SINGAPORE: Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) on Monday (Sep 25) confirmed that it hired about 60 former employees of Indeed after the internet job portal shut its local office earlier this year.

In view of the competition for tech talent, GovTech said it took “a more agile hiring approach that balances speed with responsible hiring”, when it came to these employees.

“Every candidate was interviewed as part of the process. Successful candidates were placed at comparable grades in GovTech by taking into consideration their equivalent grades within Indeed and remunerated accordingly,” said the statutory board.

It was responding to queries from CNA about online claims regarding its hiring practices.

More than 200 Singapore-based staff lost their jobs when Indeed closed its Singapore office in March, the Business Times reported.

In a Reddit post on Sep 17, a user who identified themselves as an ex-Indeed employee in Singapore claimed that GovTech offered about 60 positions to ex-Indeed staff in May; that their salaries were “inflated”; and that the new hires had no deliverables.

This drew concern from some members of the public, with more than 60 comments on the original post.

GovTech told CNA that it acknowledged the online conversations, and that it has always actively engaged tech talent to meet hiring needs.

It pointed to the Tech for Public Good initiative offering job opportunities in government. The initiative was launched by the Smart Nation and Digital Government Group in 2022, as there were mass lay-offs then.

People hired under the Tech for Public Good initiative contribute to accelerating the digital transformation of government agencies and elevating GovTech’s capability centres, said the agency.

GovTech has five of these centres in areas like application development, cybersecurity, and data science and artificial intelligence.

“With Indeed’s closure of the Singapore office, we saw a unique opportunity to hire some of their intact and functioning engineering teams to work on the two priorities,” said GovTech.

The ex-Indeed staff who were hired include software and quality engineers, product managers, user experience (UX) designers and data scientists.

GovTech said they were currently working in cross-functional teams across the organisation, and collaborating with various agencies on projects to benefit the “whole of government”.

Indeed was founded in the United States in 2004, and is now owned by Japanese human resources company Recruit Holdings.