Local e-Recruitment Is Lekker*

South Africa and the rest of the e-Recruitment world is experiencing a boom. According to an executive education forum at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, job searching is the second most popular activity on the internet!

The world labour market is changing. People are changing the way they look for jobs, build and manage their careers. A recent Financial Mail article entitled Blue-Collar Work: A Thing Of The Past, reports on a survey conducted by Statistics SA. It examines and explains why the South African labour market is rigid, and that certain sectors increasingly reflect a US style flexi-market, where workers are taken on and let go as required.

It has also been commented that the blue-collar job market in South Africa is still being addressed mainly through classified ads in print, but will gradually change as maturity and access to the Internet spans over this market, over time.

For a South African recruiter, this means big business. The same trend can be spotted around the globe though, and is not confined to our shores.

So, where to from here?

With corporates retrenching and losing employees, companies have to drastically re-look the way they attain, maintain and retain their workforce. A Business Times survey found that most respondents (54%) joined their current position from outside and not from within the company. On the other end of the scale, according to the Wharton forum, employees who are happy in their current positions can be lured away if the right opportunity comes along.

Part of the process of keeping and attracting employees is implementing intranet and Internet recruitment solutions that online career companies like CareerJunction, a Johnnic eVentures company, provide.

Another piece to the retention puzzle is advertising your positions simultaneously on your own job board and across other popular online channels, which may also be outsourced to an e-Recruitment company.

Narrowing the gap between conventional recruitment and the relatively
new online methods in South Africa will require more than a few clicks
of a mouse, however.

It also depends on the adoption of remodelled recruitment philosophies and practices. Leading companies acknowledge that, while having a large number of applicants for a vacancy may be flattering, the objective is to find the right candidates, not the most.

For leading businesses, this represents not merely a need to acquire a rigid set of skills or experiences wrapped in human packaging. Itís a search for that extraordinary - albeit intangible - blend of confidence, sense of humour, team spirit, and other attributes that match, in a perfect synergy, the company's culture.

However, time is money and the result of recent downsizing efforts is that employers can ill afford to spare the hours required for a dedicated recruitment process.

But, as Sir Winston Churchill so appropriately put it, A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

This rings true for every South African e-Recruitment business, be it on- or off-line. The e-Recruitment industry just happens to be one of those successful mediums that help people shape their careers and live their lives to the maximum.

Now how many businesses can have such an uplifting impact, on a daily basis?