Yakesh joined Jacobs Capital in 2012 and is currently responsible for overseeing employee relations within the Jacobs Capital investment portfolio. The Group’s payroll, employee remuneration and benefits portfolio are just some of his duties as Executive Manager. Other duties include the management of employee relations, policy formulation and reviews, legal compliance, conditions of service, CCMA, bargaining council and Labour Court referrals. Yakesh also leads the recruitment, talent retention and succession planning programmes for the Group.

During his year as a Employee Relations Specialist at Edcon, Yakesh adjudicated disciplinary hearings and drafted findings and sanctions in all of Edcon’s South African territories. He also reviewed enquiries and presided over grievances while ensuring that all procedures ran in accordance within prevailing employment law. He also represented the company at the CCMA, analysed labour trends, drafted recommendations on labour disputes, conducted strategic planning and trained line managers on employment law.

His 3 year tenure as a Human Resources Business Partner, saw Yakesh take on the role of business partner to the operations and shared services teams. He was heavily involved in strategy and developing new solutions to increase business competitiveness and implement cutting-edge people management practices to achieve goals within the Group strategy. He was also involved in business relationship management and networking and delivered HR advisory services both internally and externally. His involvement also extended into budget and financial management and service delivery innovations.

Yakesh joined the South African Police Services in the capacity of an Intern Psychologist working within the Employee Wellness division. His scope of service included the provision of highly specialised psychological interventions including trauma debriefing, target selections, assessment centres and psychometric testing and training for members of the service. His expertise was thereafter deployed to form part of a task team involved in leave and ill health management of the Human Resources Division. Such task team sought to review the existing leave and ill health procedures of the Police Services and implement controls in line with employment legislation. The highlights of this intervention was an almost 30% reduction in sick leave abuse across the greater Durban North district, and thereafter a National roll out of the programme in all provinces. The team’s strategy and methodology was vindicated on numerous occasions by the South African Courts.Yakesh was subsequently promoted to the head up the Career Management Division of the Protection and Security Services Division. The Protection and Security Services Division mandate is to minimize threat violations by protecting foreign and local high value persons and securing State Strategic interests. Yakesh guided the team to set up the department structures and protocols, which oversaw the management of optimal manpower utilization with the department to execute the Strategic Objectives of State Security.