Welcome to the third of our four posts on how the services at Preferred Personnel Africa (PPA) came to be.
What is the service? It is an hour session where we offer job seekers of all backgrounds an opportunity to have a conversation with recruiters. No prior agenda or prepared questions that we expect a perfect answer for, just a conversation where we can spend time getting to know a job seeker.
Why did we start it?
Our candidate assessment process was something that, for a firm that offers recruitment services, made sense. The foundation of the service is simple – do the work before the work comes.
The introduction and continued practice of this service benefits us in two major ways;
- It deepens and widens our talent pool, meaning that we spend less time scrambling looking for talent and more time on designing our interview approach.
- Every conversation that we have with a candidate sharpens our interviewing skills.
When the service first began, the job market in Kenya was different. Although the supply of talent vs. the demand for said talent from organizations always skewed in the favour of employers, it was significantly easier for the a job seeker to find their own opportunities. The recruitment channels that people had to navigate were not only fewer, but a lot simpler to nav
But times changed…
University education around the world became more accessible which meant more graduate talent entered the job market every year. The influx of talent coincided with the rapid integration and adoption of software by businesses into their processes, including recruitment software, ranging from integrated organization job boards to end-to-end applicant tracking systems. These two major factors meant that organizations could narrow their recruitment channels but still be guaranteed strong talent.
Unfortunately, the gap in supply and demand of talent in today’s job market continues to widen. It is much harder for job seekers to get opportunities today through companies like ourselves which means that the candidate assessment service that we previously offered had to change…
In the past, our emphasis when speaking to candidates would be based on superficial things;
- How to dress
- Write a stronger CV
- Answer questions better (this did later become it’s own service, which we speak about here)
- Their presentation throughout the interview process (from email writing to handshaking in the interview room)
However, job seekers of today have access to more than enough on the topics above. Our focus shifted to the most important element in any interview; the job seeker themselves.
Our current approach
When we speak to a job seeker, we look to offer advice not based on a listicle they could have read already, but on their current circumstances. We offer advice that a job seeker can adopt in the short and medium term and share our insights on where they can make improvement not only in the superficial, but in their overall approach to the job market.
If you are interested in learning more about or booking a candidate assessment, click here.
