The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
DURING a casual conversation with my colleagues one person remarked that it is increasingly becoming difficult to recruit and retain helpers at the farm and even housemaids.
The discussion then narrowed down to the general behaviour of stockman and suggestions were thrown around on how farmers can make sure they have a reliable and committed stock man. This week we will discuss how smallholder livestock farmers can retain and improve their employees’ performance. It is my submission that a good employee is not an accident but a product of a deliberate process of searching and screening during a recruitment process.
This is where most smallholder livestock farmers miss it. You just bump on a guy at the shopping centre and the next thing you are putting him on your lift going to your farm.
There are no preliminary and background checks on the person, neither are there any references. Some do not even look at the national identity document of the chap and it later emerges that actually the name that you knew was not his official one, when he has committed some crime and at times a heinous crime for that matter.
There is a reason why you went through an interview process when you got your own job, why shouldn’t that apply to the person you are recruiting to look after your investment. Smallholder livestock farmers should therefore take time to assess the person they are recruiting so that you satisfy yourself and tick all the important boxes about him before you give him charge over your investment.
The assessment should check the following aspects among other things; level of education, criminal record, medical history and social issues. The level of education will help you to know how much of technical responses you can delegate to him and also what level of short courses can you take him for.
The criminal background check is important to assess his trustworthiness. It may not be hard core crime but you don’t want to employ a person who has a history of selling veterinary drugs and stock feed to neighbours because that problem will resurface at your farm and it can be costly.
Medical history records are important so that you provide the necessary support to the person if it’s something you can manage. This is also done to gauge if his medical condition permits that he can do the type of work you want him to do. In some cases the person may be suffering from some mental health problem and this can be a challenge depending on the gravity of the condition.
His social attributes are also very important and need to be verified. You don’t want to employ a bully who will start terrorising everyone in the village and you become a regular at the village court because every time there is one crime or another that he has committed.
We also hear of stockmen who have raped a neighbour’s daughter or worse still a daughter of the employer. While rapists have no identity marks, screening for social disorders could pick some undesirable attributes of the person.
Having highlighted all the above, it is important to point out that it’s not exactly easy to do the background checks and screening of such employees because half the time they come from remote areas of rural districts where we have no contacts for reference checks. One wishes there was an organisation that does this kind of checking and profiling of such level of staff. Then one could just walk into an office, get an already processed person from the database. May be it’s a business idea one enterprising youth can adopt.
Creating a database of properly screened and referenced farm labourers from which smallholder livestock farmers can just walk in and make a selection from an existing pool.
It is often sad when a livestock farmer is left nursing criminal wounds inflicted by his stockman who has vanished into space because the farmer himself had no adequate information about the employee.
I know of a case where a stockman had moved from one homestead to another in neighbouring villages as farmers took turns to employ him. After moving to about three homesteads over a period of two years, no one cared to check the origins of the young man as he was now well known in the village.
It was only discovered that no one knew his place of origin, not even the very first employer, when he had snared a fellow villager’s animal and he was now wanted by the police.
He vanished into space and no one could provide any useful information regarding his place of origin.
It is therefore important as livestock farmers to have comprehensive information about our stockman to avoid similar situations. Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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