Project talent harbour

• Main Author: Zhang, Mingqian
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59230
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The job market in Singapore has been more and more competitive in recent years. Due to the rapid growth of the three major national universities, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore Management University (SMU), and the newly emerged Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), the current undergraduate students in Singapore will be facing the most fierce ever competition by the time they graduate. A good academic result and leadership experience in some casual extracurricular activities will no longer be enough to make a decent resume/CV in their job hunt for their targeted jobs. Relevant practical experiences such as internships, part-time jobs and entrepreneurial conducts are the new concern of human resource managers when they are seeking the suitable young talents for the limited positions. However, many current students are either unaware of the importance of seeking internship opportunities during school vacations, or feeling hard to find an appropriate intern placements due to the limitation on time and resource of information. Though many websites like JobsDB (http://sg.jobsdb.com/) and InternSG (http://www.internsg.com/) are already on the market, most of them do not conduct quality control on the job listings and they are not designed according to the need of university students. Not only the students and fresh graduates are facing problems with their careers. Nearly half of the Singapore population is made up of foreigners and most of them are staying here to work. The Singapore Government as recently tightened up many immigration and employment policies, which resulted as much slower expat acquisition (the issuing of working pass & expat to permanent resident conversion) and limited workforce quota on foreigner to local. Many SMEs, colleges and research institutions are highly impacted by these limits in hiring process as they are in greater need of foreign talents and workforce. In order to tackle this difficult situation, we introduced the concept of crowd hiring, the “Recruitpon” (name inspired from Groupon, meaning recruiting together), as a solution to ease the difficulties in adopting foreign workforce when the expat quota is not sufficient. With these two major problems in mind, my partner Sri Hartarti and I have decided to develop a platform that helps young adults with their early stage career development and mitigates the difficulties of hiring foreigners. The prototype website Talent Harbour is created for proof-of-concept and fundraising purpose, aiming to showcase the problem solving features and backend management mechanism to potential investors. It will be further developed to a fully functioning website after we secured seed fund (or start-up grants from Singapore government). Talent Harbour will be officially launched 3 months after the receiving the initial investment.