It is true that in order to prevent this type of situation from recurring we need to understand how it came about, and there are many articles available online that can be used as reference for those readers who are interested in delving into the economic and financial intricacies of how we got to this point. The repercussions have been felt everywhere, from job losses to price hikes, and certainly many companies have scrambled to review their SWOT analysis and their scorecards, seeking to find ways to stay liquid and a general belt tightening from stationary to staff has definately been felt.
For many newcomers to the job market, it has been a stressful time; internships and graduate programmes being the first to feel the axe of company cut-backs. View that alongside the re-structurings that have taken place across industries, head freezes and retrenchments and one begins to see the very tangible effects on recruitment as a whole, not just in South Africa but globally.
The effects of the recession on the recruitment industry have been many; recruitment agencies have battled to stay afloat, some have gone under, and many others have resorted to retrenchment simply because the demand for staff has whittled beneath their billing capacity, which directly impacts on how many agents stay and how many go. In the end, it's boiled down to a numbers game all around.
At a time when our staff are our greatest asset as companies, these same companies find themselves having to decrease expenditure and targetting this same assett. Some companies will begin to restructure, to re-invent themselves, or to really look at the value add of their human capital. Others panic and blindly hack away at their payroll, following only labour law practice (hopefully) whilst trying to secure a fair balance between expense and growth strategy. But there's an assett companies are perhaps not aware of, which is the ability of a recruitment agency to predict what is happening in the very near future within a specific business sector. Suprised?
It's true. Consider this; the moment your employer is under financial or survival threat, do you not feel it? And do you not, then, begin to "put your feelers out" even though you are relatively happy in their employ? It's a human characteristic; that basic fight or flight element to survival that tells you when to resume job-hunting. It is not unique to a human being in say, the marketing field. Following this logic then, it makes sense that the first people who "see" the companies in trouble via the CVs of their staff are recruitment agencies. It's a research angle that I don't think many people have cottoned onto. Perhaps economists should run a survey on "who's panicking" - because we at IMM Recruitment can certainly tell you (often before it hits the news) when a company is in trouble. Like a ship in a storm, the crew begins to locate the life-boats long before the mast is shot and the hull compromised.
Looking at this from the employer's perspective it also makes sense; when management identifies the need to restructure, it creates the kind of stress in the workplace that can often be felt right down to the caffeteria. Nobody needs to say "they're thinking of retrenching", or "they're trying to get people to resign" (there is always a grapevine or two hanging about, however unfair it's whispers may be) stress among management filters down, through processes, through small cut-backs here and there, and certainly through staff members' body language. All these put "job threat" on the radar of the employee and we, the recruitment agencies, begin to see those threats by reading into the numbers; ie the number of cvs coming in either from a particular company or a particular industry.
Each day, recruitment agencies receive CVs; some are sent in response to adverts, others are motivated by the spoken or unspoken job threats to individuals, and the cumulative effect is that recruitment agencies can often predict what's about to happen in a specific industry quite accurately. This is especially true of specialist agencies such as the IMM Recruitment - our focus is marketing and sales, which underpin to a large extent the growth of a company and even industry sectors. Just as requests from clients in a specific sector tell us what type of candidate is sought after at a particular moment and make for instance, March,the month of Internships in Marketing, so too silence from clients coupled with CVs from that industry's staff speaks volumes to us.
To illustrate, this year January and Februrary were the start of the "banking months"; we knew it was serious when it went past the 30 and 60 and then 90 day mark! CVs came in from bank call center staff, client services staff, marketing staff, and then sales and even middle and senior management. When sales staff in an industry begin to bulk send their CV to us as a recruitment agency, I tune in to the news. Sure enough, something's about to hit. The stream of CVs didn't stop until just recently, which indicates to me that there is a growing sense of renewed stability about to happen among staff members.
2008, by comparison, saw January as "pharmaceutical month" and we were swamped by CVs of all sorts of professionals from BSC grads to chemical engineers looking for "growth". It lasted about 2 months, then settled, at about the same time that the plastics sector began actively looking for sales, marketing, project management and operational staff from a "background in chemistry".
I'll admit I was surprised at SABC CVs streaming in to us in March/April this year, but that was later clarified in the media, too, although I was certainly not in the dark as to why we were avalanced by Eskom CVs around the March mark!
So the next time you're wanting to know if your company is just having a bad month or the problem is in the industry itself, consider calling up IMM Recruitment and asking us if we're getting loads of cvs from individuals in your industry .. you may find some valuable answers without the huge expense of a dedicated researcher!
Rabia
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