Job hunting has evolved over the years and one of the biggest problems plaguing job seekers today is that they aren’t keeping up with all of the latest trends to land their next job or their next promotion. At the core of this problem is a lack of information in the Caribbean markets to help the job market along. Most people still operate that it all comes down to who you know and you shouldn’t even bother trying any other strategies.
However, this isn’t the case. We live in a time now where there are ZERO limitations to landing jobs and that’s because the digital age has made the world our oyster. We have tools and platforms now that we never had years ago to help us separate ourselves in the market and land jobs, whether locally or in another market. The challenge is a lack of information.
When prepping this article, I was looking over some of the top recruitment agency’s and job boards’ websites and their social media, it’s very underwhelming.
There is no real focus on industry insights or tangible content to help job seekers or to help guide employers.
After Googling the Recruitment Agencies and looking at the top 5 that came up, I only really seen content from Caribbean Resourcing Solutions and they haven’t created any new articles in over 1 year.
I want to give 5 suggestions that I feel Recruitment Agencies should be doing to help the entire job industry right now.
- Publish reports on Job/Position Demands
- Publish reports on new industries that can help the Caribbean and about industries booming in other markets
- Workshops or Content on best practices to get the most out of working with Agencies
- Act as a bridge between Schools & Employers
- Create Salary Reports
Publish Reports On Jobs/Position Demands
There is nowhere to go online to get information about what jobs/positions are in demand or being heavily sought after. This is a great area for Recruitment agencies to start collating the data around the positions that have a need. Since companies are coming to them with their needs, they should be publishing monthly reports about the jobs that are being sought after.
This will give job seekers insights into what type of positions are in demand in many of the different industries. They can also start creating content around positions that are on the way out. So if people are currently working those jobs for companies, they can get a head start on looking for new skills or new jobs, so they aren’t caught unaware when they get the axe.
Will this be easy? Nope, but it will help the industry and also position the Agency far ahead of the others and build more trust with the public. This will lead to more companies reaching out to them to do business and more people registering with them to become clients.
Reports On New Industries Locally & Internationally
We don’t have any place to go with information on what industries are seeing a surge in growth in the Caribbean. Sure we hear about individual entrepreneurs doing some great things but never enough about entire industries. One of the questions I constantly get is people straight up asking, what industry should they get into.
I point them to websites that do training for skills and tell them to pick a skill and research but we don’t have any local context for many of these skillsets. The Agencies need a Research arm. Tell us about industry trends, new jobs, and skill sets that are needed within markets. These are types of content that should be published daily and I promise you, given the times that we are in, your websites and social media accounts would be the most important pages for the Caribbean on the internet.
Through strategies like Search Engine Listening, the agencies will be able to look at all of the data being searched digitally around any industry throughout the Caribbean and report back on its finding through their content or official reports.
1 min of research on the topic of Nursing in Trinidad and Tobago, here are 3 quick points of data.
- The top 5 cities searching for Nursing online in T&T are (In order) – Siparia, San Juan, Chaguanas, Tunapuna, Princess Town
- There were 1600 searches for “Nurses” in T&T, 66% of those searches were done by people between the ages of 45-54.
- The top 3 searches were 1) Nursing Home, 2) Nursing Assistant, 3) Nursing Scrubs
That’s just 1 minute of data research done, just imagine what you could have when a full research package is done for you or by your team.
Recruitment Agency Best Practices
Whilst writing this, I asked 6 contacts if they have ever used an Agency to get a job, all 6 said yes but nobody has ever gotten a job through the agency. All of the contacts have their Masters in their various industries but site that they never received any real help from the Agencies or seen the point in Agencies.
Now, this is not to say that Agencies are pointless but I believe there needs to be more education coming from them about Agency best practices. How to work with them, expectations, etc.
2 of the agencies out of the 5 I google touched on those things on their website but again these are content pieces they did years ago. They should be producing more content in this area and putting it out on their social channels.
The Bridge Between Schools and Employers
The Agencies can act as the bridge between the Schools and Employers and this would be a great time to do that. Whilst doing their research into new industries, and in-demand jobs and publishing those reports, the Agencies should know exactly what schools are offering the courses needed to fill those positions or populate those industries.
I think it would be amazing for someone to read a Job Title, and learn about the demand in the various Caribbean islands, and the schools locally, regionally and online to obtain the qualifications needed for those roles. This will also help businesses because they don’t always know what they need or what they should expect from candidates in terms of qualifications or experience. The larger corporate companies themselves don’t always have a clue what they need either, especially with the emergence of all these new skills and industries.
This would serve everybody!
Salary Range Reports
This one doesn’t need much explanation but we need the Agencies and job boards to step WAY up in this regard.
Publish salary range reports on industries and individual job titles. You should also force companies to list salary ranges so that the companies get the most suitable candidates and candidates don’t waste their time applying for jobs that they are below their salary expectations.
We also don’t have enough information in the Caribbean on what salary expectations are for roles since it’s still all taboo. We need to break the mould and I believe agencies and job boards can help greatly in this area.
Now I know there are much more areas that agencies, job boards and schools can improve on to help the quality of the job market. I am hoping this just gets the conversation started and there is something here that the relevant stake holders can take and implement.
If you have other ways that recruitment agencies can help job seekers, jump in the comments and let’s continue the discussion.
If you need to contact me, feel free to head over to the contact page.