Shaping the Future of Responsible Recruitment

We hope to achieve the following outcomes:

• A collective understanding among key actors in the system of how responsible recruitment interventions targeted at Malaysia can be impactful in systemic, resilient and future-fit ways. 

• New ways of working between employers, recruitment actors, migrant worker representatives and civil society and grassroot organisations supporting migrant workers that yields long-lasting, collaborative efforts to tackle unethical recruitment. 

• Tangible prototypes for high-change impact interventions that will contribute towards deepening the transformative potential of responsible recruitment services and tools to systemically eradicate unethical recruitment practices in Malaysia.

In 2023, Forum for the Future convened a cohort of 25 organisations—representing Malaysian employers, Malaysia and Nepal-based recruitment agencies, migrant worker-focused civil society organisations and migrant worker representatives—in a collective inquiry into the barriers to embedding responsible recruitment practices systemically in the Malaysian recruitment system. 

Participants worked toward a shared understanding of why current interventions are falling short: not adequately shifting norms, structures and behaviours, or not fulfilling their potential to protect workers’ well-being in the context of the current landscape and future disruptors.  

They also identified opportunity areas where action can be taken to enhance the impact of responsible recruitment interventions and contribute to transformative change in the system. Key to this inquiry was imagining the future, to lay the foundation for a subsequent phase of delving deeper into specific barriers and experimenting with design.

In 2024 – 2025, the cohort worked together in a Collaborative Design Lab to create two intervention concepts with the potential to lift barriers to deeper, more systemic embedding of responsible recruitment practices:

1. A Risk Register tool to enable employers and recruitment agencies to jointly identify and collaborate in mitigating business-related barriers to responsible recruitment;   

2. Two Capacity-Building mapping tools that enable capacity-builders to design training and services on responsible recruitment that are more responsive to the diverse set of needs, motivations and challenges that Malaysian businesses face:
   • A categorisation of Malaysian employers by business-type and how this influences their response to responsible recruitment and capacity-building. and likely response to support; and
   • A map that indicates the different growth stages that employers experience as they adapt their operations to responsible recruitment, and how their capacity-building needs change accordingly.

We are also grateful for the participation of Aziz Ahammout, Bhim Shrestha (Executive Director & Co-Founder, Shramik Sanjal), Foo Yen Ne (Independent Consultant, Onward), Matthew Kasdin (Independent Consultant), and Yvonne Khor (PhD candidate and Program Consultant, Forum for the Future).​

The next phase of the programme could involve further developing the intervention concepts and field-testing to assess their actionability and scalability.  

We are also conceptualising a Sensing for Resilience network, an initiative that would create regular, structured applied futures sessions—for Malaysian employers, recruitment agents, migrant worker representatives and civil society organisations—to collectively identify landscape shifts that could impact migrant workers, consider implications and explore anticipatory responses.