Recruitment by employers is undergoing a change as analytics and search functions facilitate early interactions between job candidates and organisations, says JobCrystal MD Kevin Laithwaite.
Speaking at the official launch of his company this week, Laithwaite said the usual models of recruitment agencies and job portals have proven to provide too few quality candidates, have a high turnover of consultants, high fees, long timelines and high query volumes.
“What is necessary is analytics and search functions that help bring employers and employees together faster,” he says.
To illustrate the power of analytics in job recruitment, JobCrystal keeps track of employee happiness in the workplaces.
The latest release of this “Happiness Indicator” shows that South African employees are more likely to be happy if they don't live in a major metropolitan area. Smaller cities, such as Richard's Bay, Durban and East London, have a higher percentage of happy employees than larger cities, such as Cape Town and Johannesburg.
JobCrystal says there could be a range of reasons for this, including better work-life balance, less stress and even experiencing less traffic.
Employees earning between R10 000 and R24 999 per month are the least happy, and as income increases, employee happiness levels rise as well.
“This unhappy group is likely to consist of young employees who know they have great prospects, but who still need to get some experience under their belts in order to advance in their career. This level of disgruntlement may point to Millennials' trademark sense of entitlement, ambition and awareness of their worth,” Laithwaite says.
It's important for companies to realise, however, that even the happy, high earners are looking for new opportunities - they know they are marketable and will consider new positions, he says.
Social media expert and consultant Dave Duarte says Internet interaction is moving from “read only”, where people would read whatever content is available, to “read and write”, meaning people are directly interacting with content.
“That is why job searches have to be able to place suggestions, such as Amazon.com uses to refine search topics,” he says. “This is called engagement.”
Duarte says many jobs fall under different titles, and jobs with different titles may overlap.
“For instance, a 'billings specialist' may also be called a 'credit controller', but a candidate may struggle to connect the two.”
Other Internet statistics cited by Duarte show that about one billion job seekers are Internet users, corresponding to about 20% of the world's total population. Technorati has indexed 120 million blogs; there are more than 500 million Facebook users; 78% of people online use social media; and online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has 13.3 million articles in 271 languages.
“It is no longer just about the technology, it is how we use the technology,” Duarte says.
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