Human capital stakeholders urged to make recruitment ‘more sexy’

Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon, minister with responsibility for digital and skills transformation, is calling for educators, administrators, and stakeholders with a keen interest in human capital to make training and recruitment “more sexy” for young people in Jamaica.

During her address as guest speaker at the launch of Ikonwork – Jamaica’s first and newest end-to-end technology product that provides online solutions that take care of human-resource needs from hire to retire – she stressed that the older generation should align with the new cutting-edge technology such as the Ikonwork platform.

“The old environment doesn’t really work for them, and we have to be able to understand that. We have to teach different. We have to approach everything very different. We also have to make it more sexy for our young people,” Morris Dixon said.

“They [youth] don’t want to enjoy some of the traditional areas and the way we speak about them, and so we’ve had to do new areas looking at where the growth is globally, and so some of the new areas we do is gastronomy technology. We teach that at HEART. We teach aerial robotics. We teach autonomous robotics. We even teach plastic dye engineering. There’s optoelectronics. There’s mechatronics. These are all areas that are taught in our national training institution, and a lot of people don’t realise that this is happening because what we are saying to our young people is that you matter, just as much as any child anywhere else in the world, and you deserve to be doing the programmes that are demanded worldwide in this new world,” she said.

DIFFERENT OUTLOOK

She also said that when she and Opposition Leader Mark Golding, who was also present at the event, were students at Campion College, their ethics and outlook on life were different from the youth of today’s generation.

“They have a different outlook. They’re looking for meaning in their work. They’re very entrepreneurial-minded, so they’re very tech-savvy, and so a tool like this [Ikonwork] is also very much tailored to our young people, our Gen Zs, who are exposed to so much technology,” Morris Dixon said.

“They want tools like this where they can interface and find work in that kind of more tech-savvy environment, so the old environment doesn’t really work for them, and we have to be able to understand that, and even in terms of HEART NSTA Trust, we have to understand that it’s different. We have to teach different. We have to approach everything very different,” she said.

She also singled out another Jamaican company, National Baking Company Limited, which has invested in robots for its upcoming $6.5-billion plant that will be launched in Montego Bay, St James, and which is expected to be completed by 2025.

NO REGRETS

Vinay Walia, group managing director, Guardsman Group of Companies and Beryllium Limited – developers of Ikonwork – has no regrets in not acting on the idea after it was shared with him a year ago.

“Five years ago, we took a decision to become a technology company, and we launched Beryllium in November 2021 and Guardsman Metaverse in December 2022. I was introduced to Ikonwork in 2022 when a dear friend presented to me a concept of making recruitment more scientific and easier. With an employee force of over 8,000 people and growing every day, I was intrigued to learn more about how this was possible,” Walia said.

“At the same time, I learnt of Ikonwork, we were presented with the opportunity to invest in Microbridge, our payroll solutions provider. I thought to myself that the same human-resource needs that our companies were facing must be similar for other companies, right? How could we not only provide a solution to this problem but take it to the next level?”

Walia said the combined services of Microbridge and Ikonwork allow Beryllium to bring to market an end-to-end human resource technology platform that provides solutions that take care of companies’ human-resource needs from hire to retire.

“We support companies throughout the entire employee journey from recruitment to onboarding to managing tasks like vacation or sick leave to payroll to offloading and back to recruitment. A seamless process in one place,” Walia said.

“With Ikonwork, we are pleased to launch yet another first. It never gets old to say that. We are pleased to launch Jamaica’s first professional social networking platform that provides people with an opportunity to make new business connections, and for employers, an applicant tracking system that helps you find the best employees in record time. While this is revolutionary in the Jamaican human-resource market. This is just the beginning for us,” he said.

Ikonwork is accessed through the web link https://www.ikonwork.com/, which now allows users to search and post job advertisements in categories such as banking and finance, customer service, call centres, BPOs, construction, architecture, property, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, health, wellness, fitness, information technology, wholesale trade, warehousing, and facility-management services.

Users are now also able to create their own account on Ikonwork and upload their résumés while widening their professional reach.

See related story on A3.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com