Updated for 2016: The 11th Reason – We now guarantee your hires.

By Lindsay Storie, Events Manager

Running dozens of Summits and working with our clients and candidates over 14 years, we’ve built an understanding of the factors that make our Summits what they are – the best African recruitment events in the world.

Here are the reasons all at once, and you can read on to see how they set Careers in Africa Recruitment Summits apart:

1. You are Not Buying an Event
2. The Recruitment Process
3. The Global Talent Pool
4. Flexible Participation Packages & World Tours
5. Track Record & Reputation
6. Client Experience
7. The Passion of Our Events Team
8. The Expertise of Our Regional Recruiters
9. Positivity and Professionalism
10. The Summit Swing

You are Not Buying an Event

People talk about attending career fairs. These Summits aren’t career fairs. There is an exhibition and the Summits are filled with people seeking the best career opportunities in Africa, but the similarities end there. The main thing that separates our Summits from career fairs, and from recruitment events in general, is that our clients and candidates aren’t actually ‘buying’ the event at all. What’s on offer is in fact a recruitment process, run by regional recruitment specialists and taken part in by top employers and candidates. It just happens to be focused into an event scenario, but it’s this process that is really on offer.

The Recruitment Process

For two reasons. First, Careers in Africa Recruitment Summits feature, at their core, a robust recruitment process including sourcing, pre-selection, selection (face to face interviews, the exhibition & spontaneous) and even offers on the day. Second, that process is fully customisable to your recruitment needs and methods. We build your participation around the recruitment process you want. If you want an assessment centre, we run one. If you want to pipeline candidates only, that’s what we do for you. If you want to offer and fill 10 roles during the weekend, we direct the process to that goal.

The Global Talent Pool

The differentiator at the core of all of our recruitment services, our Global Talent Pool is a network of 500,000 graduates and professionals around the world and our means of attracting more through our 20,000 sourcing channels. Wherever you join us for a Summit, the word of your employer brand and opportunities will be spread through our Global Talent Pool, so you can recruit the best of it.

Flexible Participation Packages & World Tours

Much the same as a customised process is at the heart of our Summits, customised participation packages are also key. Whether you prefer fixed fee or recruitment fees, whether you want to sponsor or go under the radar, there is a participation package to suit. Anticipating that you want the best of the Global Talent Pool worldwide, we also offer you the chance to join us at a series of Summits, with your participation package customised per location throughout.

Track Record & Reputation

Careers in Africa Recruitment Summits are the original and the best. In a consortium event, this fact, and other employers’ and candidates’ knowledge of it, is of paramount importance. We’ve recruited more than 7,500 professionals back into Africa across 45 countries. These numbers attract the best, making for the best events.

Client Experience

Much the same as we differentiate from other events in terms of process, we also differ in the client experience and service. You should expect a high-touch service throughout from your Recruitment Summit supplier. With Careers in Africa, you’ll get one.

The Passion of Our Events Team

Our experienced events team has been delivering Careers in Africa Recruitment Summits around the world for a decade between them. Their experience in handling our clients’ and candidates’ requirements is superseded only by their passion. We love what we do and every client participation at every Summit is an opportunity to show that.

The Expertise of Our Regional Recruiters

23 nationalities, speaking 21 languages, drawing on a wealth of experience in African recruitment. Our team has what we put in the strapline – International Perspective, Regional Understanding. This is what allows us to deliver on a multitude of client requirements at each Summit, across all levels. As much as our customised recruitment process, it’s our team of specialist recruiters that set our Summits on a different level from other recruitment events.

Positivity and Professionalism

The way your project is handled by our team, the way our candidates conduct themselves but most importantly the atmosphere around any Careers in Africa Recruitment Summit. The story of opportunities in Africa is a positive one, generating great feeling and a powerful message. It’s also a deeply professional environment, with the focus on a serious recruitment process, for serious employers and professionals.

The Summit Swing

The Swing is our ongoing commitment to your recruitment needs. We are confident of delivering significant ROI on your Summit participation. To further ensure you are supported though, in the months after a Summit is completed, we support our clients with a contingency search service delivered by our retained-only Search and Selection team. For months after the Summit, it’s clear that you didn’t just buy an event.

Guaranteed Hires

We are so confident in our recruitment process and team that we will guarantee a number of hires you will make from the Summit. We hope this gives you the confidence to plan ahead and join us at Summits, knowing your ROI is guaranteed.

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.