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As the Careers in Africa New York Summit 2014 closes for another year, and we would like to thank all of the attending clients and candidates who helped to make this Summit the most successful Summit we have had in New York to date.

With over 350 outstanding, high calibre candidates who registered with a range of industry experience and diverse skill sets, the Summit was a vibrant hub of activity across the three days.

Clients that attended included the Summit Sponsors National Microfinance, Exim Bank, Safaricom, OCP, AXA, PZ Cussons and Tullow Oil, and with interviews pre-scheduled and on the spot interviews being conducting with high potential candidates, the Summit proved to be a great success for all.

Global Career Company and the Careers in Africa team would like to thank all that were in attendance and look forward to working with you all again for 2015 and beyond.

Selection processes are under scrutiny as never before. Recruitment was once a closed world, with candidates offering themselves up to potential employers with little or no influence on the process. The arcane practices of the top recruiters and head-hunters were closely guarded secrets. ‘Human Resources’ was a closed book. Social media changed that world forever.

Now selection processes are porous – employers and recruiters can examine an often overwhelming range of information on potential candidates and the candidates can investigate the prevailing organisational culture and interrogate the satisfaction of employees through the web.

Surprisingly, these abilities can often impede, rather than support, the hiring of talent that will contribute to, and benefit from, the organisation’s ethos and performance. There are reasons for this:

1. Ethical and legal boundaries can be crossed, especially by in-house recruiters who fail to keep up with the wide range of employment legislation in different nation states
2. Defining useful information can be problematic; the signal to noise ratio when using social media as a selection filter is high

But social media isn’t the only complicating factor in identifying the right cultural blend for organisational progress. The very nature of organisational culture is problematic.

Cultural differences among organisations can be identified at the level of practices. Practices can be more tangible than values. If this is true, many recruiters are failing to benefit from examining the practices of their organisation, focusing instead on the strategic level mission statement and values in defining their ‘culture’.

That’s not the only problem – the stronger an organisation’s culture, the higher the likelihood of it (a) being seen as exclusive and (b) entrenching itself so that it cannot adjust to changing circumstances.

How talent, potential and ‘fit’ work with organisational culture

Too many people who fit too well into an enterprise can lead to stagnation – a degree of disruption is necessary to drive business change, and this is often best via a talent agenda that hires people with new experiences and novel ideas. Too many disruptors create a fractured and overly competitive environment in which a silo mentality can develop. The failure here is to build an over-arching organisational culture that coheres all those talents to a common aim and set of working practices.

Somewhere between the two extremes is a viable talent selection strategy that brings potential talent into a workplace in which it can develop swiftly by fitting in and contributing to the organisational culture. Such a strategy depends upon:

• Trust – building a robust organisational culture means incorporating change rather than alienating outliers, but it also requires the ability to effectively identify, manage and communicate an organisational ethos that current and potential talent find both attractive and challenging – the best people do not stand
  still!
  Who is the talent you “trust”? How do you identify them as a part of your culture?
• Restatement – a regular reiteration of organisational culture helps established talent to grow, whilst giving potential talent something to aim for. As organisations evolve, constant scrutiny of the culture of the company ensures that empowerment is universal, from the long-term staffer to the brand-new candidate, which in turn utilises talents to their utmost.
  Business growth and people empowerment can be a challenge at the best of times with employees that have already embraced your culture. How do you empower your  potentials?
• Diversity – global talent moves faster and more easily than ever before which makes sourcing more demanding. In addition, local conditions can impose different requirements in different locales – it is essential to balance global cultural identity with regional imperatives so that organisations can be flexible whilst maintaining integrity.
  How do you ensure that your global talent is fit for your local culture?

With 100 of Africa’s top HR professionals in attendance and key speakers from some of the continent’s biggest brands, Recruiting Excellence for Africa is a must attend event shaping and investigating the recruitment process in top African businesses. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to participate in some of the most cutting edge discussions revolving around the HR industry.

To find out more please visit our Talent Agenda 2014 Johannesburg website.

The Selection for Culture Stream is sponsored by             

 EVP – an evolutionary mechanism for talent acquisition and organisational performance

Employee Value Proposition is one of those acronyms that can lose meaning every time it’s said or written. It easily becomes a ‘function of recruitment’, something that gets promoted whenever there is a talent acquisition drive and is dragged out for the Annual Report, but not much else.

EVP has the capacity to be much more than this – just as new communication systems, from the iWatch to Google Glass are set to disrupt the way we do everything from getting up in the morning to planning our futures, EVP can serve as a disrupter of management – a spur and a probe of the talent system and a re-dedicator and re-confirmer of organisational progress and individual development.

The EVP gap

All too often EVP becomes a tool to analyse nature: a simply mechanistic process by which an organisation defines its own needs and measures applicants against those needs to find the closest match. This failure to utilise EVP as a developer, nurturer and sharpener of ability can occur because the organisational culture has become a filter – those who don’t seem to get on in the organisation are seen as ‘not fitting in’. This is the result of an overweighting of the word Employee and an underweighting of Value and Proposition.

For EVP to deliver its full potential it needs to be seen as a contributor to the mission statement of the entire organisation and as a channel of communication with employees, shareholders, investors, customers, partners … the value of any company is the proposition it makes, and delivers on, to the world as a whole. EVP is a significant part of this value, and every employee has the potential to be an ambassador and a recruiter if they are properly integrated into the EVP.

EVP – profiling progress, not candidates

Using the EVP as a template against which to measure the talent agenda and ‘hire potential’ is just a starting point. EVP is a way of encapsulating ‘who you are’ ,whether you call that a brand, a corporation, an institution or just ‘a team’. This means EVP contains the DNA of your mission. That mission could be gaining market share for a new brand, taking over a major rival for a corporation, building a supranational partnership for an institution or meeting that year’s targets for a team. From vital first steps to vast ambition, the passion that drives mission achievement can only come from sourcing the right people, bonding them to the mission through enthusiasm, and resourcing them to turn their enthusiasm into results.

Fast moving systems and resilience through EVP

Increasingly, organisations have to move rapidly. Long term strategic objectives must be maintained in the face of a global marketplace that is regularly perturbed by events outside the scope of any enterprise. From terrorist attacks to natural disasters, from leadership in crisis situations through to prudent planning for the future, any organisation may face the need to alter direction, tactically or strategically.

If the EVP is flexible and strong, it can carry the enterprise through periods of rapid change by recruiting new talent required to master the present circumstances, and by re-dedicating existing talent by recommitting it to the organisation’s primary purposes via the current situation.

Ultimately, EVP is nature, a story board. What does EVP really mean as a nurturing tool?

With 100 of Africa’s top HR professionals in attendance and key speakers from some of the continent’s biggest brands, Recruiting Excellence for Africa is a must attend event shaping and investigating the recruitment process in top African businesses. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to participate in some of the most cutting edge discussions revolving around the HR industry.

To find out more please visit our Talent Agenda 2014 Johannesburg website.

The Selection for Culture Stream is sponsored by      

Sourcing the Hardest to Find : Strategic thinking, effective techniques and sustainable processes to source diverse talent and support business growth

Business growth is an essential. The calm maintenance of organisational performance that was possible for previous generations is gone for good. Globalised economics, porous borders and instantaneous communications mean that, like sharks, organisations must keep moving, or starve.

Demand for talent

Nowhere is this truer than in the rapidly growing economies of Africa and this is a draw for uniquely skilled individuals and high potential candidates. Technical expertise will be at a premium throughout the continent, creating intense demand to fills roles that are the most difficult to fill with anything but the best talent.

EVP, diversity and talent selection

On this basis, the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) of an organisation has to be the starting point for a talent acquisition process that both identifies the need and sources the solution within frameworks that can be both demanding (geographically/culturally/logistically) and complex (compliance/risk/diversity). In such environments effective talent selection can be a demanding process, especially when there is a strong entrepreneurial culture that offers an alternative to employment.

While constructs placed around employment in large organisations – notably, but not limited to, Employment Equity in South Africa – can be seen as a hindrance, structural constraints relating to Human Resources can serve as an impetus to strategic thought, particularly in emerging markets.  An EVP that works from the supra-level of the organisation as a whole, to the specific (and often complex) needs of recruiting in a competitive talent pool, can be used as a diversity tool as well as a measure of excellence that moves compliance from a necessity to a driver of performance.

Tools to deliver highly sought individuals

Recruiting talent, retaining key individuals and building robust teams in emerging markets are all features of the global marketplace. They are much more than this in emerging markets – they are the tools that shape a talent acquisition process to source and support a talent base that can evolve and be self-sustaining.

Responsive sourcing and management of diversity can create talent procurement opportunities within even the hardest-to-fill talent sectors. Sophisticated identification techniques and labour market sensitivities are vital to success in areas of high demand, but are little more than a bottom line. A highly differentiated recruitment strategy, a reflexive EVP that copes with fast-moving environments and a clear focus on the needs of demanding business areas are likely to deliver in even the most challenging circumstances.

How do organisations source the hardest to find? And how do future sourcing techniques need to evolve to keep the pace with the fast changing market?

With 100 of Africa’s top HR professionals in attendance and key speakers from some of the continent’s biggest brands, Recruiting Excellence for Africa is a must attend event shaping and investigating the recruitment process in top African businesses. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to participate in some of the most cutting edge discussions revolving around the HR industry.

To find out more please visit our Talent Agenda 2014 Johannesburg website.

Talent – threats and opportunities

Competition for critical human resources is intensifying, and regional competition is hotter than ever. Human capital management (HCM) is a crucial part of the process of human resource management, but companies using HCM purely as a software tool to manage workforce are missing out on the wider facility to identify potential threats and possible opportunities within a global, mobile workforce that is increasingly self-entrepreneurial.

A growing concept in talent selection is the pipeline process. Whilst it begins with talent identification, this process has as an end-point successful organisation, mobilisation and retention of key talent, regardless of the entry point to the organisation. Pipeline processes are based on identified current need and scenarios around future need.

Standing tall in talent acquisition 

This process can be described as business agility – it uses potential threats to drive leadership development and workforce re-engagement inside the organisation and to focus on talent development and acquisition outside it. Social media and even international broadcast media give an increasing opportunity for the best companies to demonstrate their capacity to deliver timely, responsive and attractive solutions to regional difficulties.

Social media tools, in this way, become part of the portfolio of human resource managers – LinkedIn is not just a place to trawl for talent, but a desktop extension of the company’s outreach programme, giving opportunities to communicate, select and implement decisions both inside and outside the organisation. Such tools also ensure that compliance is based on values, rather than tick boxes, and allows the compliance process to be sold as a company advantage, rather than a mundane audit activity.

This broadly compliance based approach to engagement is often best viewed as a way of adapting global policies to regional variation, and offers two advantages:

• A recruitment story that is compelling to the best talent – by highlighting the evidence of equitable regional arrangements based on global policies
• Ability to regionalise talent flexibility across territory – reducing the need to engage in individual negotiation/renegotiation in fast moving environments.

Ultimately, response is in the process: what has changed in the ways organisations in Africa select their talent? What is new? Who is paving the way?

With 100 of Africa’s top HR professionals in attendance and key speakers from some of the continent’s biggest brands, Recruiting Excellence for Africa is a must attend event shaping and investigating the recruitment process in top African businesses. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to participate in some of the most cutting edge discussions revolving around the HR industry.

To find out more please visit our Talent Agenda 2014 Johannesburg website.

The impact of Employee Value Proposition on the global Talent Acquisition process

Talent Acquisition has become a resource grail for many organisations, whether in-house or out-sourced. However, recent surveys have shown that companies operating in fast-growing economies have particularly complex problems in attracting and retaining critical skill employees and in effectively sourcing talent from the global candidate base that is, or aspires to, excellence.

The need for an integrated approach linking Employee Value Proposition to TA may seem like an obvious given, but such a  statement ignores the need to ‘market’ a company or ‘attract’ talent to an organisation in ways that move outside the traditional search and acquisition process.

EVP, social media and market drivers

Social media has become one of the most pronounced drivers of organisational reputation and it is also a source of informal EVP, which can be extremely sensitive to regional and cultural differences.  As a result, highly sought candidates, whether critical skill or top talent, are much more likely to weave formal and informal EVP into a matrix when making decisions about opportunity, or when communicating their own experience of an organisation. The water cooler is now global and universally accessible, what is said around it is shared in real time and opportunities to communicate formal EVP in relation to informal EVP can be highly limited.

Is Talent Acquisition becoming more like marketing every day?

In tight markets where there is acute competition for talent, the acquisition process is not just an analytical tool, nor simply a recruitment strategy, although both of these are vital. EVP can create new opportunities for recruitment and retention by providing a global structure within which every employee can locate themselves and which can serve as a format for the communication of informal EVP.  

This global-to-local matrix of EVP works particularly well where organisations operate in regional markets with their own imperatives. Linking their current employees, as a talent base, to future talent acquisition allows for highly localised communication, based on a universally defined EVP. This can serve differentiation regionally, by specialism or by project, without creating a silo within which one talent pool becomes isolated. As a result, both geographical and skills-based segregation can be prevented, whilst sophisticated EVP treatment based on local or tasked related conditions can operate.

Talent Acquisition and brand communication 

Talent acquisition has a relatively short history in relation to Human Resources, and it’s development in relation to EVP may be seen as simply a factor of marketing and public relations. This is a failure of opportunity, whether talent acquisition is in-house or a specialist external function. Building upon talent acquisition allows an organisation to extend the Employee Value Proposition via communication outside the company and delivery upon the proposition inside it.

A well-defined EVP, effectively communicated and delivered against, creates substantial benefits for any organisation. It allows the company to create brand distinction, to differentiate from their competitors for talent, and to tailor a global EVP to critical regional or specialist need without deviating from brand or creating employment silos which can inhibit supra-level organisational progress. In other words,  it allows an organization to become a ‘talent magnet’.

Let the debate begin: Is your organisation a ‘talent magnet’?

With 100 of Africa’s top HR professionals in attendance and key speakers from some of the continent’s biggest brands, Recruiting Excellence for Africa is a must attend event shaping and investigating the recruitment process in top African businesses. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to participate in some of the most cutting edge discussions revolving around the HR industry.

To find out more please visit our Talent Agenda 2014 Johannesburg website.

The team from Enabling Enterprise visited the Global Career Company offices again this week, this time with over 20 children from the John Perryn Primary School. This proved to be yet another fun packed day where the children were tasked with creating a celebration event for the Global Career Company team. THe Enabling Enterprises team have kindly agreed to share the following blog on their group’s experience at Global Career Company:

To launch their enterprise programme for the new school year, twenty Year 4 students from John Perryn Primary School were lucky enough to spend the day at Global Career Company in Hammersmith. Global Career Company is the global leader in recruitment excellence for the development of emerging markets and throughout the day, the Year 4 students were joined by seven knowledgeable and supportive employees who helped them with their challenge.

“A brilliant day. It really opens the students’ horizons.” (Year 4 teacher)

The Enterprising Challenge

So, what was their challenge for the day? Students were assigned the role of event planners and had to plan an awards event for the employees of Global Career Company to reward them for all their hard work. Before they could get started though, team names had to be chosen. Team members listened carefully to each other and shared their ideas to come up with fantastic names such as the alliterative “Dynamite Dashers” or the very relevant “Global Event Stars”.

Find Out More

With team names chosen, the students now had a chance to find out a bit more about Global Careeer Company through a quiz and by interviewing different employees. Not only were students looking for this information but they also wanted to conduct some market research to see what the volunteers would like as their awards event. “I’ve learned about the people that work here, it was really interesting to hear their ideas for the party.” (Year 4 girl)

Party Planning

Now that teams had an idea of what the Global Career Company employees would like as their awards event they worked as a team to brainstorm ideas for the theme, entertainment, food and prize.

“My favourite bit was sharing everyone’s different ideas for the food we could have at the party.” (Year 4 girl)

With exciting themes such as James Bond, the Oscars, the Victorians and the Caribbean chosen, students then had to use their problem solving skills to decide how they were going to spend their £12,000 budget. The “Party Poppers” used their market research well and decided to spend a large chunk of money on their food as they had found out earlier that the volunteers would like to eat curry and ice-cream.

But suddenly there was a newsflash! The budget had been cut by £3,000 and students had to go back to their teams and rethink their choices. “Business Stars” worked really well as a team at this point to take it in turns to share ideas for how to reduce the budget and decided just to focus on decorations, food and entertainment.

“I like business and it’s really smart how you have a budget but you want people to enjoy themselves so you have to do your best with the money you have.” (Year 4 boy) …

Persuasive Posters and Pitches

After lunch, students set to work on creating eye-catching posters with really clear information about their awards events to encourage lots of employees to attend. “Dynamite Dashers” created really colourful posters to tie in with their Caribbean theme and they drew example outfits so that everyone knew the dress code.

Finally, it was time to prepare their persuasive presentations. Which team was going to convince the Global Career Company judges that they had planned the best awards event? The volunteers listened to each team’s practice pitch and gave feedback so that teams could improve their presentation. “Global Event Stars” listened carefully to their volunteer and made a real effort to improve their eye contact with the audience after their first practice. The parent who had accompanied the students noted how important today was in preparing the children for the next stage in their lives; being able to present is a vital skill not only in secondary school but in the world of work too.

The Top Team

All the presentations were brilliant and the judges had a difficult decision to make when picking the winner. After a long deliberation they decided on the “Business Stars” because of their loud, clear delivery without scripts and for displaying super teamwork throughout the day.

A huge thank you must go to all the volunteers at Global Career Company for their time and support spent working with the John Perryn students and to the students themselves for showing such excellent problem solving and teamwork skills. A big thank you also to the teachers and parent from John Perryn for ensuring the day ran smoothly and was a success. What a fantastic day summed up by one of the student who did not want it to end! Contact us if you would like to get involved!

“I’d like to do more of this during the year!” (Year 4 boy) Well, you certainly will be doing in your lesson time projects in school.

The 2015 Marimba Tour comes to the UK next February thanks to Sarah Roe, a member of the Board of Trustees with Education Africa.

10 children and 3 teachers from the 2015 Marimba Tour will be coming to the UK next February to spend a week with the children at Lambrook School, in Berkshire. Whilst there, they will be attending music lessons with the pupils as well as attending other lessons and sharing information on their lives with the pupils.

Whilst they are there, the children will also have the opportunity to visit some of the local attractions and learn more about the local area. One visit will include a trip to Windsor castle, where we hope the Queen will make an appearance!  As well as attending the school for the week, there will also be a fundraising concert towards to the end of the week as a way of marking their time at the school and to share with the pupils some of their musical and cultural heritage.

The children will also have the opportunity to spend a few nights in London where they will perform at Shaka Zulu in London, thanks to Roger Payne who is on the Board of Directors for Education Africa. There will also potentially be the opportunity for another performance at Orchard House School in Chiswick and the City of London School. The visit looks set to be packed with many chances for the children to see and learn about the UK and to share their own musical heritage on a wider platform.

With the team at Global Career Company fully on board with their support for Education Africa, and supporting the fundraising efforts through the appointment of a group of ‘Future Ambassadors’ the 2015 Marimba Tour is a fantastic element to add to the fundraising efforts. For more information on how to support Education Africa then get in touch: contactus@globalcc.net

The team from South Africa were once again out in the market, networking and connecting with talented candidates who attended the Access MBA Tour in Johannesburg. This was yet another fantastic opportunity for the team to network with high demand and high quality graduates.

This was the perfect platform for Global Career Company and Careers in Africa specifically to raise brand awareness and share information on the up coming Careers in Africa Summit that is taking place from 21-23rd November this year.

With over 150 people in attendance across the 5 hour event, it was a busy and informative day. The Access MBA Tour is a series of targeted events that focuses on delivery of high quality, personalised services for MNA candidates, perfectly aligned with the Careers in Africa Summit positioning.

The event gave qualified and motivated professionals the opportunity to meet with top internationally accredited business schools, recruiters and professional services organisations. With approximately 100 accredited and internationally-ranked business schools participating in the Tour, the event promised to have a packed agenda and didn’t fail to deliver. Among them, 70% of the Top 100 MBA programmes and some of the best American MBA programmes attended the event.

The Careers in Africa team had its own dedicated stand where we were able to share the latest information on our Summit, with information on companies attending and how to register. Following this event, Careers in Africa look to work with Access MBA in the future to continue to build and develop a sustainable relationship that will provide a platform to support high calibre candidates.

For more information on our attendance at the Access MBA Tour Johannesburg this week, please contact us on contactus@globalcc.net

With talent sourcing, engagement and selection being at the top of the Talent Agenda, the Recruiting Excellence for Africa Conference brings together HR and business leaders from across Africa to discuss Human Capital Excellence.

Top HR and business leaders will gather at the “Recruiting Excellence for Africa” Conference, the inaugural Talent Agenda Series event in Johannesburg this coming November, to discuss ways of optimising sourcing, engaging and selecting the best local, regional and international talent for Africa.

The Recruiting Excellence for Africa Conference will see leading HRDs and senior decision makers come together to create a talent agenda which supports strategic objectives, and with over 30 top employer brands confirmed so far from across the continent, the conference looks set to pave the way for new recruitment strategies and talent engagement plans for organisational and business growth.
With keynote speakers including Ndaba Ntsele from Pamodzi Group, Tavaziva Madzinga from Old Mutual and John Saker from KPMG, the one-day conference programme will be addressing, in the morning session, the significance of social media in sourcing top talent for Africa, how far the employee value proposition can impact the talent agenda acquisition process and whether new threats and new opportunities have created new selection techniques. The second part of the day will focus more specifically on sourcing, engagement and selection responses to the need for high-potential, diverse talent that fits company culture.

The speakers and panellists’ line up includes some of the most senior figures from some of the leading brands in Africa: Citi, Colgate Palmolive, DStv Digital Media, Ericsson, ESKOM, EY, G4S, GSK, Lafarge Nigeria, Maersk Line, MTN Group, Neotel, NMB, PUMA Energy International, Rio Tinto, Samsung Africa, Tiger Brands, Yum! Brands.

Global Career Company, the international recruitment consultancy with offices in London and Johannesburg, are the organisers of the Talent Agenda Series. Following the success of the launch event in London last May, the platform looks to go from strength to strength, attracting large numbers of high profile multinational and regional organisations that lead the talent agenda across Africa. With 60 companies attending, the conference highlighted the importance of identifying employability skills required by businesses to achieve a competitive edge on an international platform. The Recruiting Excellence for Africa Conference in Johannesburg wishes to continue this success and aims to build a forum for HR and business leaders to discuss the pressing issues around their human capital strategies.
The conference in Johannesburg is co-hosted with Careers in Africa Recruitment Summit, the 6th annual summit that takes place across three days and that will involve networking, interviews and hiring the very best talent that Africa has to offer.

Global Career Company’s Talent Agenda Series Conference “Recruiting Excellence for Africa” will take place in Johannesburg on Friday 21st November. Companies and professionals interested in attending should visit https://www.careersinafrica.com/events/talent-agenda/2014-johannesburg/ for further details.