The gradmalaysia Graduate Recruitment Awards (GRA), which took place during the recent Malaysia’s 100 Leading Graduate Employers Awards Night 2015, is supported by Talent Corp Malaysia (TalentCorp) as part of its graduate employability agenda.
An initiative by GTI Media, the GRA recognises and applauds the excellence of recruiters who break new ground in the way they attract and hire graduates in today’s global war for talent.
Categories within this initiative focuses on a specific element in the recruitment process. This year, the GRA increased its roster to celebrate six award categories.
Best management trainee/graduate programme [Winner] – Teach For Malaysia
Teach for Malaysia (TFM) is a non-profit organisation focused on ending education inequity in the country. Its winning leadership development programme, the Teach For Malaysia Fellowship, recruits outstanding graduates and places them in high-need schools in order to help drive education transformation.
Participants in this programme, called Fellows, receive rigorous training which equips them with the skills, mindset and experience to work towards breaking the link between a child’s background and his or her education and life outcomes.
The Teach for Malaysia Fellowship is a full-time and fully paid two-year commitment that is open to Malaysian citizens below the age of 35 years who are graduate-degree holders (in any field except education) with proficiency in English and Bahasa Malaysia.
Over the last four years, TFM has placed over 220 Fellows in eight states, impacting over 33,000 students nationwide.
Lives are often transformed. Fellows become leaders in the classroom and in the community, as they become part of the solution to one of our nation’s most important challenges.
Farihah Fahmy – Joined Teach for Malaysia in 2013
Farihah graduated from McGill University, Canada with a bachelor of arts in political science and international development studies. As a Fellow, she taught in a school in Perak for two years.
Her students, who sat in the lowest classes, often asked: “Why do you bother showing up? Don’t you know we don’t have a future? Everybody calls us stupid.”
Farihah knew her students needed more than kelas tambahan – they needed to rethink the way they thought of themselves, to swap “stupid” for “success”.
Things didn’t change overnight. Many of them continued to fail. But slowly, they began to believe in themselves.
Two years later, when it was almost time for SPM, these same students were helping their peers in the last class. Seeing their tears of happiness on results day was the best moment of Farihah’s teaching career. All of them had passed.
On Teacher’s Day this year, Farihah received this text message from a student: “Happy Teacher’s Day, Miss Farihah. You are my inspiration.” This student is now studying to become a teacher.
“When I think of the students she will teach, the lives she will touch, I’m pretty sure that there will be a day when all students in Malaysia will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education,” says Farihah.
Farihah is pursuing a Master’s in Development Studies and leading the student vision roundtable at TFM.
Best internship experience [Winner] – Alliance Bank Malaysia Bhd
The Structured Internship Programme (SIP) at Alliance Bank Malaysia Bhd (ABMB) is the springboard that has launched many bright young hopefuls into a career in banking. It is also one of the most popular internships around – attracting and grooming undergraduates into well-rounded and work-ready individuals since 2010.
The programme, which is endorsed by TalentCorp, addresses the issue of skills gap among those entering the workforce after university.
Undergraduates enrolled in this 10-week programme are led through a specially designed learning pathway within the various functions and building blocks of the bank. This includes on-the-job training, hands-on working experience and access to real working environments.
ABMB’s programme is highly regarded by its industry partners because of the way it dramatically improves a graduate’s employability. Participants are not only taught how to develop practical skills sets, but also become more engaged and intuitive through early exposure to their career interest.
Annual intakes are open to students interested to pursue careers in the financial services industry. Those who can prove their mettle within the programme are then accorded the opportunity to audition for ABMB’s management trainee programmes, or to be absorbed as a permanent employee of the bank.
Interns are hired: 50 interns were offered permanent employment with the bank upon completing the SIP since 2010. Their selections were based on rigorous assessments and recommendations from the respective host managers. There has been a consistent increment of interns absorbed from year 2010 to 2014.
Best social media usage [Winner] – Maybank
Mapping out its social media universe has made Maybank the frontrunner in the recruitment race to capture preferences of the emerging, and hyper-connected target audience leveraging on current and diverse platforms, specifically electronic channels.
Today, Maybank’s array of online tools, specialty apps and clever social campaigns dot the highway that connects its massive online empire.
Its social media traffic is impressive: 1.28 million followers on Facebook, 9.8 million views on YouTube and 103,000 followers on Twitter.
By shifting into the preferred territory of today’s graduates, Maybank maintains a direct feed into the job market – staying connected on a very personal level with candidates through their devices.
Maybank’s social media stratergy for recruitment is:
- Real time
Provide a platform that is easily accessible, updated in real-time and seamlessly linked.
- Borderless
Create seamless and borderless rewarding experience by having updates from all over the region in a unified platform that keeps everyone in the loop.
- Fun and dynamic
Encourage Maybankers to share postings of their life at work, featuring the fun and dynamism of the Maybank culture.
- Engaging
Use highly interactive user-generated apps and activities to sustain engagement level.
- Goes beyond
Overcomes the limitation of offline activities by conversion online through webisodes.
Best innovation on campus [Winner] – Maybank
Maybank reaches out to graduates through Maybank GO Ahead. Challenge (MGAC) of over 100 nationalities at campus level that stretches across 27 institutions of higher learning in 13 countries.
Nora Abd Manaf, Maybank’s group chief human capital officer (sixth from right) with the winning teams of Maybank Go Ahead. Challenge.
The international case competition is also a recruiting platform for young professionals to enter the Global Maybank Apprentice Programme.
It’s interesting to note that the entire MGAC journey is online from application to finals, and it has garnered thousands of likes, views, tweets, shares and #s!
For example, the “live” feeds on social media generated over 2,500 hashtags, 500,000 YouTube views and 4,900 followers on the MGAC Facebook page – hence contributing to the buzz amongst the students and graduates.
Aside from MGAC, over half of entry-level recruitment is done via social media. Young professionals are recruited using social media platforms, namely Facebook page, Facebook group, Instagram account, YouTube channel and LinkedIn account.
Best career development centre (Public university) [Winner] – Universiti Malaysia Sabah
Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) tops the list for a public university with the best career development centre because of the way it engages with employers through prolific partnerships that benefit both parties.
As a comprehensive university that strives to give its students the best learning experience as well as early exposure to the careers of their choice, UMS is the overall benchmark in the IPTA sphere when it comes to placement of students for industrial training, staff attachments, community engagement initiatives and campus recruitment.
The structured career development programmes at UMS strengthen its long-standing relationships with the various industries involved by ensuring a talent pipeline – students are able to connect and form a bond with their industry of choice, even before they finish their studies.
By matching the right talent to the right industry, UMS stays ahead of the rest when it comes to developing human capital for the nation as well as mobilising intellectuals of the university to bring an efficient and progressive impact to their communities.
The three-day ‘Jom Masuk Ladang’ programme at Hafiz Farm Sdn Bhd exposes students to cattle farming and oil palm plantation management
Best career development centre (Private university) [Winner] – Taylor’s University
Graduates of Taylor’s University emerge with more than just a scroll in hand. They come out work-ready and highly attuned to the needs of the job market, thanks to the talent development programmes run by the university to give them a flying start in their careers.
Taylor’s Career Services Centre, which provides these programmes, plays an integral role in supporting the University’s mission to produce graduates with strong employability skills, who are highly sought-after by top employers.
Towards this end, Career Services organises numerous events and provides various services to help students enhance their own employability, using a three-pronged approach: by firstly helping them to discover their career interests and strengths; secondly, preparing them, and finally, connecting them to their employers of choice.
Emphasis is put on global internships, so graduates can promote cross-cultural understanding, international relations and champion diversity at the workplace.
Taylor’s conduct talks and briefings by international employers and agencies, organise free weekly consultations for students with internship providers, install an “International Pavilion” during the annual career fair, and run an Inspiring Speaker Series Showcase with former alumni who have carved successful global careers, former interns with global internship experience, and Taylor’s personnel with extensive multicultural experience.
In 2015, close to 500 students underwent global internships in more than 42 countries, with popular internship destinations being France, New Zealand, China, Indonesia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Maldives, Thailand and Kazakhstan.
For more information on the awards, visit gradmalaysia.com. For more Company Profiles, click here.
Prethiba is passionate about impacting people through the written word. She believes that our lives are solely written by us, and thus the power to change for the better lies with us.
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