Covid-19 and the South African recruitment landscape

But - it is not all doom and gloom! “Recent figures released on South Africa’s recruitment landscape, across multiple industries, provides some clarity into the exact reality of the employment market over the last while,” says Marc Privett, general manager at Simplify.hr., the intuitive recruitment software solution that helps you find, manage and recruit quality hires.

Drawn from an analysis of jobs published online on job boards and corporate career sites, the data allows for insights and comparisons on a national scale of recruitment numbers from the beginning of 2019 (pre-Covid-19) up until the end of August 2021. “It provides for some interesting analysis,” says Privett. “While some industries or recruitment categories yielded no surprises, there were others we would have expected to see harder hit but proved more robust for various reasons.”

The IT and telecoms industry was by far the most unaffected. “This makes perfect sense if you factor in the myriad of IT requirements associated with lockdown, particularly from a remote working perspective as well as the need to constantly work smarter and increase efficiencies,” adds Privett.

With a huge reliance on logistics, nationwide and globally, in helping to cope and meet the various challenges associated with the pandemic, logistics became a growth sector as far back as early 2020. It continues to show growth over the course of 2021 with an average of 4,300 jobs advertised per month in this sector since January 2021, in contrast to an average of 3,600 jobs per month during 2019.

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Several industry sectors remained stable from 2019 to 2021. These include:

• Administration (Clerical): an expected recruitment drop took place during lockdown but it’s proving itself to be a definite employment opportunity.
  
• Science and Research: stable and now showing signs of growth.
  
• Engineering: an initial dip but steadied itself remarkably quickly.
  
• Marketing and Media: remained steady and whilst a decrease/dip would have been expected, recruitment spend actually increased.
  
• Sales: remained steady, despite lockdown restrictions.
  
• Social and Civil Services: remained relatively stable during 2020 in comparison to 2019 and continues that stable trajectory in 2021, with even slight growth being witnessed.

To be expected, certain industries experienced drops in recruitment numbers as a direct result of higher-level restrictions. A case in point is manufacturing. Due to the production of non-essential items that were halted during lockdown periods. The construction industry saw many of its projects stopped. However, construction is now slowly starting to hire again in 2021 together with both the retail and production industries who similarly slowed down in 2020 and are now starting to show signs of recovery.

“Sadly, there are those industries who have been hit the hardest,” continues Privett. Probably, most notably, the leisure (tourism and beauty) and hospitality industries have suffered the greatest impacts, as true internationally as it is locally. The data worryingly indicates that there is little to no employment recovery in these sectors, although hospitality did start to show renewed employment interest from around March this year; growing to over 2,000 jobs advertised that month but still below the pre Covid-19 figures of, on average, 3,000+ per month.

Some surprising trends indicated that despite predictions (notably prior to Covid-19), finance did not grow as much as expected, largely due to the world becoming increasingly at risk. Significantly, health also did not show much growth at all despite the relentless pressure on this industry. Although a huge amount of HR skill was required to navigate employment during a pandemic, the HR industry in itself actually took a dip during 2020 with an average of just over 1,000 jobs advertised per month in comparison to approximately 1,600 per month in 2019.

“Whilst we still have a long way to go and the pandemic is far from over, with some industries still heavily impacted and battling to recover – if we take a look at the data collectively across all industries on average per year, 2021 is beginning to tell a very different story than what transpired in 2020,” comments Privett.

During 2019, across all industries for which the data is captured, an average of 63,968 jobs per month were advertised in South Africa in comparison to only 47,447 during 2021. This year, available data from January through to end August shows an increase that, whilst not yet at the level of 2019, does show a solid improvement against last year at 59,865 positions on average per month.

“Whilst no one could have foreseen the global pandemic and, in that, the inevitable knock on and devastating impact on our local job market, high unemployment has been a worrying South African reality for many years far before Covid-19,” continues Privett. “Having said that, the impact of the continuing pandemic will be felt for many years to come. As business owners and leaders in South Africa, it remains our responsibility to deliver as positive an impact on the South African economy and our current and future employees as possible, in order to start to recover and build again.”

¹https://www.wits.ac.za/media/wits-university/faculties-and-schools/commerce-law-and-management/wits-school-of-governance/documents/COVID-19%20and%20the%20labour%20market-.pdf
²https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/161431626102808095/building-back-better-from-covid-19-with-a-special-focus-on-jobs