Billed as the first of its kind in South Africa, the CJI has been developed due to a lack of updated and accurate online labour market information in South Africa. “The CJI is a credible tool that employers and Recruiters can use for recruitment purposes. It serves as a guideline and aims to provide possible solutions to assist with recruitment by identifying key factors that make the recruitment process difficult in South Africa,” explains Kris Jarzebowski, CareerJunction CEO.
The CJI data is sourced from the CareerJunction website, where over 1000 top recruiters (both agencies and corporate companies) advertise over 45 000 jobs per month to more than one million registered CareerSeekers.
The CJI is intended to provide insight into online labour market dynamics, including: the current online labour market trends, rising and shrinking industries, identifying skills shortages and identifying strategies to alleviate the effect of a decreasing supply of candidates.
The data from the CJI is based on a six- month period, where the second three months are compared to the first three months.
There are three potential scenarios that can result from the index:
The current CJI is at an overall of 96.34 points which is for the period of March 2008 to May 2008. According to CareerJunction, this CJI score indicates a slight decline in demand and an increase in supply (Scenario 3), illustrating that it is easier to recruit candidates as there is an increasing amount of CareerSeekers (supply) per the available jobs (demand).
The online labour market dynamics indicate that information technology and finance are the two most difficult industries to recruit in. On average there are less than five CareerSeekers (supply) per available positions. Although the finance and information technology industries have the largest available workforce in the online labour market, the demand for candidates in these two industries is greater than the supply. However, both these industries have index scores lower than 100, indicating a trend that there is an increasing supply which means that recruitment may become easier over time if this trend continues.
The education industry is fast shrinking as there is greater supply than the current demand; this indicates a good opportunity for recruiters who are looking for candidates in the education sector as there is a great supply of online labour in education.
The engineering, design and legal industries are the fastest growing industries in terms of demand; however, recruiting for these industries is not always easy as there is not always enough supply to fill up the demand.
Economic, social and political factors have an influence on the outcome of the demand and supply in certain industries. An illustration of this is the travel & tourism and hospitality industries, which experienced a decline in demand which may have been influenced by the xenophobic attacks South Africa experienced in the reported period. Another example of this is the property sector shrinking in terms of demand, which may be as a result of rising interest rates.
The CJI Executive Summary is available monthly and is free to download from http://index.careerjunction.co.za. Further detailed reports covering the top ten industries in demand will be available on a quarterly basis from 1 October 2008. Other industry reports will be available on request.
