After retirement, many seniors would rely on their EPF savings or personal savings to meet their daily expenses. For government servants, there is the pension scheme that would take care of the person and the legally married spouse.
Due to the rising cost of living, it is very difficult to survive based on savings alone. Most seniors do not want to burden their grown children…. and sometimes, their grown children also may be struggling financially to be able to provide monthly allowance. If you are staying in town area, even on a very simple lifestyle, it is hard to survive with less than RM1000….and that is if we do not take into account any requirement for medication and treatment costs.
Hence, many seniors may want to opt to go back to the workforce to work if they are still able to. Even if they do not really need the money, they feel that working keeps their mind occupied and alert. They may be used to working in the corporate world and hence is not used to suddenly being tied to a home with Astro and daily household chores.
Years ago when I took a paycut job (took a break from corporate), I meant a lady who was working as a clerk for a top agent. This lady was formerly a secretary to the director of a large multinational company hence she is very capable, meticulous, spoke and write excellent English. After her retirement, she did not need the money but opted to take a more laid back job to help pass time and pay the bills.
Another former colleague of mine who retired after more than 30 years of service with my previous organization (he actually extended his retirement by working on contract basis with the company for a few years after his retirement). After his retirement, he find it too difficult to sit still- hence he came back out to work within two months- at first he helped with administration job at his condo’s maintenance office. Eventually he went and work as a clerk elsewhere.
This friend of mine is really rich… as he is a frugal guy with high salary, lots of savings and paid off properties. He did not need the money but he wanted to keep his mind occupied and do not want to sit at home whole day watching TV.
In both the scenarios above, the retirees got the job because they happen to know someone who know someone who is open to hiring a retiree.
How to find companies that hires retirees?
In Malaysia, the well known platform is Jobstreet.com or JobsDB where most people use to find jobs. It is difficult for a retiree to get a job from there as he/she would be competiting with hundreds of eager younger job seekers. My friend who is looking for a job told me that in a single job post, often there are 200 to 500 persons applying for the same job.
It would be difficult for retirees to compete unless they apply to companies who are specifically looking for retirees or are open to having retirees work for them.
I am very glad to know that there is a platform started by 2 ladies from the corporate world who are passionate to help retirees to find jobs if they wished to work after retirement. Both these ladies, Sharmila Sinnathurai and Jasmin Amirul Ghani left their successful corporate careers to work on this cause which they are passionate about.
I have spoken to Sharmila and she shared with me her vision and belief to help seniors find the best fit of job after retirement. Their site, https://www.hireseniors.my/ are created to help find job placements for both employers and employees.
Companies should consider hiring seniors or retirees as they generally stay longer with the company. It is different from younger generations who sometimes may leave the company even though the next company is offering just RM50 increase in pay. In my previous company, we have outsourced a section of service to a third party vendor who actually hired seniors to be based in our office. These seniors were paid much lesser than our permanent staff and were on contract basis with literally no benefits. But they stayed on in our company for more than 10 years throughout the outsourcing tenor. When our company decided to cease the outsource, these seniors were reabsorbed into the vendor company doing other tasks.
Again, it is not easy for the senior to find such jobs, similar to it is not easy for a company to locate such staff. The HireSeniors.my helped to match companies with suitable candidates.
For example, Sharmila shared with me that a particular company require a very specific skillset- the knowledge of the AS400 system. AS400 is a very old system that is used in database intense companies like banks, insurance, mutual funds and telcos. However most of the large companies have migrated to web based which in my opinion is sometimes not as stable as AS400. Those who are just entering the workforce would generally not have a good working knowledge of AS400 but some retirees may do. I immediately called a retiree friend of mine who have knowledge in AS400 system.
To apply, you would need to be a retiree (no need to be at retirement page but at least 40+ years of age and have retired). Sharmila shared with me that they have received resumes from working adults but their priority is always check against their seniors’ database for matches. If they start doing placement for the younger age group, then it would dilute their purpose for and it would not make them any different from other online job portals out there.
If you are interested, please head over to Hireseniors.my for more information. You can also visit their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/hireseniors where they would update the latest job offers in the page.
