The survey among 15,000 youth, aged 18­ to 35­, found 33% of them hating their jobs, while another 25.3% said they were “OK” with their jobs.

Only 8.7% loved their jobs and another 6.1% “liked” their jobs, according to the job site company in a statement today.

Its chief executive officer, Asim Qureshi, said: “I feel things are improving, but this survey shows that there is still a long way to go.

“What I can say is that we are seeing employers working much harder now than a few years ago to sell themselves to employees.

“We can see that in the quality of ads they post as they’re realising that if they want to build the best teams, they need to attract the best talents, and that hard work presumably extends to retaining the talents, too.”

According to David Fernandez, a psychologist with more than 20 years’ experience, in the long run, the unhappy workers would affect employers because the productivity of a person who loved his or her job outweighed one who did not.

“If employers pay more attention to the statistics at hand, it will be a great help in tackling the worryingly high levels of suicide in Malaysia.

“It is the second leading cause of death among Malaysian youths.”

Fernandez said the easiest way to combat the problem of unhappy workers was to make the workers feel welcome at work and encouraging them constantly.

David Low, from leading venture builder LaunchPad, a company that hires both foreign and local talents, said Malaysian employers needed to see this as a wake-up call.

“Generally, across Malaysia, companies suffer from high employee turnover rates. This seriously affects their competitiveness.

“While many companies blame employees’ willingness to move jobs for marginally higher offers, employers need to realise that they too play a big part ­as they are not engaging with their young talents. That’s criminal,” he said.