It’s a dream of a lot of Malaysians to find work in Singapore - mostly due to the 3.5 exchange rate, and I was one of those people.
So equipped with 3 years of software development experience, and freshly out of university I went hunting for a job in Singapore for about 4 months. Here are my experience.
TLDR: As of March 2025, the Singaporean tech market is really hard to get into, even for locals.
Introducing Myself
A bit of context about myself, I was a self taught software engineer who worked for about 3 years in the fintech industry before I decided to take a break from work in form of a university degree. That’s only partially true, I also wanted a degree to work overseas.
So it was a good opportunity to heal from my burnout and progress my career. I end up graduating with a degree in Information Systems Engineering from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) on November 2024. This was when I started looking for a job.
My Plan
The best plan of action for my current situation was to apply for jobs in Singapore, while I was still in Malaysia with the hope to get a job offer before I actually move there.
Well, I can’t exactly just move there without an employment permit, and I don’t want to move to Johor, and go job hunting in Singapore daily. It’s going to eat capital that I do not have.
So I continued with the best plan of action.
Target Market
As per the title, I am targetting jobs in Singapore but I also wanted to keep my options open. So I decided to apply for jobs in Malaysia, Finland, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia, though everything except for Singapore and Malaysia is more due to curiousity than any actual serious-ness.
This serves as a really good way to compare the job markets in these countries. It also became an unintentional A/B test of sorts.
Target Portals
In Malaysia, we tend to use LinkedIn, and JobStreet. This would be the same with Singapore, as well as New Zealand, and Australia. For Japan, I used a site called JapanDev which is catered specifically for foreigners, and for Finland I used GlassDoor.
The Hunt
Data Summary
Over a period of 4 months (starting November 2024), I applied to 292 jobs in total, with:
- 170 of them in Singapore
- 78 in Malaysia
- 26 in New Zealand
- 3 in Japan
- 2 in Finland
- 2 in Australia
The other 11 were for remote global roles. All of these were tracked in an Excel sheet.
Experience
November & December 2024
The first month (November 2024) was a bit of a shock. Back when I was working in 2020, I was getting responses and interviews within a week or two of applying. But this time, I was getting only around 15 responses for the 58 applications I sent out.
Out of the 15 responses, I got 3 interviews. One company interviewed me but suddenly stop hiring, another was an agency specializing in gambling products, and the last company, I finished all 4 rounds of interviews for a Senior Frontend Engineer role, but they said that my last payslips were too old, and they cannot justify the salary, which essentially means I can get the role but at a junior’s salary (I declined).
All 15 responses were from Malaysia, and 0 from Singapore. I was starting to feel like I was doing something wrong, my resume weren’t good enough, and my skills weren’t as good as I thought. Lots of self-doubt, anxieties, and imposter syndrome.
I mentioned the situation to a few friends, and they told me that it’s possibly because of the time of year. December is a slow month for hiring as it was the end of the financial year, and holiday season. So I decided to wait until January to see if things would pick up.
I spent December 2024w refreshing my resume, and LinkedIn profile.
January 2025
January came, and I started applying again. This time I applied to 58 jobs with majority of them in Singapore, and some in Malaysia, as well as a handful in New Zealand.
On the Singapore side, I got 2 responses, 1 from a recruiting firm, and another with a construction company. The role from the recruiting firm was not a good fit as they required a fluent Mandarin speaker, but I got a proper interview with the construction company. In the end, I wasn’t selected.
On the Malaysia side, I got 1 response from AEON Bank. I went through their interviews, and completed their coding test, but they decided that I was not a good fit for the role.
Surprisingly, I was able to get 1 responses from New Zealand with a company called SiteHost. I did their coding test, and got an interview with them, but they decided to not select me for the next round because they could hire someone local. Apparently their labor market is down because the NZ government just laid off entire departments.
This month is pretty much the same as the month before, except with a variety of companies in different countries. It is what it is, we need to just keep going. The imposter syndrome did got stronger though.
February 2025
During this month, I really ramped up my job applications. This month alone, I applied to 180 jobs. Majority of my applications were ghosted, only 18 companies responded, and majority of them were automated rejection responses.
Somehow this felt worse. It like applying to a black hole that sucks up all the matter in the universe without giving anything back. I did managed to get 2 interviews.
Tons of rejection and ghosting felt bad. I decided to release my frustration and also increase my luck by writing a LinkedIn post about my job search. That post ended up getting 40k impressions. Which was really really surprising, I’m guessing that it was relatable. The SWE market around the world is really bad at the time.
March 2025
In March, I continued applying but only to 8 companies because I was a bit burnt out from the doing take home tests, and tons of interviews with recruiters (not only companies but freelance recruiters).
I also decided to focus on the interviews I had lined up. Very interestingly, my attempt at increasing luck worked. People from 2 other companies saw my post and reached out to me. Both were trusted team members of the companies who referred me to their managers, and I was able to get better quality interviews due to that.
From the pool of 4 interviews, I managed to get 2 offers. One was from the people who saw my post, and the other was from a company I applied to in February. The other two ended up ghosting me, and decided I wasn’t a good fit, respectively.
I decided to accept one of the offers, and now I’m employed! 🥳 It’s a remote role as a web developer for a digital agency in Singapore. The other offer was with a Singaporean cybersecurity firm with an office in KL. I was really tempted to take the offer but I decided to go with the remote role.
Thoughts
This job search took around 5 months, if I only count the times I was actively searching it would be around 3 months (November, January, February) from start to finish. Which is a shockingly long time.
Labor Markets Conditions (as of March 2025)
During the job search, I also did some research into the labor markets in Singapore, and New Zealand. What I’ve found is not hopeful.
Singapore
New Zealand
Ghosting and Reply Rates
Out of the 170 Singaporean companies that I’ve applied to, only 3 replied. That’s a 0.0176% reply rate. Compared to 19 out of 78 Malaysian companies, which is a 24% reply rate.
The Australian and New Zealand companies do well in this department since every one of my applications has a response, sometimes automated, a lot of times a human replied (as far as I can tell).
In someways, this points to the state of the job market in