Southern Africa
Sourcing Talent in an Evolving Africa. A white paper on executive recruitment in African regions.
Executive Summary
The following document is the first in a series of white paper documents prepared by consultants at SpenglerFox Executive Search to provide our clients and business partners with insight into new developments on African markets. We focus primarily on changes taking place in four key regions on the continent:
- Northern and Maghreb Africa
- East Africa
- Southern Africa
- West Africa
This issue of the comprehensive white paper looks in particular at the market in Southern Africa and addresses a number of key issues: growth markets in the region and how businesses plan the location of hubs and headquarters; the HR outlook and how talent sourcing occurs in the region; regional specificities related to finding talent that might not be obvious at first glance, and standard salary packages for executives and upper-level managers.
Picking up on the regional specificities point mentioned above, we feel it is important to point out particular regulatory measures on hiring implemented in various countries in the region: namely, in South Africa. These countries have strict quota systems to equalize the hiring of both white and black citizens as well as men and women. Such quota systems, with their noble aim of trying to integrate historically-discriminated populations and afford new opportunities to disadvantaged groups, do have an impact on how businesses hire in the region and how they plan incentive and career advancement programs.
To make the document more timely and relevant for readers, we have also included an interview with a business partner who has first-hand experience managing operations in the Southern Africa region. This testimony highlights what areas are most difficult for sourcing talent; what successes have been achieved with programmes for finding talent (best practice); what mistakes have been made and learnt from in recent years and what advice the interviewee has to offer on succession-planning.
The interview provides added value and real-life examples of how a business has addressed issues that impact a number of organisations in the given region: sourcing expat vs. local talent; promoting worker mobility; setting up attractive remuneration packages and talent retention programmes; and managing long-term talent development programmes.
We hope this text proves both informative and useful.