How have you been keeping busy during the recession?

How have you been keeping busy during the recession? Were you gearing yourself for when the green shoots were becoming yellowish and suddenly bursting into a whole new world of success and happiness! This year has been a rather testing time from a number of angles, none the least of which were the following, generally: Clients taking too long to make financial commitment decisions Candidates very reluctant to take the leap of faith, lest they become victims of the LIFO principle during redundancies.

At HR Matters we invested both time and other resources to gear ourselves up for growth to the extent that we were preoccupied with this during the FIFA Soccer World Cup in July 2010…don’t misunderstand, we were also gripped by the everlasting fever of that soccer spectacle our beautiful Country had ever seen, our office in Durban was bedecked with the flags of the World and the Vuvuzelas trumpeted away all the recesion blues away, you would swear FIFA had a satellite media office there! The investments I am referring to were in the areas of improving our systems, particularly the recruitment software which now allows us to integrate our website and other job portals and which, more importantly, improved our ability to manage our candidate database which is growing day by day.

During this time, the recession, we consolidated our mentoring and coaching effort by being certified as behavioral analysts by CMT International.  We also completed ExecuCoach training which has given us access to a wealth of information and acess to other experienced coaches locally in RSA and internationally including the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere.

We are also very excited at our recent training and development accreditation through the South African Qualifications as a training provider which is going to strengthen our already established skills development and training effort. Yes there have been may instances of no one to invoice but boy are we ready for when things turn up for the better! How can I leave this out I also attended a wine course offered by the University of Stellenbosch which needless to say I enjoyed a lot as it well opened my eyes re opportunities the Industry offers. Let’s go back to the earlier questions…how have you been keeping busy during the recession?