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It’s all about digital

When LinkedIn and online job applications first began to gain traction, they were seen as supplements to the traditional paper résumé and in-person interview. Today, the world of recruiting has gone 100-percent digital.

“From the résumé to the search to the interview, we’re moving toward a digital hiring model,” said Bob Myhal, CEO of NextHire. “Résumés will be displaced by constantly evolving representations of individual experiences, skills and aptitudes that exist purely in the digital realm. By 2016, innovative tools that use social media, big data and other technologies to give tremendous insight into individual job seekers will [be] the primary screening method.”

Jon Bischke, CEO of Entelo noted that digital profiles are able to provide far more insight into a candidate, as many recruiters have realized.

“Twenty years ago, the résumé was a piece of paper,” Bischke told Business News Daily. “Now, it’s a collection of all [candidate] data that can be found online, like participation in online communities, conferences and meetups. Recruiters can assess whether a person will fit, and learn if he or she has the right skills for a job.”

For out-of-area candidates and first-round interviews, the phone call is quickly being replaced by the more-high-tech video interview, too.

“More and more employers are leveraging webcam and video interviews to streamline the hiring process,” Myhal said. “We are already seeing a steep uptick in one-way videos where applicants record their interviews for later on-demand viewing. Live, two-way webcam interviews will also experience tremendous growth over the next three to five years.”

Engaging the ‘passive candidate’

More and more of Generation Y will be entering the job market in the coming years, and will soon make up the largest percentage of the workforce. Employers are quickly learning that these workers have different expectations about the hiring process than past generations.

“Raised on technology, [millennials] do not accept many legacy concepts of recruiting and work,” said Marley Dominguez, CEO of Haystack. “To be effective, recruiters are going to need to engage Gen Y candidates in new ways.”

This is especially true of “passive candidates” — individuals who aren’t necessarily seeking a job, but are open to new opportunities, Myhal said. While some employers have no shortage of applicants who reach out as soon as an opportunity is posted, this is no longer the norm for most companies.

“Today it’s far more important for a recruiter to be proactive when finding candidates,” Myhal said.

If you aren’t doing this already, Bischke advised looking for candidates through their social media profiles and anywhere else they have a Web presence, since today’s professionals expect employers to search for them and take their online branding and positioning very seriously.

More-sophisticated data analytics

Using social networks and other digital profiles as candidate search tools has opened up a much wider talent pool for recruiters to draw from, but the time it takes to do that research could end up taking hiring managers away from their most important task: actually hiring.

“It is not efficient to manually sort through profiles and social network data,” Dominguez said. “We expect that the next trend will be not just sourcing social and mobile recruiting data, but actually applying intelligence to summarizing the important information.”

High-quality analytics programs have already been applied to customer data to help businesses make better strategic decisions. Candidate information will increasingly get the “Big Data treatment” so recruiters can quickly and easily locate the best people for the job.

“Cloud-based hiring tools will allow recruiters and hiring managers to easily and affordably find, evaluate and organize top job candidates, while innovative assessment and filtering techniques will help provide a 360-degree holistic view of top applicants,” Myhal said. “Through biometric data, companies like will better predict which candidates are most likely to be a good fit for a position, and which are not.”

Data analytics may even help recruiters discover which passive candidates are better to approach.

“One of the ways Big Data is impacting recruiting is around using social data to identify people who are more likely to be open to new opportunities,” Bischke said. “[Tools can use] people’s online public footprint to help predict when they might be ready to leave an employer and seek a new job.”

While digital tools will never fully replace the human instinct necessary for identifying the right candidates, staying on top of technological trends could be a recruiter’s biggest advantage going forward.

“You need to take advantage of the new tools and resources that allow you to move beyond the résumé,” Myhal said. “This will help ensure you’re finding the righthire and ultimately saving your business time, headaches and cold, hard cash.”

Originally published on Business News Daily

The Australia-based Cotton On Group, the fashion retail group, is predicting its strongest festive period yet in South Africa, with an expected 20% growth in year-on-year sales.

The expectations have been bolstered by the retailer’s rapidly expanding South African footprint, in which the group has opened five new stores in December alone. Now at 153 stores across the country, the new additions will help meet the increased customer demand over the peak trade period. Over 1000 new team members have also been welcomed to the retailer’s local operations to support the Christmas rush.

“Our South African operations have reported double-digit growth every month since opening our first store here in 2011. We have been thrilled to see our brands and products resonate so strongly with South African customers and expect the positive response to continue into this year’s festive season,” said the Cotton On Group’s South Africa country manager, Johan van Wyk.

Fastest growing market

Van Wyk said that South Africa is the group’s fastest growing market, and a key contributor to the greater than 25% annual growth the retailer has achieved globally for the past three years. Three of its South African stores – Sandton City, V&A Waterfront and Gateway – rank in the group’s top-10 performing stores globally. The flagship Sandton City store is still the best-performing store worldwide.

“In terms of contribution to annual sales, our South African festive season results over the past few years have been around 5% larger than those of our operations elsewhere in the world. Whilst we traditionally see Black Friday and 26 December delivering the biggest sales in other markets, like Australia and the US, it’s 16 December and the three days leading up to Christmas that are the peak trade days with our South African customers.”

Independent analyst and retail sector expert Syd Vianello said that the success of the Cotton On Group in South Africa can be ascribed partly to the fact that the group has tapped into a gap in the local market, offering quality products across a wide range of categories and all at an accessible price point.

“The group has read our population demographics well – within this segment, there is a very large skewing towards a growing under-25 group, who want fashionable, affordable clothing. The Cotton On Group has got this ‘affordable fashion’ product mix right, probably more so than their competitors,” he said.

The Cotton On Group started as a family business in Geelong, Australia in 1991. More than 24 years later, it now has 1375 stores in 17 countries and a global team of over 20,000 people.

The group aims to double its business in South Africa over the next three years. “We want to increase our store count to 350 and aim to introduce more brands and categories as well as expand all the current brands – Cotton On, Cotton Kids, Cotton On Body, Typo, Rubi Shoes and factorie,” Van Wyk concluded.

Source: Bizcommunity. 

Edcon Holdings has agreed with lenders to a debt refinancing that will see SouthAfrica’s biggest clothes retailer reduce borrowings by R4.5 billion ($313 million), easing the pressure on its balance sheet and enabling the company to pursue a turnaround plan.

The owner of the Edgars and Jet chains agreed to extend the maturity of more than R7.9 billion of bank debt, the Johannesburg-based company said in a statement on Monday. As a result of that and other measures, none of Edcon’s debt will mature for at least two years.

“We won’t have any debt to repay or refinance until Dec. 31, 2017,” Chief Financial Officer Toon Clerckx said by phone. “Our balance sheet is now in good shape. Our cash flows as a result of that will give the business the chance to further turn around.”

Edcon was burdened with debt after being acquired by Bain Capital Partners for about R25 billion in 2007 to tap rising economic growth in Africa’s second-largest economy. That increased 15% to R27 billion in the three months through Sept. 26, Edcon said in a statement earlier this month.

Edcon’s interest repayments due in March and September are unaffected by the deal and will be met, Clerckx said.

Balance Sheet

In June, Edcon asked holders of the company’s 425 million euros ($450 million) of 2019 bonds to take a loss as the company sought to stabilize its balance sheet. Almost all of the bondholders accepted the exchange offer, cutting Edcon’s net- cash interest-payment obligations by about 1 billion rand a year. Edcon concluded the final stage of the exchange offer on Friday, Clerckx said.

Chief Executive Officer Bernie Brookes said on Nov. 19 that the business can’t maintain the level of debt and still invest. Management should be focused more on the customer than repaying borrowings, he said.

Edcon retail sales declined 0.1% in the quarter through September as transactions settled on credit slumped 7.6%. Earnings before interest, taxes and other deductibles rose 3.1% to R501 million.

Yields on Edcon’s March 2018 bonds fell 5 basis points to 34.707%, according to Bloomberg generic pricing. Rates on the securities jumped to a record high 37.56% on Sept. 30.

This article first appeared on Bloomberg News.