This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 155

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Open Kitchen: Lessons from Recruiters in South Africa: A Few Hot Takes

I remember doing a series of 'How-to-Hire' Guides a few years ago when I interviewed local recruiters on what the secret sauce was to hire successfully in that country, but wasn't ever able to get it going beyond the 2 or 3 that were completed. Probably this is a project I should revive - the combo of crowdsourcing, AI and community support should lessen the load - as once again meeting with local recruiters during my 7 days here in South Africa has educated me on how local solutions to universal challenges remains the way to be effective.

I'm going to jot down a few mental notes I took during the conversations, dinners, drinks and events I attended, and share them with you. It's going to be impressionistic and interpretative, so don't come at me with 'data' ??. However there are lessons to be learn and applied regardless of context and I hope you find them useful.

1. Problems Require (Staffing) Solutions

South Africa is a country which in recent decades has attracted negative headlines for decline in state capacity, rising unemployment, high crime rate, lack of security and a general sense of opportunities missed. These problems are very real and a huge burden to the people who live here. However, it is the nature of our industry, that problems that need fixing often generate vacancies that need filling, and perversely, the more problems you might have, the greater the demand for qualified staff to fix it.

Energy infrastructure is a famous problem in South Africa; everyone downloads an app which the government uses to inform the citizens when different parts of the grid are due to power down, in order to mitigate risk of total grid collapse. People plan their Zoom calls around the 'loadshedding schedule' and most companies will have backup diesel generators - or increasingly, solar powered batteries - to kick in when the power goes down. Whilst this has indeed become a part of doing business in the country, that doesn't mean that there isn't attempts to fix it. Hence, the demand for energy transmission, storage, maintenance engineers is super high in the country, countervailing the overall market trend of softening labour demand where SA is on trend with the RoW.

In the conversations I had between breaks at Recruiters Unite, it was clear that there were different reports on market health, based mainly on domain & industry. Engineering (non-software) agencies were doing great; generalists, were having an incredibly hard chew.

Lesson for Everyone Else

The global market has definitely softened since US Fed Reserve killed the Zero Interest Rate Policy and basically repatriated financing back to the HQ. However, specific domains, addressing acute, local problems will continue to have strong hiring demand. Recruiters have to think where are problems are, and seriously consider a domain switch to a sector where staffing is seen as the solution.

2. Diversity....is Diverse

...and actually very specific to local places. We often treat the conversation DEI is as a universal and standardised when it is in fact culturally embedded into a specific local context. Many of us non-South Africans might shocked when looking at one of the categories here, particularly in the US, where the term 'coloured' became derogatory term for Black Americans. However, in South Africa, it is an official ethnic category, defined as a person from mixed African and White or Asian descent. It is a distinct identity - and one - to my knowledge - embraced by the people who identify as such. This is also not a small group. In the Western Cape Province, where I am currently writing these words, Coloured people constitute as high as 40% of the population.

Of course, all of this makes sense once you look at diversity of ethnic taxonomies that exist in the world today. And its not surprise that each country, generally has evolved its own racial / ethnic taxonomies based on their historical interaction between the groups it seeks to organise. Even the same words can often mean different things; the US for example, 'Asian' typically means someone whose ethnic background Chinese, Korean, Japanese. In the UK, this usually means something from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan.

Lesson for Everyone Else

There is no standard category of racial or ethnical classification. The classifications themselves are cultural products, the results of historical interactions between groups of people in specific local conditions. Hence, when hiring internationally, we would be wise to familiarise ourselves with how different countries do their classifications.

3. Global Dispersal of TA Will Help South Africa

I talked a little bit last week about how the world was undergoing a global rationalisation of resources, as employers looked to shed costs, and increase efficiency. A big part of this, will be off shoring jobs which can already be done remotely. This is not going to be great news for WFH enthusiasts, but it was always a stepping stone for job dispersal once we proved we did not have to be physically proximate to do the job.

There are some obvious advantages for European Headquartered / Staffed businesses to think about relocating jobs to South Africa, especially the Western Cape which has the closest timezone to most of Europe. English language literacy is 95%, with high quality education at High School and University levels. Finally, the wage arbitrage opportunity enables employers to make highly cost effective hires, whilst still giving upper market local rates.

Lesson for Everyone Else

Remote work is fabulous, but you better have a moat - some sort of unique insight, skillset, talent or social capital or something - which makes you irreplaceable in your current role. Otherwise, that job is going to go offshore where cheaper, harder working people are going to eat your lunch.

There's loads more I've picked up, but I will leave it there for now. Look forward to your comments on this - have you been to a different country and learned something new that has had you think differently about recruiting?

Out of the kitchen, onto the lounge....??

What's in the News?

LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram All Suffer Major Outages

Big week for social media as almost all major social networks experienced major outages within days of each other. With recruiter dependency on LinkedIn being at all time high, the shocking lock out no doubt slowed down hiring velocity for the entire industry. Recruiters - at least those who hire knowledge workers most likely to be on LinkedIn don't have many alternatives - last week, reminded us, we're in the vulnerable place.

LinkedIn Future of Recruiting Report 2024

I featured this in Recruiting Brainfood yesterday and recycle it again here today - important that we read what other recruiting leaders think the future of the recruiting looks like. Note, these is a survey data so it best considered to be what a 'best case' scenario looks like in the AI-enabled future. Worth a download here

Google Ends Email Job Alerts...For Europe?

Alexander Chukowski is a must follow on LinkedIn, if you're into recruiting intelligence on the state of job boards, recruitment advertising and search engines. He is quickest off the mark to notice this deprecation of service - the end of job alerts for (at least) German users. Hard to know how significant these unannounced changes are but it seems like it is a permanent thing, especially seeing as Google don't make money off this service, and I suspect, the continuation of which might be in breach of GDPR. Have a read of Alexander's analysis here.

If you have any news which you think the wider market needs to know about, put into comments below on this thread.

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiter Events to Attend in 2024

There are 100+ events in the Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 - make sure you bookmark this spreadsheet, share it with your event organiser and event going friends and get yourself to one of these this year. If you see any that are missing and should be there, please do add to the bottom of the spreadsheet - I will merge them in weekly.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep249 - Future of Work: Talent Acquisition...Not Invited?, Friday 15th March, 2pm GMT / 9am ET

We need to have this conversation folks - is HR / TA even involved at the right level of discussion when organisations think about future state? Important to elevate if we're not. We're with industry luminaries Jason Seiden, VP Growth & Innovation (Cielo Talent), Paul Maxin, Founder (MaxinTalent) & Madeline Laurano, Founder (Aptitude Research). Register here

How to Recruit A Data Scientist, WeAreDevelopers, March 14th 11.00 CET

This has been one of the most fun things to do in a long while - getting a technical expert on screen with the technical recruiter who hires for that skill set and see if we can demystify the behaviour each has of the other. We're bring together Jodie Burchell, Data Science Developer Advocate at Jetbrains with Yves Greijn, Founder of Maven for this one, with the legend that is Rudi Bauer joining me as copilot for this conversation. Make sure to join here

Small but Mighty: A Blueprint for Candidate Attraction and Retention, March 14th 2.00pm

What advantage do SMB's have in Candidate Attraction and Retention? We know that big consumer brands are often considered the most attractive employers, but mainly due to name recognition for the inexperienced! Do SMB's have any advantages when it comes to Candidate Attraction? We're with Gianluca Rosania, Top HR Influencer in Spain and friends. Register here

TA Leaders Workforce Planning Masterclass, Wednesday 27th March, 12.00pm GMT

Workforce planning has got to be one of the key responsibilities which TA need to embrace, in order to fully transition away from being a delivery function responding to requirements. Do we know how to get there, can we demonstrate the value, what are the tools which are available for us to use? We're with industry brains Yasar Ahmad, Global VP of People, HelloFresh, Kesh Ladwa, Head of Talent Acquisition (ex-BBC) and Danny Hodgson, Founder, Foresight. Register here

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter,?comment below?with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

Whose Story?

It's Andrew McFetrich, Head of Recruitment Marketing & Outreach, Defra

I've known Andrew for a while it seems, mainly when losing at Chess to him, but I hadn't really got a handle as to know the person was until he joined the Brainfood Tribune and answered 20 Questions. Some wonderful answers here - have a read.

If you are interested in taking part in the Brainfood Tribune 20 Question Series, please comment below "20 Questions" and I will personally be in touch to work with you on your story. Open to all who want to do it - the only condition is that you commit to honest answers!

Who's Hiring?

Lead Technical Recruiter (f/m/d), GoHiring, Berlin, Germany

People Operations Manager (all genders), Urban Sports Club, Berlin, Germany

People Operations Specialist, Blinkist, Berlin, Germany

Senior Recruiter, Western Union, Vienna, Austria

Aggregator is still up so check it out yourself, here.

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Whose Available?

That's 435 members of the community. If you are a recruiter or HR person that is looking for work, join the Brainfood Talent Collective here. If you are an employer hiring recruiters, apply for a company account here, and use the code: BTCFREE to freely post jobs and search the db.

End Note

Last day in Cape Town and I'm thankful for the wonderful week I've spent here, in the company of friends old and new. Even me being sick as a dog for a few days ended up in me being able to chill out at an amazing seafront room at the Lagoon Beach Hotel, getting the most amazing views to help with my recovery!

Early AM flight tomorrow, back in Blighty hopefully to see in the Spring.

Cheers!

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.