Subscribe in a reader | Subscribe by Email I’m kind of surprised that Dr S.Subramaniam is saying “it was disappointing that the participation of the Indian community in job fairs was not encouraging.” He also mentioned that “indian youngsters should take an initiative to attend job fairs so that they could look and apply for jobs which might be suitable based on their qualifications.”
Time to time, I do attend such fairs (and also those related to education) and can notice significant number of Indians roaming around. The awareness is there to a certain extent.
I know that concerned members of the community do take the initiative to spread information on such job fairs via emails, forums, and SMS. That reaches many of the Internet-enabled students and graduates. As for those in the outskirts or without Internet access, they have to rely on media and also more conventional methods. This is where MIC, IPF, NGOs, and various temple committees come into play. These people should be having good network of contacts, and thus able to use their premises to display news on job fairs. Newspapers which are own by political parties do highlight such fairs from time to time, but more prominence should be given.
When you provide something that is beneficial to the people, people will come to you. No need to waste money on publicity campaigns or rebranding exercises.
Of course there are those fraction of people who wait forever for things to fall onto their laps. But that is common among all communities.
Now, the next questions will be: How many of those who attend get selected? Are job-seekers wary of discrimination by employers? Are the job-seekers qualified and well equipped with the necessary skills?
Any idea where we can use new technology like blog / sms and so on to spread information to general public (nation wide level ). At the moment we do have vacany listing in our blog and portal but i dont think so its very effective. It is still not in touch will all the indian youths.
Inside Putera MIC we are using twitter and PACMEE to spread information between us. If there is any vacany and so on , we will sms to our national co-ordinator, and he will send to our Putera MIC Pacmee number , and all the members who are subscribed to him will receive the sms. and they will send it to their downline.
Can technology like this used in nationwide level? im quite skeptical…
how the general public will react if we ask the to register under one number to receive notifications?
would be happy if mr.poobalan and members who read this blog can comment on this.
give us ideas on this, and we will try to bring to implementation via Putera MIC/MIC.
correct me if i’m wrong. we have quite a number of leaders who say that they come from poor background, from estates, from very rural areas etc. Now, how did they get information on vacancies during their time and at their places? They should be able to provide useful details.
The use of internet technology is limited to those who are in Internet-served areas, which for our country is about 13-14% of household (having broadband).
notification via SMS is better since number of mobile lines have overtaken landlines, and nearly everyone has a handphone now.
It is important to look at the target groups first – who are the groups that need help? Then, look at the language – use trilingual if possible. Then, look at the probability of the person getting a job. I would suggest that advertisement on vacancies at indian-based businesses or those with higher probability of having non-discriminatory recruitment policies.
my take:
1 . paper based ad is the best. tampal notice at all temples, tamil schools, cinemas, indian restaurants, hangouts, colleges. get a team of people to cover an area. do weekly updates. if one area of 50sqkm has 5 indian-centric focus points, one person can cover all 5 places in a day. so, theoretically (!) you will need about 6600 people to cover whole of malaysia (including east malaysian!), which is a mere 1% of MIC membership.
2. create a segment in radio abt job vacancies.
3. SMS is third option since you can utilise the network of contacts. people may forward job vacancies to their family members and friends if suitable. for this to work, the burden of proof is on you guys to convince that their hp number won’t be misused to send propaganda materials. which in my opinion, very very hard. obviously, any such service have to be free(maybe in the beginning) and operator-independent. perhaps can get maxis to sponsor the whole project. or try to do it under our Dr S.Subra’s ministry.
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Thanks for the inputs 🙂
The 2nd idea is the best and easiest i suppose. Will try to ‘push’ this agenda into ‘higher’ level.
Free anytime in this week for a Chaya sar? Would love to have a chit chat session with you on this and more .