Latest News

Until recently, the common understanding was that, just as nature abhors a vacuum, employers abhor gaps in employment. As a result, many job hunters felt compelled to try and cover up these gaps for fear of rejection.  However, in today’s market, there’s much less concern over gaps if they are properly explained.   In this blog, we go over the h...

A ‘people pleaser’ is someone who constantly tries hard to make others happy – and is usually a person that everyone considers to be helpful, kind and a hard worker. They could be a person who will always lend help on a project, will always take on extra work, will often stay late or work through lunch hours.    This may well sound like the idea...

There will always be certain circumstances at work where we will need to make an apology. For example, when you have hurt the feelings of a co-worker or maybe you said something that was offensive. But there are often circumstances where we shouldn’t really be making an apology – for things that are beyond our control or outside the scope of our...

Many of us in Southeast Asia are still working from home while the pandemic situation evolves, or operating on some hybrid model, depending on the nature of the business we work in. However, business goes on and so too does the eb and flow of jobs and recruitment needs.   With several company switchboards closed and so many people working from h...

2020 was an eventful year for most businesses. Faced with the impact of the Covid19 pandemic, many companies went through major transformations. In some cases, this was due to expansion – for example with some vaccine developers, PPE manufactures and online delivery and logistics businesses. On the other hands, some firms that were adversely imp...

We’ve been handling a mix of recruitment and executive search campaigns for many years now at Ellwood Consulting and one thing that proved to be consistently misunderstood within the candidate community in general is the difference between contingent recruitment and executive search. Today we take the opportunity to clear this up, as it not only...

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan is once again upon us and we’d like to wish all our Muslim readers Ramadan Mubarak. For this month’s blog, we take a look at how best to utilise your time during Ramadan – both for those who are observing the month of fasting or “puasa” and for those who aren’t - and also give some tips for working with Muslim co...

As the vaccination programme rolls out globally and market confidence starts to return, we are now starting to see an increase in hiring activity and more people moving jobs. And naturally, we’ve had more enquiries about the best way to actually resign. So today we’ve written a guide to help you navigate the process, keeping key relationships in...

We’ve all been working from home, off and on, for some time now and one of the major impacts of this has been on the ways in which we communicate.  As we look towards the post-pandemic period, it is easy to see that many of the changes that have happened due to Covid19 are here to stay.  While it’s true that there had already been a move to vide...

Saying no has always been problematic.  We work in an always-on culture in which we are expected to rise to new challenges and take on unexpected tasks with flexibility and relish.  Some might say we have also had an unhealthily glamorised relationship with the concept of burnout and the productivity arms race you can get into within some compet...

As firms look to restructure and reorganise and future-proof under the new normal, business leaders are embracing the hybrid model of flexible working. But as well as greater agility in terms of work location and methods, we are also seeing a greater flexibility in that workforce composition itself – essentially, the further rise of temporary an...

While Covid19 has forced us to reassess our preconceptions in many area of our lives, its dramatic impact on the recruitment market has accelerated a necessary change in attitudes toward the unemployed in the talent pool. In this week’s blog, we investigate why hiring managers and recruiters have approached this segment of the talent market with...

Covid19 has introduced many changes to the way we live. From turning our homes - our sanctuaries - into our workspaces, to turning us into part-time home schoolers, to completely changing the way we view personal hygiene and physical wellbeing. We are now at a point where some promising vaccines are on the horizon and we can glimpse the light at...

We are now eight or so months into the global Covid19 pandemic and we can safely assume that, for most people, working from their home is no longer a novelty. With many countries across the world (Malaysia included) reimposing localised movement restrictions, the need for remote working for health reasons is still there.  But moreover, many comp...

The Coronavirus pandemic has led to a sizeable shift in economies around the globe, the acceleration of growth in certain job markets, and a contraction in others. Along with this has come a great re-think of both the ways in which we work and also the locations we work in. In this time of change, new job opportunities have emerged, while other ...

As the restrictions on work and movement, imposed at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, start to be loosened, many companies are starting to bring employees back into their places of work. In Malaysia, many people have already gone back, albeit with some firms running a hybrid return model. Singapore is currently in Phase 2 and many companie...

As of 2nd June 2020, Singapore officially exited the Circuit Breaker and entered ‘Phase 1’, while in Malaysia the government moved from the CMCO to the ‘Recovery MCO’. Clearly, the region is now in the recovery phase of the Covid19 pandemic and this heralds a return to a greater degree of normality for most people, especially in terms of going b...

With the recent announcements that Singapore is extending the Circuit Breaker (CB) until 1st June and Malaysia is extending the Movement Control Order (MCO) until 12th May, we thought it would be a good time to look at job hunting during the regional ‘lockdown’ period.   While it is certainly true that many staff are furloughed and while many co...

Now that nearly all of us are working from home, there has been an unprecedented uptake of online collaboration tools and remote working technologies. Indeed, as governments, schools and businesses have scrambled to implement virtual continuity plans, workplace software companies (such as Zoom, Microsoft, and Google) have started offering their ...

With the types of technologies available to us today, such as VOIP, desktop virtualisation and web conferencing, there really hasn’t been an easier time to work from home – and to work there as effectively as if you were in the office. And now, with the global concerns around Covid-19 impacting work in many different ways, more and more people a...