Spot early signs that hiring in your industry or company is slowing.
Jasmine is 33 and works as a marketing manager at a regional tech company in one-north (an invented example). The first hint of trouble came when a recruiter who had been messaging her every few weeks stopped writing.
About a month after that, two open roles in her team were "paused". Her manager's budget for next quarter came back smaller than planned, and the product launch Jasmine was working on slipped to "next year". She looked up the official unemployment figures, and they showed a job market in fine shape. Those figures were accurate, but they lag behind events, and other signals move sooner.
A business facing weaker demand seldom starts by cutting staff. Retrenching people is expensive and damages morale, and the firm knows it will want people again once demand recovers. Its usual first move is to stop adding headcount. Vacant roles are left open, requests for new roles are turned down, and recruiters receive fewer briefs.
This pattern is known as hiring falls before firing. It appears in the data as a drop in job vacancies and in the number of job postings, well ahead of any rise in unemployment. Unemployment climbs later, when firms conclude that freezing hiring has not done enough.
That gives you two kinds of indicator. Vacancies, postings and recruiter activity are early signals. The headline unemployment rate is a late signal, and by the time it starts rising, the period in which you could move jobs easily has usually narrowed.
You can follow the early signals on your own. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) puts vacancy figures in its labour market reports, which you met in Lesson 4.2, "Indicators to watch: GDP, hiring, inflation and the yield curve". On whichever job sites you use, keep a rough tally of how many roles are advertised under your job title. Pay attention as well to recruiters who used to approach you, and whether they have stopped. If advertised roles fall noticeably over a few months, or recruiters no longer get in touch, the hiring side of your market is cooling.
Problems at a company usually leave traces before management says anything. Watch for a hiring freeze, or for roles that were signed off and then quietly pulled. Watch budgets for a freeze or cut partway through the year, or a sudden rule that spending needs approval from someone more senior. Projects that get pushed back, shrunk or cancelled are another sign, particularly new products or moves into new markets. So are reorganisations, extra layers of management and teams being merged. Notice too when senior leaders leave, or when the company gets a new owner or major investor.
A single one of these does not tell you retrenchments are on the way, since companies reorganise in good years too. When several turn up together, and especially when they come with weaker results or lost clients, the business is probably under pressure. For a listed company, results announcements are public, and it is worth reading how management talks about the period as well as the figures themselves.
The economic cycle hits some industries far harder than others. In cyclical industries, activity and hiring swing strongly with the cycle or with shocks.
Manufacturing is one of them, and electronics and semiconductors in particular move up and down with global orders. Kumar's plant in Module 4 is a cyclical manufacturing business of this kind. Financial services firms can make cuts fast when markets drop and fewer deals get done. Tech has gone through sharp booms and busts in hiring, and companies that had been expanding quickly pulled back once funding became harder to raise. Construction, property, tourism and aviation also react to the cycle and to shocks.
Healthcare holds steadier, because people keep falling ill during a recession and demand stays fairly level. Jobs in the public sector and in essential services generally hold up as well.
Treat all of this as tendencies, since plenty of firms go against them. A strong company in a cyclical industry can be a safer place to work than a weak company in a stable sector.
Think of your job risk as three separate parts: your role, your company and your skills. Give each its own rating.
Start with the role. Work out whether it earns revenue, keeps the business running, or relies on new projects and growth. Roles linked to expansion, such as a launch into a new market, tend to be cut first, while roles that look after existing customers are usually kept longer.
Next, the company. Decide whether it is growing, profitable and well funded, or whether it is losing money, missing targets or depending on a single large client. The warning signs from the section above go into this rating.
Then the skills. Picture losing your job tomorrow and consider how readily what you know would carry over to another employer or another industry. Specialised skills that only one or two firms in Singapore use carry more risk than skills that many employers want.
For each rating, point to something you have actually observed at work or in your market, because a rating with nothing behind it is a guess.
When Jasmine did this honestly, her role came out tied to the delayed launch. Her company had paused hiring and lost a large client. Her skills would transfer, but into a field where many people are job hunting. She did not panic; the exercise gave her a clear reason to build the buffer in Lesson 5.3 and begin the steps in Lesson 5.4.
Now rate yourself on the same three dimensions: role, company and skills. Beside each rating, write down something you have actually seen in your own workplace or market that supports it.
Rate your job risk from low to high on three things: your role, your company and your skills. Write one line of evidence for each.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).