The coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed and added pace to the transformation of a lot of processes, including the way data is being valued, managed and absorbed. Technology ventures and their solutions have come to the fore when it comes to access to accurate and reliable resources on digital platforms, including for those seeking a job or an employee.

Looking for a job or employees? A new generation Turkish human resources application has managed to make a name for itself when it comes to an easy and fast solution for such a search.

Bonded: 24 Saatte Iş (Job in 24 hours) is a digital marketplace that says has revolutionized the way people find a job and companies hire.

Founded in 2017 by Gizem Yasa and Mert Yıldız, Bonded incorporates 4 million candidates and 160,000 companies. It says it has enabled more than 500,000 candidates to find a job over the last five years. One of the online platform’s most important features is the fact that it guarantees candidates a reply to their job applications within 24 hours.

It eliminates uncertain processes and makes the job search procedures practical and enjoyable. Candidates can apply for the nearest and most appropriate jobs with a profile they can fill out in a minute without creating a CV. For their part, employers can immediately evaluate the applications and start interviews.

The company in late June expanded to Mexico under Bonded Busco Chamba brand, becoming the first Turkish new generation advertisement platform to launch abroad. It is now gearing up to open to other Latin American countries as well. Yasa and Yıldız are running the operations abroad through a rotating leadership.

White collars work remotely

Remote work has become the most important transformation in the lives of white-collar employees, Yıldız says, stressing that personal and professional life balances have changed.

"The opportunity to work remotely has started to be seen as a status symbol," he said. "Young people who are new to business demand this as a prerequisite. Families and those with children are similarly very satisfied. However, it is not yet clear how remote work will affect productivity in the future."

On the other hand, he cited the ever-intensifying global effects of the spread of remote work.

"Companies in high-income countries (U.S., EU) have now begun to hand over many jobs to employees in low-income countries. This trend, which used to cover mostly the software sector, is now valid for all sectors. This will lead to an increase in unemployment in developed countries. But it will also put upward pressure on wages and inflation in developing countries," Yıldız noted.

Finally, he said, this is bad news for young people who want to work abroad as a white collar. "Because many companies know that they can hire the same employees without obtaining a visa or relocating."

Changing jobs in 41 days

On the blue-collar side, Yıldız pointed out that the biggest effect of the pandemic was the increase in circulation. He emphasized that the employee circulation, which stood at 169 days on average in Türkiye before the pandemic, decreased to 41 in the aftermath.

Yıldız said that blue-collar employees see all kinds of work as temporary.

"The fact that each job is offered with more or less the same wage, and that the quality of the work done is similar, also contributes to the employees seeing the job as temporary," he noted.

Hard to find couriers, waiters, dishwashers

Highlighting employee loyalty, Yıldız said: "Human relations always lie at the core of employee loyalty. As long as you value the people you work with, loyalty will be high. The real question here will be ‘how do you show that you care?’ This can be achieved by offering career advancement, rewarding good work done and not being bossy."

He also stated that the two prerequisites of the globally disappearing professions should be that the work should be automized and the cost should be at a reasonable level.

"Every profession has a cost of automizing, and if this cost is high, it will not be profitable. At the moment, agency jobs are topping the list of the professions that are disappearing. Companies that carry out these intermediary activities have difficulty in standing especially against the digital competition," he noted.

"In the past, you used to buy your flight ticket from your travel agency, but now you buy it directly from the internet. Apart from this, many professions (such as cashiers) are disappearing in the banking sector. The industry is always at the top of the sectors where it is most difficult to find workers. Positions such as machinists and CNC operators are always open, and the wages are always very high. Apart from that, it became very difficult to find couriers in the winter and to find waiters and dishwashers in the summer."

Three-step solution for unemployment

Emphasizing that the biggest reason for reprieving young people from entering the labor market is not that they do not want to work, but that they think that they cannot have a job they love and value, Yıldız offered three-step suggestions for the solution of this problem.

"The world of business and education must unite. Business awareness should be developed not only in universities but also at the high school level. The skills that are and will be demanded in the business world should be developed from high school onwards," he said.

"Effective and not long training should be encouraged. Many of our young people find themselves doing irrelevant work after attending university, studying subjects that are not related to the profession and graduating. In fact, those four years in college (which many prolong) are wasted four years. On the other hand, close to half of those who start vocational high schools do not graduate. We should encourage vocational high schools. We should encourage having a profession," he added.

"The importance of having technical skills should be shown at an early age. For the next hundred years, people interested in technical subjects will not be unemployed and will receive much higher wages than non-technical ones. Despite this, in many countries there is still a perception that ‘engineering is studied at university, it is the work of a hardworking student.’ These are extremely wrong perceptions. You don’t have to be an engineer to deal with technical issues. You don’t need to study college to know the software. The important thing is that there is interest in these topics."