[ 2008] At a time when the industry seems to be in a spiral with regards to securing talent, local ICT recruitment and skills specialist Compuways has geared its offerings with a unique toolset to ensure it can harness South Africa's very best.

It is the view of the company that the real challenge is not that the talent does not exists, but rather that it is increasingly difficult to find. Compuways has developed a set of key recruitment best practices that expand a variety of tools in order to ensure that its clients will benefit from the best in the industry.

"Its not that talent is scarce, but for the most part that talent has been boxed and their real skills are not at the forefront of the position they are currently employed in," says Arnold Graaff, Managing Director at Compuways. "As a recruitment specialist one needs to break the norm and look outside of the traditional tools used to secure talent."

Compuways has developed a three-pronged approach to these challenges, firstly it continues to follow the more commonly used approach and advertises on targeted industry Web sites and on sites. Secondly, it has beat many to the race and has developed a sophisticated Web-based engine of its own, and as opposed to just self marketing, it uses well-respected and known Internet professionals to assist it in marketing this.

And thirdly, it takes the more human approach and relies on personal referrals from friends in the IT Industry, people who know the candidates, understand their strengths, and can identify the potential opportunities that may suit the nature and skill-set of the individual.

"We do a lot of filtering and categorising of candidates to ensure the correct skills are supplied to the correct job specifications. We have personally identified over 20 categories of skills in the IT industry as opposed to the handful usually used by many specialists in this area," adds Graaff. "Yes, of course we do all the reference checking on behalf of our clients, but take a more hands-on approach to this to ensure the references themselves check out."

A key differentiator for the company is that it also allows its clients to conduct interventions in the form of assessment tests, should they want to do so before the CV is even sent through. According to Graaff, there is a growing trend among clients to want to do this testing themselves, and set it as part of the interview process.

"In our experience, sometimes a client doesn't understand what they really want, or that there is even a gap in their organisation, until such time that you present it to them. Therefore we currently produce a report every few weeks where we summarise the top candidates that we have interviewed. This report is then sent to the employers on our database, to pique their interest and help highlight any needs they may have," states Graaff.."