Recruitment: from slavery to digitalisation

October 28th, 2019 | Industry News

At Recruit So Simple we’re rarely surprised by anything we see in the recruitment industry, but every so often we come across a story that completely blows our minds. And this is one of those: The Global Slavery Index says that Malaysia has 212,000 slaves – and pretty well all of them are domestic workers. Recruitment in Malaysia is complex: ‘formal’ workers can be forced to pay up to a month’s salary to the recruitment consultancy that gets them a job, but ‘informal’ workers, such as cooks, cleaners, nannies, gardeners and chauffeurs, often travelling from the Philippines, can be charged such high fees that they are essential trapped forever in low paying jobs that never allow them to clear their recruitment debt. It’s a staggering and terrible statistic and while we do occasionally hear people complain about recruitment agencies in the UK, we’re a million miles away from that kind of horror story.

Digital Recruitment Software – a global perspective

At the other end of the scale, yet another report into the digital transformation of recruitment suggests that online recruiting software has become essential for anybody engaged in permanent recruitment. Permanent recruitment, using web-based recruitment software, was over 62% of the global digital recruitment market between 2015 and 2018, however the expected largest growth area up to 2025 is part-time recruitment. Why?

1. Start-ups and solopreneurs are expected to dominate recruitment growth in the next five years and part-time staff are a key way for such organisations to grow without too much cost.
2. The fourth industrial revolution has led to many portfolio careers – Henley Business School says one in four of us has a ‘side hustle’ – a job we do for fun or passion, or just to help pay the bills. Online recruitment software helps portfolio workers find the right jobs, at the right time, which also helps employers.
3. Part-time employment also suits women, the very young and older workers, who need to combine work with leisure, family commitments or education.

SaaS recruitment agencies have an advantage when it comes to flexible recruitment practices that suit these kinds of employment and allow part-time workers in particular to seek jobs that work for them, at times that work for them. In other words, the largest growing digital employment market is comprised of those who see flexible employment, around other jobs, with access to job information and application processes, at times that suit them.