Two Hundred Hires, Zero Growth

In short: When a company hires 200 people in a year and still has 200 employees, the problem is not recruitment — it is retention. Pouring more into the top of a leaky bucket just raises acquisition costs. Fix the bucket, and hire to fix the bucket.

The situation

A local F&B group with many concepts — about twenty restaurants, mostly in malls. Post-COVID, they employed around 200 people, many of them work permit holders. Both their Work Permit and S Pass quotas were maxed out.

Their HR setup looked strong on paper: a team of five practitioners, running recruitment mostly through job advertisements. But advertising is costly, and it is a passive form of recruitment — you post, and you wait. To keep outlets staffed, they leaned heavily on part-timers.

When we analysed their hiring, one number told the whole story. They had hired 200 people the year before. Their total headcount, at that moment, was still 200.

The churn underneath was brutal. We found that of everyone hired in the last year, one in ten left within the first seven days. Half were gone within six months.

The client's verdict, when we first sat down, was that their HR was weak — not able to deliver. The numbers said the exact opposite. A five-person team had hired 200 people in a year, through a post-COVID labour crunch, mostly off job ads. That is not a weak HR team; that is an amazing hiring engine. The people were arriving just fine. They were leaving just as fast — and retention doesn't happen in the HR office. It happens on the restaurant floor.

What was really going on

The client's diagnosis was: understaffing causes attrition, so we must drive the rate of acquisition faster than the rate of loss. They had raised salaries to keep pace with the market, and believed competing on pay would slow the bleeding.

The numbers said otherwise. This was not a hiring problem. It was a retention problem — a leaky bucket. Every hire was expensive: the ad spend, the five-person HR team's hours, the interviews, the onboarding, the disruption on the restaurant floor when someone new walked out in their first week. And half of that investment evaporated within six months. Raising acquisition speed into a bucket like that doesn't grow a workforce; it just raises the cost of standing still.

Context mattered too. This was 2021–2022, just out of COVID. Many Malaysians had left Singapore for good during the pandemic, and the sector was slowly trying to attract them back. But you cannot hire a Malaysian work permit holder without quota — and quota depends on how many Singaporeans and PRs you employ. The client had maxed out. They literally could not hire the workers they wanted, because they couldn't hire enough locals to unlock the quota.

What we did

They had a five-person HR team — big for an SME — so we took the stance up front that they didn't need us long term. Our job was to do the high-value, hard work they couldn't: hire Singaporean and PR headcount, to create the Work Permit quota their own team could then use to bring in Malaysian kitchen crew.

At Emplifi, we put little weight on passive hiring. Job ads simply don't work that well for SMEs — and this client was a well-established brand with far more visibility than the average SME. Even for them, ads were too slow and converting too poorly. There's a line that sums it up for us: 好的不来，来的不好 — the good ones don't come; the ones who come aren't good.

So we didn't wait for applicants. We went into the active jobseeker market on the job portals, found people who fit on paper, and called them. The call was the craft: frame the role honestly, talk about what actually matters to the person, and only when there's real alignment, present the opportunity and invite them to apply.

For this client, we allocated a dedicated recruiter and projected 75 hires over three months, across marketing, sales, front of house and back of house. We tracked everything — sourcing numbers, calls, offers, acceptance rates — incessantly, on our in-house ATS, which is another thing virtually no SME has invested in. That tracking is how we knew week by week whether the projection would hold. And because our own team are all career SME HR practitioners, we didn't route everything through their HR team — we worked directly with their outlet and operations managers, the people who actually felt the vacancies, at peer level.

In the end we made around 70 offers. About 35 accepted in those three months — every one of them a Singaporean or PR. That was enough. The client used the unlocked quota to bump up their workforce with the kitchen hires they'd been blocked from making, and staved off what was heading toward a total staffing collapse.

The outcome

The immediate crisis passed. The restaurants stayed staffed; the quota engine started working again — locals hired by us, permit holders hired by their own team.

But we were honest with them about what we had and hadn't fixed. The hiring push was a stop gap. The leaky bucket — why one in ten new hires walk out in a week, why half are gone in six months — still needed work: a deeper look at how they compensate, a relook at benefits, and a constant, disciplined review of core HR metrics. Attrition is not one number. It has to be read in many ways — first-week attrition, six-month attrition, by outlet, by role — before it tells you what to fix.

This is what SME HR actually looks like

An MNC would have answered this with an employer-branding programme and an engagement survey. What this business needed was someone to read the hiring data honestly, say "this is not a recruitment problem", understand MOM quota mechanics well enough to turn hiring into a quota strategy — and then do the unglamorous outbound work, role by role, outlet by outlet.

SME HR is incidental and emotional. The owners felt the understaffing every day, so hiring faster felt like the answer — and blaming HR felt like the diagnosis. Part of the job is absorbing that urgency while pointing the effort at the real problem, and sometimes that means defending the client's own team with their own numbers. And part of it is knowing when to make yourself unnecessary — telling a client with a capable HR team "you don't need us long term" builds more trust than any retainer pitch.

The takeaway

Before you spend another dollar on job ads, do the arithmetic: how many did you hire last year, and how many do you still have? If those numbers are the same, you don't have a recruitment problem — you have a retention problem, and every new hire is a more expensive way to stand still. Count the full cost of acquisition — ads, HR hours, floor disruption — then put that money into why people leave. And watch attrition like a vital sign, in all its cuts, not as a yearly surprise.

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