During the course of the 2011 financial year we recruited 104 people into the South African divisions. These staff needed rapid, effective on-boarding to get them operational in the quickest time possible and the company induction and orientation policy was run for new recruits.

Winning the battle to attract and secure talent is of primary importance to our future progress. It’s imperative that we bring the best people into the organization and make sure that we retain those with real talent in a fiercely competitive market. We continued with our rigorous recruitment process wherein every attempt is made to match potential recruits to the job function as well as to the culture of the business. Much success was achieved by making use of referral based recruitment and other more creative recruitment strategies.

Functioning in a global economy and having operations throughout Southern Africa, an increased focus has been applied to worker mobility and ensuring the we have the right people in the right place at the right time. This often means staff having to move from one region to another and HR is actively involved in ensuring that this process is efficiently managed.

Our graduate development programme continues to provide value to the organization as well as the graduates. Young talent is brought into the business to gain valuable work experience and at the same time for the company to have the ideal opportunity to select those graduates with the most potential to fill any possible vacancies that may arise over the course of the year.

As anticipated this has been a win-win initiative and ensures that we build our leadership and priority skills pipeline today so that we have no shortfall in the future. Across the South African divisions we introduced 9 internships and 3 learnerships – all participants were black, with a focus on females. We currently source our graduates for the programme from the University of Johannesburg and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (PMB).

Retention of talent is as complex and difficult as sourcing the talent and as such we have put in place mechanisms such as flexible work conditions, career paths, regular performance measurement and feedback, incentives, recognition bonuses and aggressive development plans to ensure that we retain our talent and don’t have them leave to join other employers. Our voluntary staff turnover in South Africa is 8.6%. This number has risen 4% over the last year’s figure, but still remains below the national average.