New recruitment offerings widen placement opportunities

Will the announcement of the merger between Quest Staffing Solutions and emmanuels to create one of the largest white collar staffing company in the industry and the launch of an IT dedicated recruitment company, Techboard.co.za, offer candidates superior placement opportunities?

Merging temporary and permanent recruitment skills

Quest Staffing Solutions, as one of South Africa's leading and largest recruitment companies and emmanuels, one of the longest established, national staffing company in the country are both part of Adcorp. The two companies will be consolidated under the Quest brand and leadership of CEO, Kay Vittee.

Vittee says, "The economic downturn prompted the leadership of both companies to review our business models in the context of our client offerings. Through this process, we established the benefits of integrating non-value added functions, such as back office support, that would allow for more efficient and effective support structures. Further to this, we wanted to provide our clients with an offering that would enable them to leverage their procurement spend with a consolidated entity.

"We are undergoing a focused and structured change process to define a unique identity and cultivate a tangible culture by incorporating teams from both organisations. This exercise will define a key set of values aligned to associated behaviours that will define the 'new' organisation.

"By harnessing the synergies of two brands and their combined industry experience, which spans more than 68 years, we have formed a compelling market offering with benefits for clients, candidates and staff. Not only has our pool of available talent doubled but, due to the amalgamation of our innovative technologies and location strategies, clients will have access to the best candidates available."

"Through the merging of Quest's strengths in the temporary staffing arena with those of emmanuels in permanent staffing, the 'new company' will be able to offer a broad range of employment options," she concludes.

Accepting jobs from employers only

Michael Erasmus, founder of Techboard, a job site focused squarely at IT professionals in the local industry, argues that IT job advertising model in South Africa is due for a major restructuring in line with international practice.

There has been a recent worldwide trend in the IT industry to cut out recruitment agents, with big name sites such as careers.stackoverflow.com and coderstack.co.uk banning all ads from recruiters.

The South African site aims to attract only the best tech employers and IT talent as, unlike many other recruitment sites, it is a place where employers and employees can connect directly, with no intrusive ads from employment agents.

"As an IT professional myself, I have had some very unpleasant experiences with recruitment agents. Most of my friends and colleagues in the industry share a universal loathing for dealing with recruiters, both when looking for work as well as when hiring. Yet, it is seen as a necessary evil, since they have such a stronghold on the market," explains Erasmus.

"If you look at the current crop of popular job sites in South Africa, you'll see that most ads are from recruiters. Most of these job ads do not contain any information on the employers. On our site, all ads must be from employers and must contain details of the company itself, such as a public url and email to respond to job ads. Job ads must also follow certain quality guidelines such good spelling and grammar, only one position per ad, etc. When a job is posted, it is moderated manually to make sure it follows these guidelines."

With the tech industry in South Africa ripe for the same type of disruption, techboard.co.za is looking to be at the forefront of the trend.