Retrenchments – What do people do in this situation in South Africa?
We have known for a while and the statistics have been troubling on the number of jobs available or being created and the rate that this was happening. In March, South Africa went into hard lockdown, severely increasing the pressure on the job market through a severely crippling affect on the majority of industry (industries). Several articles have been written on the scale of retrenchments that have increased since April this year and the number of people this will affect. I am not going to go through all of these again as we all know that every industry and every business has been affected to some degree by what is going on, not just in South Africa but globally.
Most businesses are doing what they can to assist the people they are having to let go, but their time and resources are severely limited. So a potential question to answer is, what can people do to help themselves?
Before I attempt to give some potential solutions, just some views on what we have seen and heard from people affected. As a business that has been affected by these trends as well, we continue to receive many CV’s to apply for positions and I am certain that every business is seeing the same. In desperation, people are applying for positions that they do not have the experience for, in the hope they get lucky. When we interview people to understand what work they do, very few of them understand how to “Sell” or represent themselves accurately or understand what information should be in their CV’s. A number of people are lacking self-confidence about themselves and what they can contribute to a new employer.
Being in the recruitment industry for over 10 years now, a number of these points above have been prevalent in people applying for jobs even when they have been in employment, never mind the current stressful and difficult situation we find ourselves in. So what are some things we advise people to do?
Go through your CV and make sure your CV is not just a job spec but highlights all your achievements for the businesses you have worked with especially in your more recent positions
This will lead you to showing what value you can bring and help build your self-confidence and remind you that you are good at what you do
Keep the CV to under 5 pages and make sure it is bespoke for the role you are applying to
Have a list of previous colleagues, friends and family that you are going to contact in the next few weeks to discuss what potential opportunities there might be and that they can introduce you to and help you develop
Be open to consulting/contract roles
Continue to develop your skills through free/paid for online learning courses
Make sure your public profiles especially Linked In are up to date and show off what you can bring to a business and what opportunities you are open to.
These may seem very obvious and common sense, but unfortunately, more than 90 percent of the people I speak to, do not represent themselves well to the job market and those potential employers or recruiters searching for their skill sets, whether graduates or senior management.
Over the last few weeks, we have spoken to a number of consultants willing to help people understand their value, open their minds up to opportunities and build their self-confidence. South African’s are renowned for at being resilient, making a plan and being entrepreneurial and right now, we need as much of this as possible. The other thing we have seen is how individuals, businesses and government can pull together through a crisis and if we have the attitude to partner with people we can achieve more than we can on our own. There is an old expression “when times get tough, the tough get going” and right now we are there and all of us as tough South Africans need to help each other and get this economy going.