SMEs are an integral part of South Africa’s economy. According to a report by the International Finance Corporation, approximately 50% to 60% of South Africa’s workforce finds employment within SMEs.

Despite this, SMEs often face various challenges in terms of the recruitment process itself. Issues such as time-to-hire and high recruitment costs can hinder their ability to attract quality talent.

Overcoming common recruitment challenges

Time-to-hire: Time is a critical factor for all SMEs during the recruitment process, but particularly so for those within the Warehousing & Logistics sector. Due to the nature of the industry, it’s important to fill roles as quickly as possible in order to mitigate downtime in procurement and supply.

Sourcing candidates directly using job-matching technology streamlines the hiring process so that SMEs can quickly reach more jobseekers. SMEs can advertise their vacancies directly to active jobseekers, or tap into a database of professional candidates. Pnet’s sophisticated online recruitment portal offers a host of easy-to-use tools and features to filter and shortlist suitable candidates from its database of over 6 million jobseekers. What’s more, recruiters’ job ads get further reach from the 100 million Job Alerts that Pnet sends directly to jobseekers’ inboxes every month.

High recruitment costs: Due to the need for specialised skills companies tend to lean on the likes of recruitment agencies or headhunters, inflating the cost of talent as a result of retainer fees or placement fees.

By going directly to Pnet to source suitable candidates, SMEs can save up to 60% on their recruitment costs. Pnet uses advanced algorithms and analytics to target job advertisements to the most relevant candidates. This enables recruiters to find quality candidates using locally relevant filters and create talent pools to access when they need to hire for similar roles in the future.

Recruitment activity in the Warehousing & Logistics sector

“Jobs in Warehousing & Logistics have remained stable through 2023, with a 2% growth in demand between 2022 and 2023. There has been slow yet consistent growth in hiring activity since 2021 to the point that, in 2023, we can report talent demand levels close to pre-covid times. Hiring activity in 2023 was 13% higher than 2021,” says Paul Byrne, Head of Data Insights & Customer Success at Pnet.

“Since 2019, Warehousing & Logistics has remained in the top 10 in-demand job sectors. On average, people stay in Warehousing & Logistics jobs for 3 years. This is higher than the average tenure in South Africa across all sectors (2 years and 4 months). 33.1% of candidates in this sector have a tertiary qualification; 53.8% of candidates are willing to relocate, with 60.3% currently residing in Gauteng; and 60.3% are employment equity candidates,” says Byrne.

Built-for-purpose online recruitment platforms are emerging as powerful tools to help SMEs find the right candidates for their vacant roles, thereby boosting their competitiveness in the market. In fact, these platforms have become a gamechanger for companies of all sizes, allowing them to flourish by attracting and retaining their most important asset – People.