German-backed online job recruitment portal Everjobs officially announced plans yesterday to conduct its first career fair in Cambodia. The company, which entered into Cambodia a year ago, joins the ranks of numerous online job portals aiming to dominate the recruitment market.

Aside from the career fair scheduled for June 25, Everjobs claims that it is unique in comparison to other online job recruitment platforms. “We try to simplify the search and the way you can register on our platform,” said Gijs Braakman, marketing, communications and PR manager for Everjobs Cambodia.

“Though we don’t want to say anything bad about our competitors, what we have objectively seen is that where we are growing, the rest of the companies have stagnated,” Braakman said, referring to the fact that Everjobs offers step-by-step training to help job seekers build their portfolio, market themselves, and prepare for job interviews.

According to the company, the Everjobs website gets 4,500 hits per day, and has a database of more than 19,000 CVs with over 900 listed employers. Sandra Dámico, managing director of HRINC job recruitment agency, said that online job portals are important for job seekers to access companies and market information.

“If you’re sitting in a province somewhere and you don’t know what all the companies in Cambodia are, a job portal can certainly help you to understand the labour market and understand the opportunities,” she said.

But as the online portal competition grows with foreign companies trying to tap into Cambodia’s young demographics, Kevin Britten, managing director of Top Recruitment Cambodia, said that most employers looking for senior level candidates to fill middle- to high-level positions prefer to use standard recruitment agencies.

“We see companies come in, contact us about our fee and service, load up a whole lot of jobs onto online job boards and then call us back three weeks to a month later because they have not found what they are looking for,” he said.

Britten explained that the reason for this is because entry-level job seekers upload their CV to every position advertised, which only causes a headache for employers.

He claims that more experienced professionals prefer to develop a personal relationship with recruitment services.

“Cambodians have a lower level of trust in people until they build a relationship, which means the best Cambodian candidates won’t send their CV to a job board because they don’t know who is on the other end of that email address,” Britten said.