Listen to what Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi has to say about young talent.
Some great quotes:
“People can call themselves what they want, I don’t care”
“We turn over 1/3 of our people every year, so I have a new company every 3 years”
“We don’t retain anybody”
Continue reading
Today, there are a mind boggling number of channels to use while searching for the best candidate to join your team. In Singapore, the number one channel for recruiters to hire employees is through an online jobs portal. The other Southeast Asian nations are catching up to the trend. Which means, not only do you have to post in multiple online portals, you also have to stand out from every other company in your industry because everyone is using the most popular channel. We want to help you with that. Here we have a list of jobs portals, both conventional and specialized, for restaurant and retail owners to recruit staff.
Recruitasia: This website is devoted to the hospitality sector in Singapore. This is a great site for very specific roles for your establishment. It also provides industry news so that you can stay ahead of the curve when you are recruiting. Currently, the website is in beta stage. During this stage, jobs can be posted free of charge while the website is adding new features and receiving customer feedback to improve their application procedure.
JobsDB: This website runs ads in many Southeast Asian countries: Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and China. In Singapore, it currently has 300 positions posted on the website under F&B. In the Philippines, the site features 960 positions. Every recruiting ad costs SGD 99. However, JobsDB is turning over all Job ads to JobStreet.com.ph in order to streamline the two recruiting sites into one.
JobStreet.com: JobStreet runs in Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Currently, the Singapore site is featuring approximately 800 vacant positions in the F&B industry.This is the largest recruitment website in the Philippines and one you cannot miss while posting ads. The Philippine website is currently running a promo package that is 40% off the standard price (the standard price being PHP 5,600). The Singapore website runs 3 packages, based on number of ads you want to post and how long you want them to stay live. The price ranges between SGD 180 to SGD 400.
Kalibrr: This startup recruitment website works on a completely different pricing strategy. Instead of charging employers per ad, the ads are free and the database is open for employers to find their best candidate. They are charged a minimal fee of PHP 50 only when they want to contact the candidate. This company is becoming increasingly popular in the Philippines with around 1000 applicants signing up every day. Kalibrr features restaurants and retail as the most popular searches. (Disclosure, both Mike Stephenson and Stephen Jagger of PayrollHero are investors in Kalibrr)
These four are a few of the most popular recruiting website in Southeast Asia. We hope this list is useful and do let us know if you have any additions to the list that are unconventional or special to the retail or restaurant industries.
Every employee is valuable. Repeating this old tired phrase really doesn’t mean much anymore. Sure, we know we are of value, but how valuable? Can we measure that? How do we know if our bosses are with us as much as we are with them in this company? Studies have revealed that the millennial generation is the population in the workforce that really values these questions, and use it to determine if they have join the right company to work for.
The PayrollHero Team has millennials as the majority. Just to be honest, our young talents in our team are being headhunted daily because they are doing such a stellar job and other companies are starting to take notice. However, the thought of leaving never occurred. Here’s how we keep our young rock stars with us!
We communicate all the time
There are no walls between management and the employees. We function as a team, always working towards the bigger picture. Our team is constantly on the move, functioning from different offices in Singapore, Canada and the Philippines, which is made easy using productivity apps like Slack. (Read on how we use Slack)
Having great communication means we are clear on the tasks each team has to complete and eliminate any grey areas and speculation. There can never be enough clarity when working with Millennials. Each team gathers for a huddle every morning to discuss completed tasks, give feedback- good or bad, in the moment. This way also we keep accountability crystal clear within the team.
Morning Huddles
Suggested reading: 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Being flexible enough to meet halfway
PayrollHero is incredibly blessed with many gifted and talented millennials like Vince, and Maita. And we are more than happy to participate in out of office events as often as possible. We are with each other 10 hours in a day, every weekday and some weekends too and happy to do so. We work hard and play hard together.
Smiles at breakfast
Recognizing each employee’s lifestyle needs is important too. Millennials appreciate when a company acknowledges life outside of work. PayrollHero knows that mixing life and work as harmoniously as possible is one of the secret to making millennials happy to be at work. Fundamentally, we believe in getting things done. So, you can feel free to do activities you love, so long as you complete tasks that is required of you during the week.
Empowering each employee with ownership
For a millennial, ownership means a lot. At PayrollHero, many members of the company have a stake in the company which ensures that everyone commits. As a millennial myself, I can see that having that kind of ownership is empowering because I can be a part of something bigger. The days of working for a company just for the paycheck are gone. Owning a part of the company is a great incentive for an individual. But more importantly, it pulls the team together to focus towards a common goal: to see the company succeed.
To know exactly how we work, you’ll just need to join us. We are hiring for many positions across all offices and even for home based roles.
Today marks two weeks of my internship at PayrollHero. To celebrate my two-week-erversary, I went out to do a little survey. The aim was to understand what systems businesses have set up to manage scheduling, measure attendance and calculate payrolls.
The Costa Coffee crew.
I surveyed 10 cafés in the Central Business District in Singapore to find out how they schedule workers in their outlets. Some of the outlets I visited were Cedele, Starbucks, Joe & Dough and Costa Coffee. They all had similar systems set up to schedule workers, with a few interesting anomalies:
With that simple survey, it was evident that cafés in Singapore use conventional ways to schedule shifts. While workers rarely drop shifts, outlet managers need to be on standby to call nearby outlets for substitutes immediately.
Using Data Analytics to Improve Productivity
When the weather is bad, or there is an MRT breakdown, the situation is worse because all outlets in the same region are affected equally. While an outlet manager is calling multiple outlets for substitutes, customers are walking in and waiting for service before walking out, disappointed and unhappy. That directly affects the bottom line. Managers should be able to access an online database and use data analytics to see which outlet is on top of things in real time in order to call that outlet directly and ask for a substitute.
The top priority for every outlet manager is to make sure the day runs smoothly. It becomes much harder when the manager is not equipped with the right data to plan ahead of time. In a country like Singapore that has high internet penetration rates and high cell phone penetration rates, installing an application that stores this data in the cloud is easy and inevitable. If managers had access to this data, it would also be a way to motivate workers to be regular in order to move higher up in the rankings among outlets.
Calculating Payrolls
The systems put in place for measuring hours worked per employee in order to calculate payrolls should also be revamped. It should not take a manager 2 or 3 days to calculate payrolls when she has a million other things to look after. What’s more, the hassle of buddy punching, human errors and shifts in multiple locations add to complications for the manager. More errors equal higher costs. Higher costs equal lower profits. The bottom line is affected by inefficiencies that can be wiped out by a one-time change in the basic infrastructure.
Finally, the idea behind having an app that does all of the above is predica
ted on increasing productivity: be it that of your rank and file workers or your manager. Higher productivity leads to a better workplace environment and happier people, which further leads to higher productivity. That is a virtuous cycle, if ever I saw one. In effect: optimizing work productivity with happiness.
Now, where have I heard that before…
Life on the Line is a book written by Grant Achatz, owner and chef of the best restaurant in the world: Alinea. The book is about how Grant rose through the ranks to finally become an executive chef and a pioneer in molecular gastronomy. I loved the book. Not only was it a remarkable story about perseverance, it gave a glimpse of what it means to work in a restaurant.
While reading the book, you get an idea of what happens behind the scenes. Like every other restaurant, Alinea has the regular mix of members on the team: a general manager, restaurant manager, executive chef, sous chef, commis, sommelier, the captain waiter, regular waiters, bartender. The whole orchestra.
Most of this was new to me. My knowledge on restaurants went as far as:
And that’s about it.
So a breakdown on how restaurants work from a management perspective was an eye-opener to say the least. Naturally, restaurants around the world have the same structure. Singapore is no different. Given below is a little summary of the standard jobs in any restaurant. Not all restaurants have all the components. Most hiring admins in restaurants go by this convention:
General Manager: The CEO of the restaurant. She makes sure things run smoothly. She oversees operations, makes sure supplies arrive on time and hiring and firing activities run smoothly. She tries to cut costs and improve sales too.
Restaurant Manager: He makes sure that training of new employees runs smoothly. He deals with customers, allocates manpower and deals with the maintenance of the place.
Maître d’: She manages the front of house operations. By maintaining the customer database, the maître d’ makes bookings. She also welcomes customers as they enter the restaurant.
Executive chef: The executive chef creates new dishes and plans the menu for every outlet. He looks after the overall direction of the restaurant or outlet.
Head Chef (chef de cuisine): The head chef is the CEO of the kitchen. She allocates duties and ensures there are supplies. She manages daily operations in the kitchen.
Sous Chef: The second in command. He works under the head chef and makes sure things run smoothly in case the head chef is not around. He also ensures the quality of supplies coming in.
Chef de Partie: This is a chef who is in charge of a particular section: grill, pastry, whatever was allocated to her. She makes sure the cooks under him deliver what is required from the section.
Sommelier: Everyone loves the wine guy. He is an expert on wine and food pairing. He maintains the inventory, trains the staff on what wines to suggest and teaches them the convention on serving wine.
Head Waiter: A head waiter is in charge of other waiters/waitresses. She trains them. She also waits on tables and suggests dishes and wine pairings.
Waiter: He waits on tables. He also suggests dishes from the menu. Waiters are trained on how to serve the dishes and the wine that goes with them.
With that crash course on who is who in a restaurant, below we have a table on their average monthly salary in Singapore. This varies based on the location of the restaurant and the type of restaurant.
|
Title |
Salary/Month (SGD) |
| General Manager | 4,000 |
| Restaurant Manager | 3,200 |
| Restaurant Assistant Manager | 2,500 |
| Executive Chef | 7,400 |
| Head Chef | 4,000 |
| Sous Chef | 3,100 |
| Chef De Partie | 2,200 |
| Sommelier | 3,000 |
| Captain Waiter/Waitress | 1,800 |
| Waiter/Waitress | 1,500 |
We hope this gives you a better idea on the industry!
Speaking with a few entrepreneurs who are setting up a new F&B outlet here in Singapore, I found that a few shared similar problems- mostly about the liquor licence for their restaurant and how to go about getting it.
We though it will be helpful to provide a guide to getting the liquor licence for your new establishment.
Before Sending your Application
It’s good to have the required paper work in order before applying for the liquor licence. You will need to be in compliance with laws & regulations from the relevant authorities and get approval for your establishment. Find out if your premises are approved for F&B here.
Liquor Licence Fast Facts:
Got it? Great! Let’s get into the necessary details.
There are 2 types of liquor licences available in Singapore. If you are carrying out any of these activities:
For more than 30 consecutive days, you will need to obtain liquor licence for your establishment.
If your activities is shorter than 30 consecutive days (1-30 days), you can apply for a temporary liquor licence instead.
Should your activities do not run on consecutive days, you will need to obtain more than one liquor licence for operation.
The Licence Fees
| Types Of Liquor Licences | ||
| Licences for liquor sold and consumed on your premises | ||
| Name Of Licence | Permitted Hours | Licence Fees (2-Year Licence) |
| Public House Licence | 1st Class (6am-12am) |
S$1,760 |
| 2nd Class (6am-10pm) |
S$1,320 | |
| Beer House Licence | 6am-12am | S$920 |
| Outdoor Beer Stall Licence | 6am-3am (Permitted hours to be decided based on the location) |
S$570 |
| Licences for liquor sold and consumed off your premises | ||
| Retail Liquor Shop Licence | 6am-12am | S$220 |
| Wholesale Liquor Shop Licence | 6am-12am | S$220 |
| Retail Beer Shop Licence | 6am-12am | S$220 |
| Wholesale Beer Shop Licence | 6am-12am | S$220 |
Note that the licences only permits you to sell liquor within the stipulated hours. If your establishment requires sale of alcohol past these hours, you will need to get the Liquor License (Extension of Operating Hours).
Application, Processing Time and Payment Method
All applications for liquor licence are to be submitted through electronic filing (e-filing) via the Online Business Licensing Service (OBLS) at http://business.gov.sg.
The processing time for these licences takes up to 12 working days.
There are three online payment modes available-
Credit card (Visa or Mastercard), Direct Debit through your internet banking account. Payment modes available at our counter are NETS or cheque.
If the amount payable is more than S$2000/-, payment by cheque is preferable.
Was this post helpful? Let us know by writing a comment.
Be in touch with us. Find out how you PayrollHero can improve productivity for your business with our time, attendance, scheduling and payroll management system in the cloud.
Editors Note: Introducing Pragya Gupta, Business Development Intern at the PayrollHero Singapore office. She will be contributing to the PayrollHero blog from time to time.
“To get a job you need experience; to get experience, you need a job.”
That pretty much sums up a college kid’s life-crisis. Enter: internships.
I am an intern at PayrollHero. Today marks the second day of my internship. I have been studying in a university in Singapore over the last two years. The importance of internships cannot be stressed enough to a college student. Universities even have an internship requirement that must be completed in order to graduate. So it is worth exploring how this works and what both parties, the intern and the company are required to do.
Internships, in general, are quite a messy affair. The first question that should/would strike anyone is: Why should I hire you? You’re just a kid, probably not a smart one, probably irresponsible and probably not good at what I need to get done. Most importantly, I am going to spend all these resources on you for two months or more, just to see you walk out that door by the end of it. What’s the point?
Great question. So here is the thing: companies take two or three months to train their newly hired staff just so they can get used to the way things work. And while that is true for interns as well, some companies use internship programmes to really judge how good a student is in order to hire them once they have graduated. By this time most of the training is already done and the company can be sure that the student fits the bill. Other companies need interns to help them with a particular project. In both cases, it’s a cost effective way to get things done. To give you a student’s perspective: an intern is always excited to do something new and get some experience. It is mutually beneficial, if all goes well.
Step 1: Who Can You Hire?
The Ministry of Manpower states rules that are different for a local student and an international student studying in a local university and looking for an internship. Local students in universities do not have binding requirements on the hours that they can work during term time. As an international student, I have a Student Pass that is valid for four years of college. During the term, I can work part-time for only 16 hours a week regardless of where I work: banks, startups, the neighbourhood Subway, anywhere. During holidays, there is no solid requirement that prevents me to work.
Leave of Absence: A student may take a Leave Of Absence for an entire term in order to get some internship experience, which can be a full-time internship. For an international student, this is possible only if the university’s internship requirement has not been completed. For a local student, the LOA has no binding requirement.
Step 2: Where Do You Look For Interns?
I applied for an internship using the standard internship search portals: StartupJobs.Asia, internsSG, the university jobs portal. Usually companies post about internship positions on these websites. Some of these companies partner up with universities and post job positions through the university portal or email. Some internships are structured while others are spontaneous and depend on the project that the company is currently working on. Companies specify the job scope in the search portals. PayrollHero worked a bit differently. It was featured on one of these sites. I clicked on the website, loved the look and content and decided to email them.
Step 3: Details, Payment, Contracts
The job applications have been posted; you have called the applicants in for an interview; you have picked a prospective intern. What’s next? Once an intern is hired, a contract must be drawn up. The contract specifies what the job requirement is, the number of weeks in the internship, number of hours in a day and the amount that the intern will be paid. An intern is covered by the Employment Act that entitles him or her to a stipend, a fixed number of hours and a few more entitlements (check links below). A regular internship is anywhere between 8 to 10 weeks. The regular stipend is between SGD800 and SGD1200 a month, depending on the hours and the job scope and excluding over-time pay. SPRING Singapore is an agency that supports SMEs to fund internships for local students. This is a good resource in case businesses have trouble paying for interns.
If the internship position was posted on the university portal, then the company and the university liaise together and the university directly clocks in the weeks for the student. In a self-sourced internship, if the student wants to clock in weeks, he or she keeps the university in the loop and they contact the company for details. Some universities require forms to be filled for the internship to be approved. Once the internship ends, the university sends a feedback form to the company for details on how the internship went and how the student performed.
Finally, internships are a great way to get people to know about your company. When a company ties up with a university, it can participate in career fairs and feature in promotional emails that the university sends out. Students get a chance to gain some experience and build skills for their future jobs. All in all, Singapore has a straightforward infrastructure set up to hire interns which makes it a worthy option for companies to explore the existing talent pool.
Happy Hiring!
For More Information:
Employment Act and who it covers: http://www.mom.gov.sg/employment-practices/employment-act/who-is-covered
Hours of work, over time pay and rest day: http://www.mom.gov.sg/employment-practices/hours-of-work-overtime-and-rest-days
SPRING Singapore: http://www.spring.gov.sg/Growing-Business/Grant/development-areas/Pages/HCD-SME-Talent-Programme-for-students.aspx
Earlier today, PayrollHero co-founder Stephen Jagger spoke at the Asia HR Leader Forum organised by Roffey Park. If you don’t know Roffey Park – they are an internationally renowned leadership institute based in the UK and Singapore, focused on developing people who develop organisations. Find out more on what they do here – www.roffeypark.com
Roffey Park had a unique approach for the forum. The most interesting segment would be the facilitated table discussions – where the 30+ HR professionals in attendance were split into 5 smaller groups, and each group was given a specific topic to discuss concerning HR with a “subject-matter-expert” leading that discussion. Each discussion was deeply insightful as participants actively shared their thoughts and experiences on major HR issues: changing employee mindsets, emotional intelligence, developing strategic thinking capabilities, staff morale and understanding the human dimensions of productivity.
Facilitated HR Table Discussions
Participants in discussion
PayrollHero Xray Insights
Stephen closed the forum with a presentation on the importance of integrating a business intelligence component into HR systems. Steve shared the PayrollHero Xray Insights app, which provides businesses with useful analytics based on employee data, so managers can make better, intelligent decisions on human resources. He also ran through how our Adventure Engineer program works to attract and retain talent.
“I found the session yesterday really inspiring with the passion you have to make a difference.”
Simon Lau
Leadership Effectiveness & Organisation Development
Group Talent, Learning and Culture Standard Chartered Bank
You can see Steve’s presentation deck below:
Here is some of the material covered by Roffey Park:
Want to learn more about PayrollHero? Register for our next event on May 14th 2015.
Our friends at PageUp have a book launch coming up in the Philippines for their latest book “Talented Philippines”. If you are looking to learn more about HR in the Philippines and grab a copy of their latest book, then register for their event.
Event Details:
Talented Philippines Book Launch & Summit
Date: Wednesday 18th March, 2015
Time: 10.45am – 3.30pm PHT
Venue: Dusit Thani Manila, Mayuree II Room
Location: Ayala Centre, 1223 Makati City
Metro Manila, Philippines
You must register so that you are able to get into the event.
From their email:
Don’t miss the chance to:
| Agenda: | |
| 10.45am | Registration & Morning Tea |
| 11.15am | Talented Philippines Summit |
| 12.30pm | Networking Lunch |
| 1.30pm | Talented Philippines Summit |
| 3.00pm | Afternoon Tea |
| 3.30pm | Close |
PayrollHero is looking for ridiculously client focussed leaders to build out the Manila Branch of Customer Support.
With branches in Singapore, Manila and Whistler you will be an integral part of an international startup focussed on disrupting the Time, Attendance, Scheduling, Payroll and Business Intelligence space throughout the billion+ workforce of South Asia!
The majority of the PayrollHero cloud software platform is being hand crafted in Canada by an international team of engineers hailing from France, Australia, India, USA, Canada, Vietnam, Scotland and of course there are few Filipinos for good measure. However, our Client Success team are based here in Manila to be closer to our customers.
Swagger in your application if you:
At PayrollHero you must love figuring out how to make people smile! You will wield a variety of online tools (Groove, Gmail, & Nimble) to engage our clients from around the world.
Come help us make a dent in this huge space – every business around the world reels from the pain of payroll every two weeks!
Your compensation starts at ₱20,000/month. After that it is based entirely on your merit. We are looking for leaders to grow this division; this is your opportunity to cultivate happiness and work towards being a partner.
Oh… almost forgot. We’d like to test you before we begin the application process.
Please complete the following task so that we can get an idea of how you will service with our clients…
You are working for a website that helps clients store and manage their client’s contact info. You get the following email from an angry client. The rest of the team is already off for the night and you can’t reach anyone. Please reply to this email you get from an angry client right away:
“Hi,
I tried to log in again today and the log-in still doesn’t work. Nobody is answering your supposedly 24/7 support line and I am getting incredibly frustrated. I stored all of my employee’s phone numbers on your annoying website and now that I can’t access it, I can’t get in touch with my own employees! This is ridiculous and is killing my business. Do you realize how poor your service is? I have been calling for 3 days and still can’t get anyone to fix this for me.
Please get me out of this site but give me back my client’s contact info first!
-Tim”
Please include your reply to Tim in your application to us by email support at payrollhero.com. Be sure to write a cover letter that is specific to us, we are not down with form letters or random generalized resumes.