Online recruitment sites are prospering in South Africa, where the keen hunt for jobs is many locals’ top priority
Rupert Neethling
Surfing for a job? You are by no means alone. What’s more, online recruiters are eager to hear from you. Especially if you’re in information technology (IT). Indeed, the first thing a South African job seeker notices is that there are more IT recruitment websites than just about all the other industries combined.
Skilled jobs in the IT sector are hot property and the profusion of sites dedicated to this sector points to a highly fluid market. This fluidity is part of a global trend: the average technology professional in the United States is reported to change jobs almost every 13 months.
But the popularity of IT recruitment sites cannot overshadow the fact that the keen hunt for all kinds of jobs is many South Africans’ top priority, and the Web has become a vital resource in this regard.
A few minutes of surfing will reveal an overwhelming number of South African recruitment agencies. When one filters out specialist sites (including IT), however, the top players who stand revealed are sponsored databases and “meta” sites or portals featuring lists of recruitment agencies.
To make things easier for job seekers, most of the sites below allow applicants to fill in their resums online, or download CV templates to fill in and e-mail back to the recruiters. More often than not, placing a CV with most of these sites is free. In many cases, however, employers wishing to advertise vacancies are required to pay.
Recruitment databases sponsored by groups of companies are among the most impressively designed, and they deliver on the content side too.
A prime example of such a site is Jobfood (www.jobfood.com), “the most exciting gateway to employment and training opportunities”.
CVs and vacancies on this site cover areas as diverse as engineering, sales, management and accounting.
Aside from offering a large database of CVs, training courses and vacancies all over the country and beyond, this site is a goldmine of information for both job seekers and employers.
Applicants can fill in their location and select their profession or area of training from drop-down lists, and fill in optional keywords to fine-tune their search.
The returned results feature the nature of the offer, who’s making it, the location of the job and how much it pays. If nothing else, this is an eye-opener to the kind of salary one can expect in a particular field.
A noteworthy feature of Jobfood is its chat room (a public message board, really), which reveals the concerns and goals of many South African job seekers.
Jobfood is an initiative of LogicalOptions, an education and training holding group.
Newer to the Web, CVonline (www.cvonline.co.za) is another privately sponsored site (owned by the Privest Group of companies) and while it has been active only since January, its reported hits indicate that it is growing by leaps and bounds.
Job seekers are presented with a detailed CV form to fill in and vacancies consist of a broad spectrum of categories.
A major “meta” site (clearing house for recruitment services) is Career Junction (www.careerjunction. co.za), which describes itself as “the ultimate job search”.
Among Career Junction’s partici-pating recruitment services are the Daily Mail & Guardian’s Work@ZA (www.mg.co.za/mg/work) and JobMail (www.jobmail.co.za). There are many more, and the sheer volume of jobs (from barmen to architects) on offer make Career Junction an excellent option for one-stop job shopping – especially since many recruitment sites’ links to job listings take you to Career Junction anyway.
It would be foolish to ignore Job Navigator (www.jobs.co.za). Like Career Junction, it features a broad range of permanent and contractual jobs offered by a substantial list of major recruitment agencies and employers.
System Publishers, which owns this service, claims its Job Navigator serves “27E000 job seekers and some 50 recruiters”, while thousands of applicants are said to scour the site every day. Available information includes an interesting list of the kind of remuneration candidates would like to get and what employers are willing to pay.
This service strives to provide the closest match between job seekers’ reported skills and advertised positions. Leading IT recruitment agency Abacus (www.recruiting.co.za) features prominently on this site. IT and finance professionals looking for new jobs would also do well to visit Careerweb at www.careerweb.co.za.
Formerly known as TechJobs, this site functions as the career site of its sister publications ITWeb and ZAFinance, and it lists jobs offered by close to 70 prominent IT – and finance-related employers and recruiters.
While this new site is just a month old, business manager Greg Gunn nnnnsays “the hits have been nnphenomenal”. He confirmed that part of its popularity is probably thanks to the fact that job hunters and vacancy advertisers alike are able to access the site at no charge.
It is impossible to do justice in this article to the myriad online recruiters who focus exclusively on the IT sector, but some which stand out are Leading Edge Careers (www.lec. co.za), SilverLine (www.ddsilver line.co.za), the flashy E- merge (www.e-merge.co.za) and Hilltop (www.hilltop.co.za).
As the name suggests, Global Options (www.globaloptions.co.za) specialises in IT vacancies overseas. Like other recruiters, such sites often advertise vacancies with some of the larger recruitment portals.
Specialised or not, most job sites allow seekers to supply their CVs and browse vacancies at no charge while companies looking for employees are sometimes required to pay.
A significant exception to this model is Employ SA (www.employsa. co.za), which works the other way around. Job seekers buy registration forms at any post office for R80 and post it to Employ SA.
Employ SA then makes it available online to all prospective employers and recruitment agencies at no charge.
The rationale behind this technique is that more employers and recruiters will get to see the job seeker’s details.
Recruiters can access Employ SA’s large list of CVs, covering all skill levels and all provinces, without so much as needing to register.
If all else fails, other applicants’ opinions may provide a useful guideline in determining which recruitment sites to go for. To this end, SA Web Chart can provide a shortcut to some of the more popular ones. Go to www.sa. web-chart.com and type in “recruitment”. This will reveal many sites not mentioned above, some of which might offer just what you’re looking for.
Online recruitment sites (and portals in particular) are not only doing well, they are prospering in a country where skills shortages, unemployment, a growing tradition of job-hopping and office Internet technology all conspire to nurture an extremely fertile market.