This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on May 4, 2017 - May 10, 2017

KUALA LUMPUR: There are still plenty of job opportunities in the market despite the current tough sentiment, says JobStreet.com’s country manager for Malaysia and Singapore, Chook Yuh Yng.

“There is tough sentiment in [the job market], but through our survey, we found that 84% of employers in the market are still willing to hire at the same rate or more,” Chook said when speaking to reporters at JobStreet.com’s Graduate Employability and Industrial Transformation Forum yesterday.

Though there has been a decline of 3% in the number of job advertisement postings on JobStreet.com, said Chook, there are still over 27,000 advertisements posted, which she viewed as positive for the market.

“Even though sentiment generally is tough [and has been on a decline], there are still a lot of job opportunities out there,” she added.

Chook said the survey also found that 9% of employers plan to reduce their hiring numbers, while only 7% of overall employers are choosing to not hire new employees.

JobStreet.com, in collaboration with Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, organised the forum to address the role of graduate underemployment in the 21st century, as Malaysia currently has over 200,000 unemployed graduates in the country.

JobStreet.com also said the top factors for graduate unemployment are that graduates expect unrealistic salaries, are picky about the job or company, have poor attitude, poor command of English and poor communication skills.