Unemployed Algerians pin hopes on e-recruitment

29/05/2009

Online job announcements give Algeria's unemployed a new, free way to apply for positions more quickly and efficiently than before. Candidates typically pay nothing for the service; the cost is covered by the employers, who also gain easier access to those looking for work.

Mohand Ouali in Algiers contributed to this report – 29/05/09

[Mohand Ouali Said] The team at emploitic.com offers unemployed Algerians a new job resource.

For Algerian job-seekers and employers, the employment market is difficult to navigate, given the current economic climate.

A candidate, faced with rejections in a limited job pool, may wonder whether it is better to go to an employment agency, search advertisements or ask friends and family for help, while employers report trouble recruiting candidates with the right skill set.

A new arrival on the Algerian labour scene could offer the best solution for candidates and companies alike.

"The concept is simple," explains Tarek Derghal, founder of Emedia DZ, parent company to a host of websites in Algeria, including the country's premier internet job board, tawdif.com. "E-recruitment offers a way for the young unemployed to find jobs quickly and for employers to search for the skills they need."

E-recruitment is founded on the basic notion of putting employers and jobseekers in contact. The internet makes it easier than an employment agency: no need to travel or use middlemen. From any computer, with just a few clicks of a mouse, the applicant can open a free account, post a CV, look at job offers and even sign up for e-mail alerts when jobs become available.

"I had four interviews, which proves how effective this recruitment method is in Algeria," says Djamel Touati. "For those who are still looking for a job, or even those who already have a job but want to get a better salary, I tell them to go online."

Is Djamel an exception? Not at all. A growing number of young – and not so young – Algerians are convinced that using the World Wide Web is the right way to find a job.

Young unemployed people, who have to watch every penny, see this free access to job listings as a godsend.

Amina D. is looking for a management secretarial post. Familiar with computers, she naturally turned to the internet to find work.

"I don't need to buy several newspapers a day to look at the job ads, which are often rubbish, and I don't have to pay to place an ad or waste time going round to an employment agency where they don't have much to offer you," she says.

While employment portals are plentiful on the web, there are only a few in Algeria. At first, the sites were free to everyone. Candidates still do not bear any of the costs, but now businesses must pay a subscription to post their job offers and have access to the candidate database.

The number of Algerians using these employment websites has grown quickly in just a few years. Carried along by the conviction that our-of-work Algerians would use this kind of online resource, Louaï Djaffer and his multimedia specialist partner Tarek Derghal convinced ANSEJ (the national agency to support youth employment) to help them launch a job website.

In 2006, emploitic.com was born. Three years later, Djaffer tells Magharebia, his site gets "around 10 to 15 thousand visitors a day". Two thousand companies pay to post job listings and access more than 150,000 candidate CVs to recruit employees.

"It wasn't easy to get companies to join our system," he remembers. "The first to sign up were international companies, particularly in the banking sector, cars and telecoms, and then the others gradually followed."

Watania Telecom Algérie (WTA), one of the country's three mobile telephony operators, is one such businesses that turned to e-recruitment for the opportunity to browse through job-seekers' CVs – even though it already had its own website to advertise jobs online.

"Candidates with high potential turn to modern means with a global reach," explained human resources director Redha Bendedouche. "By publishing our job offers on the Web, we can even reach Algerians living abroad."

"We've seen some very good results with this method," he tells Magharebia. "About 70% of applicants found WTA this way."

[Mohand Ouali] Emedia DZ founder Tarek Derghal and Emploitic.com director Louaï Djaffer announce international expansion for Algerian employment website.

As a measure of how employers are using e-recruitment, the number of jobs obtained through emploitic.com has doubled each year since 2006, Djaffer said at a press conference held on Tuesday (May 19th) in Algiers to announce a new partnership with The Network.com.

Thanks to arrangements with international job websites, employers will have access to Algerian workers and Algerians will have access to the world. Under the deal signed last week with The Network, for example, job-seekers using the Algerian portal will be able to peruse listings from more than 1,000 companies and employment agencies in 100 countries.

The Network chief Piet Derricks, who attended the Algiers conference, said he hopes to achieve "total coverage of the Maghreb" and present "the best offer possible to international companies who are looking for applicants from Algeria".

Other employers attending the conference expressed their satisfaction at the possibility of getting good candidates through employment web sites. With this method, one of them told Magharebia, "Recruitment can take place more quickly and more efficiently".

"We can avoid the imperfections of recruitment agencies," the employer said. "The law forces us to go through these agencies. We have to be patient for the 21 days required by the regulations, and then we turn to our partner employment site."

Legislation has yet to catch up to these internet companies.

"The law is still a bit vague, and there's no legal framework to regulate our activity, which is part of e-commerce," Djaffer said.

"These employment websites can help create job opportunities and support the government's efforts to fight unemployment," ICT Minister Hamid Bessaleh told the press on May 28th. Speaking after a closed parliamentary meeting to plan internet regulations, he said that for now, while these websites are not yet controlled by Algerian law, they bear complete responsibility for whether the job ads are true or false.

The ministry intends to prepare a law that will organise all the websites on the internet, not only those with job ads, Bessaleh said.

Even traditional employment agencies – the main competition to the internet job sites – recognise the effectiveness of the new business model.

"Statistics tell us that the average Algerian spends about two hours a day surfing the net, either for fun or to find information or employment," Mehdi Zeddani of human resources firm HR-Halkorb tells Magharebia. "Relying on the huge success of e-recruitment at the global level, we can say that this has, in Algeria, a strong future, whether for business or job seekers," he concedes.

E-recruitment is not, in itself, the solution to unemployment, Zeddani cautions: "It is businesses that create the jobs."

Yet even the best opportunities may not be enough without the right preparation. According to Emedia DZ's Tarek Derghal, the necessary adjunct to the online resource is a support system.

"During our participation last year in a job fair in Algiers, we realised that young people are not prepared for various aspects of the job search and that even when they do get an interview, they often miss great opportunities because they do not how to sell their skills," he said.

His company, whose employment site only came online three years ago, decided in March to establish a free programme offering individualised assistance to young, unemployed Algerians. An experienced coaching unit teaches job-seekers how to write CVs and letters, target firms most likely to hire and use strategies for handling interviews.

"This approach reassures people seeking work and keeps them from feeling lost."

He is already planning to expand the new programme.

"We hope to do a partnership with the state to fund this coaching project, as is the case in European countries, especially since one of the priorities of the state is the integration of youth into the workforce."

"Work," he says, "is a right".