Despite the gloomy prognosis for the US economy, major recruitment agencies have still issued a positive report card for the job market in Singapore. According to a quarterly survey conducted by employment agency Hudson, only 8 per cent of the 659 respondents polled here expect sub-prime woes in the US to dampen their hiring plans.

"Hiring expectations are steady and remain at a high level. Employers are paying big increases in salaries and bonuses to attract and retain talented candidates but still face rising turnover rates," said Mark Sparrow, Hudson's country manager for Singapore.

51 per cent of key employment decision makers surveyed plan to increase their headcount in the current quarter. In particular, the Hudson report revealed that the manufacturing sector has the highest recruitment expectations, with 61 per cent of respondents gearing to ramp up hiring over the coming months.

With the bright prospects, job hopping and poaching has become commonplace, prompting companies to look at new means to attract talent while hanging on to existing employees in a tightening labour market.

How can employers retain their precious talent base in light of the mounting challenges? How can technology play a part in this process? BizIT asked a panel of HR industry experts for their opinions.

Winston Chai: With the booming economy, Singapore has become somewhat of an employee's market. How do you hang on to existing talent?

David Ang: Indeed, today's talent cannot be won over through basic methods such as increased remuneration. Attracting and retaining talent has become a corporate objective of some organisations, if not most at this stage. They are striving to improve their methods for managing, motivating and training talent.

Every employee is motivated for different reasons. It is important to capture this information as each individual stays and progresses within the organisation. We will see an increasing trend in the use of human resources information systems and tools being used for updating key employee data and each individual's motivators.

Christopher Mills: Companies should develop an "employer of choice" mentality. They can do this by paying at least at 75 percentile of the job market; provide employees with challenging but interesting and developing work. In addition, they can strive to create a culture where all staff are expected to live the core values and have supervisors who realise their key role is supporting and taking an interest in their staff. Other measures like flexible work hours, the development of a collegiate atmosphere as well as a pleasant work place with good tech tools will also help.

Leong Weng Loong: Retaining employees today rarely depends on compensation as a sole factor. There are several factors involved such as benefits, job satisfaction, job recognition, job advancements, personal development, recognition of contribution. Hence, companies will have to formulate a plan for employees to recognise their job objectives for the incumbent to contribute substantially to an organisation. Through the plan, employers will recognise the shortfall of the employee's skills.It can then contribute towards developing an employee's skill-set through initiatives like training.

Winston: What are the major challenges in managing your talent base today? Is there a growing shift beyond remuneration as a motivator?

Mr Ang: Talent diversity and mobility present a lot of challenges for business leaders and HR practitioners where they have to manage staff retention, relocation and expatriate management matters as well as succession planning. While talent management is key, succession planning is just as important to retain knowledge held by retiring matured workers and ensuring there is sufficient time to coach and develop successors. One of the major challenges would be getting HR professionals to focus on developing line managers to be equipped with people management capabilities and evolving them into people managers, who are not just functional specialists.

The challenge for HR practitioners would be, how "seamless" can the HR role be performed and transited within the organisation to minimise conflicts at the strategic and tactical levels is a real test to the organisation.

However, the only constant is the measurement or the metrics factor. HR professionals must constantly assess, review and level up its competencies and capabilities to keep up to the needs of the changing business environment. It's only through this constant practice that HR practitioners can stay relevant and strategic, and be a long-term partner to work together with CEO, business and HR leaders to refresh and retain the talent pool within the organisation.

Mr Mills: Pay is always important among young talent. But increasingly the focus is shifting to providing work which moves them forward in knowledge and skill development. Secondly, it's having supervisors who understand that if they don't involve, listen to, and show genuine interest in their staff and their progress, then there are consequences.

Mr Leong: Yes, there is a major shift beyond remuneration. Employees are looking for job satisfaction and recognition opportunities.

Winston: Do you have HR/talent management software in place? How has it helped the talent management process?

Mr Ang: Today, we see integrated talent and compensation management programmes that feature areas such as pre-employment skills and personality and behavioural assessments.

One of the leading technology companies in Europe created dedicated compensation planning software to allow HR managers to gain full access to performance history and succession data while planning and allocating merit and equity rewards within one system.

SHRI has an online HR competency framework for Singapore HR Accreditation of HR professionals. It provides a competency roadmap for busy HR professionals to upgrade themselves.

Mr Mills: Yes. It helps in competency profiling and selection, the skill auditing, measuring and managing performance and in personal development and recognition. It also provides access to many aspects of personnel reporting and "at a glance" data.

Mr Leong: Yes. The system has contributed to multiple aspects of our talent management process, especially for recognition of top performers and development of employees. The capability of generating analytical reports also helps the management and saves a lot of time for our HR people.

Winston: Will the increasing use of technologies be at the expense of the "human" factor or the personal touch in HR?

Mr Ang: I would not say so. Instead, technology or this "paperless" concept plays a value-adding and complimentary role to most HR processes and efforts. However, the human touch is still important and the use of technology can provide good support to tedious functional areas and take time away from heavy paper work. HR practitioners can focus more time and efforts in other soft skills aspects of the job such as providing coaching and counselling to employees, and working with leaders, business and line managers to strategise and map out competency roadmap to enhance knowledge and skills of the employees.

Mr Mills: No, it won't. e-HR today provides a roadmap with systems and tools. HR staff will always need to be strong in EQ and especially the listening and empathy aspects. However, they will need to have more knowledge of the business and naturally be IT-savvy. HR staff in the future should be ex-line executives or supervisors who are seen as high-potential who then spend one year in HR before going back into line management.

Mr Leong: With the help of technology platforms, HR professionals gain more comprehensive information on both individual employee and teams, which improves fairness in the organisation. Other than that, transparency in communication within the organisation is also improved. These are examples how technologies can help to avoid the problems of being too "personal". But after all, technologies do not make decisions for you, but target to provide you sufficient and analytical information for you to come out with good strategies. So the "human" factor in HR should not be affected.

Winston: How do you seek employee buy-in for the new processes or ways of doing things associated with the new technology tools?

Mr Ang: We need to be "time-sensitive" and "profile-sensitive" to employees. Each individual learns at a different speed and it's important that the training in place be structured and allowsmore time to employees who might not be so savvy with technology. An orientation about technology or a refresher programme might help.

Mr Mills: Most people don't like change. People often only go to the doctor when they have pain. Show them the potential agony and then they will change. Even if present methods show no sign of real problems this still means continually including them in all aspects of the design and implementation process. By doing this, one develops understanding of efficiency and best practice processes and ultimately you gain commitment.

Mr Ang: Educate the employees on the benefits of the change and how it would assist them in making the working environment better.