Why Job Seekers in South Africa Should Be Spying On Themselves

Our team at i-Check Data Solutions have put this article together to highlight why prospective job seekers in South Africa should verify their own documents. South Africa is currently finding itself in the midst of an unemployment crisis. Jobs are scarce and good jobs are even harder to find. With this hard truth in place, when you apply for a job through a recruitment agent, firstly you are up against hundreds of hungry qualified candidates who want the same position.

Recruitment agents like any company work with budgets to manage costs, typical costs that a recruiter would incur for placing a candidate is as follows:

• Advertising the position on web portals and newspapers.
• Running background checks on you as a candidate.
• Generally running a busy office with normally associated costs.

The bottom line is that the job market is against you as a job seeker and now you are up against the recruiter’s lottery of who gets chosen to go to the next round of vetting. Typically, if you ask a recruiter they will tell you they get hundreds of emails from prospective job seekers. The recruiter does not have the time of energy to sift through each and every CV. They will usually skim read and find 15 or 20 they feel could work for the position being advertised. They then call these people in for an interview and of those 15 or 20, maybe 5 are then screened before being presented to the client.

So, if 100 people applied for a position, only 20 were pre-selected and 5 get through to the screening round, then only 5% of the original group of applicants has a chance of getting placed.

This might sound depressing, however, the recruiter is actually desperate to place a candidate and it’s a numbers game. Therefore the more people they can push forward the stronger their chance they will get a placement and ultimately a commission.

Candidates need to realize that if they want to boost their chances of getting selected to go to the next round, they need to take steps to run background checks on themselves and present these findings to the recruiter with your supporting documents.

Presenting theses documents will save the recruiter time and money and might push you straight to the top of the pile.

Recruiters are typically interested in the following verifications:

• Matric. (R 70)
• Degree or Diploma. (R 90 per a qualification)
• Drivers License and PDP. (R40 for a combo report on both)
• ID verification. (R7.99)
• Criminal Check. (R60)
• Credit Check. (R 15.99 for a comprehensive ITC report)

Collectively these checks can cost anywhere from R 300 to R 500. So, if you are checking 20 candidates then you could be in for R 10 000  in costs.

If you do the hard work and run a background check on yourself, which you can easily do through i-Check Data Solutions. You can then submit these documents to the recruiter, it means they do not have to add you to the cull list. It means that you can be added to the final round of candidates and the recruiter is happy because they get to put extra people in the running for the position and you are happy because you have boosted your chances of getting that job!

Do yourself a favor and get yourself I-Checked today, we are here to help and can offer you all the verification services a recruiter would require to push you through to the next round.

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