I'm in between jobs so thought of doing something fun (and hopefully helpful for the job seekers community).

A little bit about myself:

I have 10 years experience in Recruitment (7 years in a top recruitment firm in Malaysia and 3 years as an internal recruiter in a Tech company). In my career, I've been promoted 5 times and went from a Junior Recruitment Consultant to where I am now as a Recruiting Manager. I absolutely miss my agency days where I was raking MYR 250K yearly on average from placements and placements. Took a (indirect) cut to do internal recruitment in hope to be more involved in recruiting ops and strategy and have never looked back since.

I've spoken to approximately 7000 candidates, placed more than 600 of them in jobs, met with at least 1000 hiring managers throughout my career in Malaysia and Singapore. Having seen the variance between offers, experiences and screening through countless of CVs, I hope I'll be able to answer any questions you may have

I've recruited for a wide range of roles including Finance, Sales & Marketing, Technology (currently) and Strategy related positions. I spend every week talking to candidates, understanding the needs and wants of different hiring managers and companies, prepping candidates to ace interviews and negotiating the best possible offers for them so ask away!

1. Interesting question!! My company is currently battling with attrition problem due to the intense competition in APAC.
Back in my agency days, we always conduct these type of surveys to see how we can help client retain talent and the baffling discovery is most employee leave not for better salary, they leave for better work culture. Like they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast and culture stems from the top. That's why you see top companies like Google & Meta offer free meals, childcare/barista/gym services/ full flex work arrangement/ 6 months maternity leave just to keep employees happy. You can pay your employee at max range but it won't keep them for long if they're not enjoying what they're doing. Aside from remuneration and job growth (promotion), we also find employees wants to feel belonged so monthly townhalls/all hands are good to keep them engaged. Reward and Recognition are both important. Showcase them if they've done a great job. Some employers also invest in up skilling them (sending them for courses, even overseas short term training and bonding them for 1 year in return).

Lastly, this is uncommon in Malaysia but here many tech companies especially offer equity to employees that is vested across 4 years. Microsoft, Google, Meta, Uber offers a 4 years vesting schedule of 25%/25%/25%/25% after completion of each year on top of equity refreshers yearly to keep them so this could be a new strategy company can adopt to retain their top talent. Some companies like Amazon are even more aggressive with a backload vesting 10/20/30/40% after each year (so they'll very unlikely to leave after 2 years). Oh well in all honestly you'd be lucky to keep a good employee for 3 years these days.
2. You're right! A regular job seeker will be interviewing on average 3-5 companies and a good one will get more than 1 offer so the competition is real. As recruiters, I learned from experience we need to manage expectations from the beginning of the process (not only at offer stage); it's important you know what is the candidate looking for? Is it money? growth? What are his/her short/long term goals and how can you or the company be able to support his/her aspiration/growth?.
I will also always ask if they're interviewing elsewhere and for what roles/industry - even if they refuse the share the companies name, I'd like to know what am I up against so I can do some research and be prepared for my closing before the offer stage.
After every interview stage, I will also do a follow up to get feedback from the candidate or if s/he has any concerns - it it IMPORTANT we address any concerns soon.  If it's WLB (I may arrange an informal chat with someone in the team to reassure the cdd), if it's scope, I'll need to get the hiring manager involved; point is the candidate should feel at ease after the entire process. Last but not least, the company PITCH is everything > How are you going to pitch about your company? I'd usually start with our vision and mission before going on to growth plans and culture.
It sounds like you're a hiring manager - if you are, I'd highly recommend you work closely with your recruiter should you identify a good candidate. I'd like to think recruiters are more than gate keeper; they have to be a good sales person, empathetic process owner and  a skilled negotiator.

Haha depends on the role. For non Technical roles ,they're all difficult but if I had to choose, I'd say Uber - most L3 and above roles for Uber has a final case study presentation with a panel; followed by Amazon (they have a 6 panel loop interview + written essay before you get invited for the loop). Similar process for Google, Meta, Microsoft, not 'hard' per se but the bar is extremely high - For Tech roles, go check out Blind.

Why are recruiters ghosting on job applicants? Like is giving an update or replying an email so difficult?

If the recruiter has spent time on speaking to the candidate and promise to get back to him/her the next day, and disappeared after that, is this excusable with 'too many to manage'? It's a really bad work ethics. And no one ever realise that these candidates could potentially be their fiture clients

I can provide an example of a company that try to mitigate bias and avoid underpaying candidates.

Meta -
For any roles Meta hire into, all interviewers do not have visibility to the candidate's current package. Candidates will be sent for screening and after the loop interview, Recruiter will organise a debrief where the interviewers will level the candidate based on interview feedback collectively.
If they find candidate to be within Level 4 for example, recruiter will obtain candidate's current salary information and make offers based on a range for Level 4 for that job family in that particular country. If the candidate's current is way below the range, the offer will still be the MIN of the range even if that means a 50% increase for him. If the candidate's salary is over the range, the recruiter will also offer the candidate the MAX of the range which could mean a potential cut for the candidate (this mean the candidate is overpaid for his experience. If the candidate's current is at the median of the range, they will offer a nice 15% increment. Fair?

I just saw this post. Can't deny it's a overly competitive market out there but I beg to differ on your friend statement. This may be controversial; many recruitment firms think clients are more important because they are the source of $$$ but I strongly believe candidates are equally as/if not more important because they're your "product"; without product, you cannot make a sale.

Clients only come to you because you have good candidates so I firmly believe in offering the best possible service to your candidates. What makes the candidates choose your agency over 1000 other agencies? It's the personal touch. If they like you (esp senior candidates), they will work exclusively with you (nobody wants their CVs to be in the hand of 10 recruiters)

Even if s/he might not be a good fit for this role now, this candidate could be GOLD for your next role in your next 10 years career as a Recruiter. Happens to me in soooo many instances where I reject them (politely) but stayed in touch and eventually place them somewhere the following years.
So yeah, as a Manager who manages a team in an agency before, I always have my team to close off any ongoing candidates when a role is closed. No such thing as leaving them hanging after speaking to them

It’s a shame really. I am having a hard time finding company that have great data infrastructure which in turn can enable me to grow further on my career path but I’m hitting this wall at this point.

Most of the companies within Malaysia just doesn’t have that kind of backend infra to cultivate this kind of job.

Personally I’ve worked in start-up tier company and e-commerce with Alibaba backend support (worked closely with Alibaba team actually) and currently with one of the largest international bank with strong Asia presence.

I would say I have experienced through 3 tier of analytic infra. First is the messy but are working toward proper datalake/data warehousing. They have the data and you can get the data easily if you know the right place to ask for. Most of the SME/startup are currently in this stage.

Second is one with strong backend support (Alicloud) with proper data governance. Something FAANGs would have. The more established companies I can see in Malaysia with this sort of infra that isn’t FAANG is Shopee, Lazada, Grab, AirAsia and probably some telco like Axiata. There are more choices in SG as well such as Gojek and bytedance, but still very limited by nature.
Third is one with huge amount of data, but with all the legacy tool and the massive amount effort needed to consolidate them causing it to move extremely slowly. On top of that, regulated industry makes it even harder. This type of company requires a huge amount of time dealing with bureaucracy. Most international companies is at this stage.

Personally I still prefer the second type because of the ease of access to data and tooling, where you can achieve the most with the least effort in trying to hack through everything just to get the result.

Currently I’m looking to develop my skill set on building ML model that can productionize, which is the main reason why I’m looking for FAANGs as the next career jump.

Most of the existing SME does not need this level of model and do not have the proper data pipeline that can make it work as well. BI would be a better use of their resource as compared to data science. This leaves me with second and third type and bureaucracy is an unnecessary blocker for technical development.

Sorry TS might have swayed away from your AMA.