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6 February 2008
Finding a new job for fired workers is difficult, but not impossible – Abacus Recruitment Finding a new job for a worker who has being fired is one of the most difficult tasks facing recruitment agencies, but, in the IT industry, this forms less than 1% of candidates who are placed by agencies, said Karen Geldenhuys, MD of Pretoria-based IT recruitment company, Abacus Recruitment. “Finding employment for a person who has been fired is a very difficult task, but it currently makes up less than 1% of our placement work. Placing retrenched personnel is at around 1%,” said Geldenhuys. “There is very little retrenchment going on in the IT industry due to the skills shortage. But, also, the last few years have seen the IT sector performing pretty well – it has recovered well from the downturn caused by the dotcom crash at the turn of the century.” Geldenhuys said that before her company accepts a candidate who had been fired, “extensive research into background matters” is always carried out. “We naturally need to find out why they were fired because our job is not only to find employment for candidates, but also to ensure that we provide the best candidates for employers – who are also essentially our clients. “If a person is fired for theft, for instance, we won’t represent them. But, in the vast majority of cases, people are fired for non-performance, although candidates will frequently claim that there were compatibility issues at play. Often people have resigned, but, in many, instances, they would otherwise have faced a disciplinary hearing - and the easier route to follow is to resign. We need to take at look at both sides of the story and find the real reasons. There is a middle line to take. But we certainly do more extensive referencing then we would normally do – and this would often involve going back a number of years and checking with a number of previous employers.” Geldenhuys said that although there is stigma associated with being fired – which makes it hard to “sell the person” – there are often ways to circumvent this problem and “re-sell and re-package” the person. “In the IT sector there are a lot of different types of technology that can be focused on. A candidate, for instance, might have been fired for non-performance, but he, or she, might have been bad on the development side of things, but might be good with databases. In instances like this we look at the positive and recognize the candidate’s strengths. If we re-assess the situation and find him a position that calls for database skills it is very likely that he can perform much better – even achieving excellence. This is the type of concept we have to sell to employers and, often, it really does boil down to re-packaging the individual and re-setting sights to a large extent.” Commenting further,Geldenhuys said that while retrenched candidates only form around one percent of the placements conducted by the company, “finding employment for a retrenched person is a lot easier…there is less of a stigma attached and employers generally know that some very good personnel often end up being retrenched. Our job, in these scenarios, is to make sure that potential employers don’t take on the opinion that they can employ these people for a bargain price.” |