals and their full potential? If no, are employers being engaging enough with employees in having open discussions towards their individual goals and career growth?
A recent JobStreet.com survey indicates, 52% of the Malaysian workforce feel disengaged within their job roles. This begs the question of, are individuals not doing what they like? If so, why are they still pursuing the same unsatisfactory job? Has dissatisfaction amongst employees become commonplace for all organisations? Does the employee fall short of his or her job expectations? Or perhaps the adverse economic outlook makes it difficult for job seekers who are looking for a change?
In an attempt to answer this, let’s explore an assumptive scenario, perhaps, some individuals knowingly joined the ‘wrong organisation,’ using that basis as stepping stone into the employment market, without actually giving their own individual goals a second thought. This phenomenon could be the result of job demands surpassing actual job vacancies, which render applicants with limited opportunities. Or in some cases, individuals apply for a job in which they lack the technical skills purely for the sake of developing their credentials. In most cases, such individuals will jump on the next job opportunity should they see it as being better, we’ll refer to this as the ‘stone stepper phenomenon.’
In Malaysia, each year alone there are 200,000 fresh university graduates. Amongst these numbers, it has become common for graduates with basic academics to acquire qualifications in finance, engineering, business, and medicine etc. Interestingly, the Catch-22 where companies are still actively in search of experienced employees, the graduate employability (GE) numbers continue to increase from 76.1% to 77.2% as of December 2018 with Malaysia’s unemployment rate remained functionally full employment at 3.5% (Statista, 2018). In short, given the same lack of requisite job experiences/skills and increasing GE number, there are now more mismatched-relationships between employees and employers. This is to say that graduates accept job offers to get employed regardless of the suitability or to treat such organisations as a stepping stone until they see better job opportunities.
The ‘Stone stepper’ phenomenon may be seen as an unfavourable trait but in hindsight it allows individuals to harness their technical skills before moving onto the next job. At this stage, individuals put their best foot forward to obtain strong recommendations in pursuit of their dream job. It is not the least bit surprising that most organisations are aware of this occurrence and hiring of these individuals are purely for their short term contribution and adequate training and guidance are foregone on these employees. However, this “cost-saving” strategy is flawed resulting in the loss of job satisfaction amongst employees at an early stage. This in-turn loses out on building a lasting positive impact, in which an employee is given the means to develop the right skills through proper training parallel to their personal goals. Foregoing this element also leads to the dead spiral of dissatisfaction, resulting in inefficiency and lost of productivity that opposes the initial intention of recruiting the individual based on short term contribution.
An identifiable remedy to address the stone stepper ordeal is to establish smart partnerships with third parties that are well-equipped with requisite knowledge and technology to bridge the trust gap between individuals and organisations, where individuals are assured of programs comprising of proper technical and managerial training/coaching, mentorship as well as personal goal assessment. Whilst organisations can measure the ROI and impact of the training programs and effectively measure the efficiency of the individuals based on the individual’s optimal potential in a given environment.
On the flip side, we have another group of workforce that unknowingly joined the wrong organisation. Fundamentally caused by the lemons problem in the talent acquisition process, increased competition as well as cultural and economical push towards getting full-time employment. Going back to the aforementioned goal reflection and self-realisation: generally, information of salary and scope of a job offering are known before a candidate is recruited. However, more importantly, candidates are not aware of the culture, environment, attitudes of direct superior and the growing opportunity in the hiring organisation. Not until the candidate is officially hired or has signed a contract does the environmental and cultural fit is realised by both parties, until then the employer may not have an actual idea regarding candidates soft skills, ethical values sets and personality traits. In the end, it somehow became a mandatory risk for both parties to take in the talent acquisition process that can potentially cause both parties to put their resources to waste. For instance, 3 months of resources on employee and at least 6 months of resources on the hiring organisation, including increased employee turnover, decreasing productivity and waste of recruitment cost, thus resulting in lower profitability.
Unfortunately, in our current work scene, the majority of the workforce falls under this “unknowingly joined the wrong organisation” category. The solution can be tricky as the self-actualization process of individuals involves time and allocation of resources. It does not make economic sense for organisations to pull together time resources to implement programs specific towards dealing with the individual’s specific needs. Once again, the projected problem in this category of workforce points us to the same solution, third party interventions that can speed up the process with their experience and technology with a large customer base so that they can provide a more precise solution to different organisations at a much lower cost.
With a large number of graduates seeking employment, leading towards increased competition to land a satisfactory job, thus forcing the organisation to implement more stringent assessments to select candidates of best fit and high quality. Somehow, bad hire does still exist regardless of layers of interviews it does not seem to be enough. Is it because in general, our workforce is below par in terms of technical and managerial skills? Or organisations do not have months of resources to wait for the right candidate to come and apply for a position that has been vacant for months? We believe it is the latter, organisations are always about efficiency and productivity. Here staff referral programs comes in; hoping to get a well-fitted employee on vacancies from time to time. At times things are not perfect, an employee who was referred might have the required skill sets but may not possess the right attitude or the right cultural fit (conflicting values or work ethics). Most of the time organisations have no choice but to absorb this referred person as there are no better existing solutions to identify employees with required skillsets & culture fit at a large scale within the shortest time frame.
This is not a one-time event, it happens over and over again in majority of the organisations and when this repeats throughout the tenure of other employees, it brings a hard time for organisations to build coherent culture and environment to bring happiness and satisfaction to their employees, who are faced with reduced sense of belonging even though that was their passion, to begin with. Thus, in this case, employee engagement and employee retaining strategies fail or are targeted at the wrong group.
Therefore the right match between candidates and organisations is imperative to allow both parties to propel and to save the tremendous utilized resources and inefficiency issues. Although there are many existing third party Human Resource services, the HR industry needs an innovation revolution to enhance Training & Development, Human Resource Business Partners, Salaries & Benefits, Succession Planning and Recruitment. This is to say a holistic platform with the right technology instead of providing silo services separately due to the interrelated process. Proper linkages and bridges allow us to garner valuable information, which can then unleash individuals and organisations power and dramatically improve the performance of all industries.
Sources
https://eduadvisor.my/articles/what-didnt-know-fresh-graduate-unemployment-malaysia-infographic/
https://tradingeconomics.com/malaysia/job-vacancies
https://www.statista.com/statistics/319019/unemployment-rate-in-malaysia/
https://www.ihrnet.com/and-we-wonder-why-malaysian-graduates-remain-unemployed/
https://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/12/195216/malaysian-graduates-employability-rate-rises-772-cent
