We are hiring: Companies getting more creative in wooing workers

On a busy Friday afternoon in Kingston, outsourcing company Ibex Limited took to the streets with a float, featuring music and women dressed in red – the company’s signature colour – to woo new workers.

Ibex is currently seeking 2,000 employees new workers for four locations in Kingston, St Catherine and Ocho Rios.

Women in red distributed fliers outlining the frequency of pay, career growth opportunities, free health, critical illness and life insurance benefits, performance bonuses, free transportation for night shift, daily lunch subsidy paid biweekly and rewards, recognition and employee engagement activities.

With business process outsourcing as one of the fastest growing markets in Jamaica, companies are not only competing against each another for service and technical personnel, but also against hotels, supermarkets, schools, fast food companies and security companies whose ‘we are hiring’ advertisements proliferate traditional and social media.

Anand Biradar, president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica, GSAJ, says local outsourcers are also making use of artificial intelligence for multiple job postings and candidate selection to improve outcomes.

“They use GenAI to match passion with profession,” said Biradar, who is also the head of Sagility in Jamaica.

“They are creating an individual GenAI assistant for each job seeker and also employers,” he said, adding that the tech provider of the service is is a company called Ikonwork.

In the past, job recruitment ads were all about the skills the applicant needed to possess. But these days companies are also promoting themselves to prospective workers, saying their programmes and benefits can make their lives better.

Alorica, for example, which is seeking workers in Kingston, is pitching comprehensive comprehensive life and health insurance coverage, tuition reimbursement for higher education, 100 per cent paid training, and birthday-off with regular pay. And InTouch C, which operates in Hanover, St James and Trelawny, is offering a US$300 signing bonus for newly hired customer service staff.

With the Jamaican economy considered to be close to full employment, companies have had to get more creative in how they recruit. The situation is compounded by the continued brain drain in which skilled workers migrate overseas in search of better opportunities, and a tight labour pool that’s limited in numbers and skills.

A new dynamic is also emerging whereby Jamaica, whose citizenry has raised concerns in the past that foreigners often take away jobs from locals, is itself actively considering importing foreign labour as a policy initiative to plug skills gaps within companies that are investing in more advanced production equipment and systems but can’t find technically qualified staff to man them.

As such, the current recruitment strategies by Jamaican firms see more of them turning to job fairs, employment agencies, and press advertisements. But some are going much further with unorthodox methods in the field to sign up workers, including the latest deployment of ‘promo girls’, whose corporate usage in the past has more been focused on brand promotions.

“There is [also] an escalation in wages and benefits to some degree,” said Biradar. Employers are marketing for jobs, investing more in training people who normally would not get through the recruitment process,” he said.

Both the BPO and hotel industries are on the rise. And both employ tens of thousands of people. The competition is likely to become fiercer with the tourist market currently heading towards its busiest season of the year when visitors and hotel jobs reach their peak – winter.

President of the Human Resources Management Association of Jamaica, Lois Walters, suggests that companies should start emphasising staff retention, side by side with seeking new hires, to prevent attrition.

She listed 12 mistakes which local companies tend to make in retaining staff already hired, including “not ensuring that the culture of our organisations is deliberately cultivated, and our employees are treated with respect and trust is built,” she said.

“We have a history of slavery and indentureship, crown colony governments, labour unrests; and therefore we have to counter that culture norm/expectations in our workplaces,” Walters added.

A review of job recruitment ads show that the demand is coming from all sectors, including the security industry, fast food, medical and healthcare, government departments, e-commerce operators, retail, manufacturing sector, distribution, communications, and many more.

Companies like pharmacy operator Fontana are recruiting because they are expanding. But many are seeking new staff to replace ones that have left for better opportunities.

Walters recommends a strategic approach to workforce planning whereby companies determine the roles they view as ‘mission critical’ and follow up with a ‘competencies audit’.

“You want to ensure that top performers have the appropriate skills to fill these mission critical roles,” said the HRMAJ president.

“Some organisations offer study leave or day release or tuition reimbursement, time off, flexible work arrangements, job rotations/secondments, and so on, as retention sweeteners to the top performers or to those in mission critical roles so that the gaps can be addressed,” she said.

Jamaica has a labour force of more than 1.3 million. Unemployment is currently at a record low of 4.5 per cent.

avia.collinder@gleanerjm.com