No pun intended in this title - my firm are actually looking for a few eRecruitment Gurus and I thought it would be silly not to mention it here on my blog.
I am always keen to hear from people in the ercruitment technology industry so if you've got industry experience and fancy a challenging role based in Dubai then contact me at work on:
ben DOT fawcett AT thscompany DOT com
The link for the jobs is as follows:
http://hsc.sniperhire.net
We're looking to hire people in marketing, sales, technology and customer support. Aside from the technology roles (which are getting much harder to hire by the way) you have to have experience in corporate recruitment (client side) or with another eRecruitment provider.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Dr Lien's Talent Management Conundrum
I attended an interesting lecture last night at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. Their Associate Professor in Human Resources Management, Dr Lien Els, gave a great presentation debating what is 'talent', and how do you harness it.
One of her great points I thought was that you should not plan to keep talent. You can't keep or restrain talent. Talent moves on or leaves. You should plan how you intend to retain talent as long as possible and that all comes down to what you'll let them do whilst they're with your firm. To retain talent, she argued, the role should be wide open and not a tightly defined job description. Talent needs to feel as though they are constantly growing, or at least have the room to grow into at all times.
Another good observation in my opinion was that most HR professionals tend to think of talent management primarily as sourcing/recruitment, and as a result of that, it is easy to neglect the talent that may already exist within an organisation.
All quite heady stuff. If you want to know more about their research events then see the following link: http://www.uowdubai.ac.ae/research/
Job site Search Engines
Essential for those looking to quickly find jobseekers via the Net. However I have a small gripe this week with a couple of job sites who have overlooked the basic model of a search engine. You have to be able to find something using it!
Sounds simple, and it is for the majority. However a client asked us to integrate our recruiting technology this week to a new South African job site which has lots of IT jobs on it and is popular. Now if you visit the site and search 'all' vacancies, which I would think 2 out of 5 visitors would do when they reach the homepage, the search doesn't work. At best it retrieves a dozen jobs; when there are actually hundreds posted.
This isn't the only site who has not yet made a brilliant job of making job searching easy. I don't know whether in this case the site have put a restriction on the site because their servers can't handle retrieving hundreds of records at a time, but either way I think job sites should be audited by an independent body to make sure that employer advertising bucks are being spent in places that will actually yield candidates for them.
One of her great points I thought was that you should not plan to keep talent. You can't keep or restrain talent. Talent moves on or leaves. You should plan how you intend to retain talent as long as possible and that all comes down to what you'll let them do whilst they're with your firm. To retain talent, she argued, the role should be wide open and not a tightly defined job description. Talent needs to feel as though they are constantly growing, or at least have the room to grow into at all times.
Another good observation in my opinion was that most HR professionals tend to think of talent management primarily as sourcing/recruitment, and as a result of that, it is easy to neglect the talent that may already exist within an organisation.
All quite heady stuff. If you want to know more about their research events then see the following link: http://www.uowdubai.ac.ae/research/
Job site Search Engines
Essential for those looking to quickly find jobseekers via the Net. However I have a small gripe this week with a couple of job sites who have overlooked the basic model of a search engine. You have to be able to find something using it!
Sounds simple, and it is for the majority. However a client asked us to integrate our recruiting technology this week to a new South African job site which has lots of IT jobs on it and is popular. Now if you visit the site and search 'all' vacancies, which I would think 2 out of 5 visitors would do when they reach the homepage, the search doesn't work. At best it retrieves a dozen jobs; when there are actually hundreds posted.
This isn't the only site who has not yet made a brilliant job of making job searching easy. I don't know whether in this case the site have put a restriction on the site because their servers can't handle retrieving hundreds of records at a time, but either way I think job sites should be audited by an independent body to make sure that employer advertising bucks are being spent in places that will actually yield candidates for them.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Chief Talent Sourcer?
I must admit I had been struggling to chose a topic to post about this week. Not that it hasn't been a busy period, just nothing inspirational to go on about here.
However, after several meetings with clients from all different sectors, I realised that hardly anybody gets the whole talent pooling/sourcing thing.
You may have read in an earlier post when I talked about receiving an email from Electronic Arts asking me to apply or refer games software engineers to them. The mail came from a lady in the US whose job title was Senior Talent Resourcer. I'll come back to that in a second.
In every single meeting I attended this week in Dubai, I heard the same cry - "we've just lost a key recruiting resource, and we can't find a replacement - do you know anyone?"
Well it's easy to say and hard to do, but it's too late because they've left already and now you're hurting. People leave firms, that can't be avoided entirely. But given that we know that to be true, it suprises me that no companies are identifying replacements before staff resign.
The point of developing a talent pool is to create a pipeline of qualified, interested, screened potential hires. All that recruiting technolgy has done is made that all far more possible.
I think Recruitment departments, especially in growing competitive markets/times should consider having a separate person or team, who doesn't hire against open vacancies, but rather develops pools of potential hires who can be interviewed and offered jobs within 3-5 days of a resignation.
Your Chief Talent Sourcer or Scouts should have their own marketing budget, and be able to make use of the corporate recruiting technology, they should perhaps have their own special area on the careers portal. They need to have some tools and skills to communicate individually and en-masse to groups of target hires. They need to predict where it will hurt the company most if people leave - and build relationships with potential replacements on a daily basis.
Think about it, okay you've still got notice periods and bedding-in periods, but the Talent Scout could save millions of dollars each year in lost revenue, speed up time to market from R&D, retained customers, etc.
The time to hire or gap between hires is extremely costly, but still companies only (manpower) plan and have strategies/suppliers in place to fill new hire roles.
The way the web is used to communicate and the tools available to find and meet qualified professionals out there on the Net - I think this key hiring role is going to become a must for major employers across the Middle East markets today.
If any of you are in a pre-emptive talent sourcing role then perhaps you could share a few tricks that you use with us here on my blog..
Ben.
However, after several meetings with clients from all different sectors, I realised that hardly anybody gets the whole talent pooling/sourcing thing.
You may have read in an earlier post when I talked about receiving an email from Electronic Arts asking me to apply or refer games software engineers to them. The mail came from a lady in the US whose job title was Senior Talent Resourcer. I'll come back to that in a second.
In every single meeting I attended this week in Dubai, I heard the same cry - "we've just lost a key recruiting resource, and we can't find a replacement - do you know anyone?"
Well it's easy to say and hard to do, but it's too late because they've left already and now you're hurting. People leave firms, that can't be avoided entirely. But given that we know that to be true, it suprises me that no companies are identifying replacements before staff resign.
The point of developing a talent pool is to create a pipeline of qualified, interested, screened potential hires. All that recruiting technolgy has done is made that all far more possible.
I think Recruitment departments, especially in growing competitive markets/times should consider having a separate person or team, who doesn't hire against open vacancies, but rather develops pools of potential hires who can be interviewed and offered jobs within 3-5 days of a resignation.
Your Chief Talent Sourcer or Scouts should have their own marketing budget, and be able to make use of the corporate recruiting technology, they should perhaps have their own special area on the careers portal. They need to have some tools and skills to communicate individually and en-masse to groups of target hires. They need to predict where it will hurt the company most if people leave - and build relationships with potential replacements on a daily basis.
Think about it, okay you've still got notice periods and bedding-in periods, but the Talent Scout could save millions of dollars each year in lost revenue, speed up time to market from R&D, retained customers, etc.
The time to hire or gap between hires is extremely costly, but still companies only (manpower) plan and have strategies/suppliers in place to fill new hire roles.
The way the web is used to communicate and the tools available to find and meet qualified professionals out there on the Net - I think this key hiring role is going to become a must for major employers across the Middle East markets today.
If any of you are in a pre-emptive talent sourcing role then perhaps you could share a few tricks that you use with us here on my blog..
Ben.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Changes to my blog
Those of you who've tuned into my new blog before will have already noticed the new design - hope you approve and find it easier to use. I had been asked to play around with the html by a couple of people, so here you go..
Another change I'm looking into is having a few guest writers posting to my blog from time to time, so that we can get a broader view of eRecruitment technology and activities from around the region. Once I've worked out which way to go on this, and how to go about it, I'll let you know what to expect.
Ben,
Another change I'm looking into is having a few guest writers posting to my blog from time to time, so that we can get a broader view of eRecruitment technology and activities from around the region. Once I've worked out which way to go on this, and how to go about it, I'll let you know what to expect.
Ben,
Monday, November 13, 2006
What War for Talent?
Over used around the world, the term 'war for talent' is mostly used to describe the situation when recruitment teams within a company start to find it difficult to recruit good people. Of course I would tell them to start using the tools available out there to hire smarter, and to leverage the Internet better; and more that below. However, the market in the Middle East
hasn't generally understood what a WAR for talent is really about. It is more competitive today in the region and it is hard to recruit good people; especially as the booming economy means that there are 10 competitors out there searching for the same CV's. But that isn't war, that's just making it harder and longer to find people to work for you.
War has been declared!
Well things have changed now. The front page of the Gulf News this week ran a story describing how a leading investment house in Dubai (Shuaa Capital) lost an entire team of 6 investment executives on the same day. Where they're headed is as yet unknown, but the cost to the company in terms of loss of business, loss of knowledge, and damaged reputation must be immense. All of that, added to the cost and time to replace those people, is serious indeed.
Shareholders, the CEO and the management team will be discussing this in great detail that's for sure. Recruiting at Shuaa is undoubtedly a strategic issue this week. It seems highly likely that the entire team will turn up at work as a new team for a direct competitor, and will start work on building wealth for a new employer.
This was a smart move in many ways, and the practice of team recruiting is not new to the world of finance and technology - it happens every couple of years in financial centres such as London and New York. It happened in the 1980's when Sony, IBM, Lucent and others all wanted smart engineers to design the next supercomputer. It is new though to the Middle East.
When you are competing for something and you really want to win, as in War, you have to have some aggressive strategies. You have to try to hurt your competition whilst helping yourself. Companies relying on old school recruiting strategies are now going to start really feeling the pain, as a few of their competitors have declared war on them.
A local example of note was when I heard that Qatar Airways and Gulf Air were both scheduling interviews within a couple of days of each other in the same city. When they turned up to hold the interviews the hotel staff told them that Emirates had been in two days previously and hired everybody already.
Somehow Emirates got hold of some information about a competitors recruiting plans, and they had the ability to respond very quickly to gain an advantage.
Corporate recruiting in the MENA markets has already got very tough in retail, financial, hospitality and construction sectors - basically anything with an element of service or knowledge. It is now hitting the very specialist roles as there are more opportunities out there for skilled professionals to consider.
So what other aggressive tactics can we expect to see?
Car park canvassing? - Don't be shocked if your competitors recruiters are approaching your staff wherever they hang out or work. If you have people who are in demand, then expect the opposition to approach them.
Blogs & Social Networking sites - the Internet offer so many ways to find and contact people, even if they don't want to be found. Many companies embracing the Internet to recruit staff now are realising just how much potential there is to cut out the third party sourcing agencies and their high placement fees.
Email/letter campaigns/viral networking - I received a chance email from the head of staffing for Electronic Arts (of EA Sports fame if you've ever played a 'Sony PlayStation') just a week ago asking if I wanted to work for them or could refer them any good software engineers. Now they got it wrong as I am not a software engineer, but I did refer them to two people in the games software market. Why, because I have a great feeling about EA as a company, and if I were an engineer I would like to work with them.
Star hiring - this is where a firm hire a key employee from a rival without necessarily having a vacant role for that person. They are worth hiring to add value to your talent pool and to hurt the competition.
Great place to work employer branding - All of my clients in the eRecruitment arena right now are working hard to improve their external careers brand and to attract higher volumes of qualified applicants to their careers portals. The portals we're being asked to design are having to offer high levels of interactivity with jobseekers, and create differentiation for the employer.
If you have any comments to add about aggressive tactics you have seen, or even better - are deploying yourselves, I'd be interested to see your thoughts on this topic.
Regards, Ben F.
hasn't generally understood what a WAR for talent is really about. It is more competitive today in the region and it is hard to recruit good people; especially as the booming economy means that there are 10 competitors out there searching for the same CV's. But that isn't war, that's just making it harder and longer to find people to work for you.
War has been declared!
Well things have changed now. The front page of the Gulf News this week ran a story describing how a leading investment house in Dubai (Shuaa Capital) lost an entire team of 6 investment executives on the same day. Where they're headed is as yet unknown, but the cost to the company in terms of loss of business, loss of knowledge, and damaged reputation must be immense. All of that, added to the cost and time to replace those people, is serious indeed.
Shareholders, the CEO and the management team will be discussing this in great detail that's for sure. Recruiting at Shuaa is undoubtedly a strategic issue this week. It seems highly likely that the entire team will turn up at work as a new team for a direct competitor, and will start work on building wealth for a new employer.
This was a smart move in many ways, and the practice of team recruiting is not new to the world of finance and technology - it happens every couple of years in financial centres such as London and New York. It happened in the 1980's when Sony, IBM, Lucent and others all wanted smart engineers to design the next supercomputer. It is new though to the Middle East.
When you are competing for something and you really want to win, as in War, you have to have some aggressive strategies. You have to try to hurt your competition whilst helping yourself. Companies relying on old school recruiting strategies are now going to start really feeling the pain, as a few of their competitors have declared war on them.
A local example of note was when I heard that Qatar Airways and Gulf Air were both scheduling interviews within a couple of days of each other in the same city. When they turned up to hold the interviews the hotel staff told them that Emirates had been in two days previously and hired everybody already.
Somehow Emirates got hold of some information about a competitors recruiting plans, and they had the ability to respond very quickly to gain an advantage.
Corporate recruiting in the MENA markets has already got very tough in retail, financial, hospitality and construction sectors - basically anything with an element of service or knowledge. It is now hitting the very specialist roles as there are more opportunities out there for skilled professionals to consider.
So what other aggressive tactics can we expect to see?
Car park canvassing? - Don't be shocked if your competitors recruiters are approaching your staff wherever they hang out or work. If you have people who are in demand, then expect the opposition to approach them.
Blogs & Social Networking sites - the Internet offer so many ways to find and contact people, even if they don't want to be found. Many companies embracing the Internet to recruit staff now are realising just how much potential there is to cut out the third party sourcing agencies and their high placement fees.
Email/letter campaigns/viral networking - I received a chance email from the head of staffing for Electronic Arts (of EA Sports fame if you've ever played a 'Sony PlayStation') just a week ago asking if I wanted to work for them or could refer them any good software engineers. Now they got it wrong as I am not a software engineer, but I did refer them to two people in the games software market. Why, because I have a great feeling about EA as a company, and if I were an engineer I would like to work with them.
Star hiring - this is where a firm hire a key employee from a rival without necessarily having a vacant role for that person. They are worth hiring to add value to your talent pool and to hurt the competition.
Great place to work employer branding - All of my clients in the eRecruitment arena right now are working hard to improve their external careers brand and to attract higher volumes of qualified applicants to their careers portals. The portals we're being asked to design are having to offer high levels of interactivity with jobseekers, and create differentiation for the employer.
If you have any comments to add about aggressive tactics you have seen, or even better - are deploying yourselves, I'd be interested to see your thoughts on this topic.
Regards, Ben F.
Human Capital Conference @ JW Marriott Dubai
Just a quick note about the conference last week. Thank you to the hundred or so HR professionals that participated and made it such an enjoyable couple of days. If you missed it, we had great presentations from FedEx, GE, Microsoft, Motorola and others talking about strategies for success in Human Capital for the MENA region. There were also dozens of 1-on-1 solution provider meetings to see how we could add value in terms of eRecruitment technology, career portals and job-board posting.
Naseba did a great job of running the conference - so a big thank you to them.
If you weren't able to attend, but want to see any of the presentations from the conference then feel free to get in touch.
Naseba did a great job of running the conference - so a big thank you to them.
If you weren't able to attend, but want to see any of the presentations from the conference then feel free to get in touch.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
SAP Portal for MEA
Unlike many of my posts, this is a short blog update. Atos Origin Middle East have just launched the following careers portal to attract fresh SAP skills into the region.
http://careers.atosorigin-me.com/
The site is going to be advertising on worldwide IT job boards so should see a lot of traffic. Good luck with the initiative Atos!
http://careers.atosorigin-me.com/
The site is going to be advertising on worldwide IT job boards so should see a lot of traffic. Good luck with the initiative Atos!
Goldmine Recruitment & Creating jobs for women in Saudi
A couple of weeks back from the week in Saudi, and I'm sat in the airport on the way to Kuwait to run some eRecruitment strategy workshops with a couple of banks. I spent much of this week with an HR leader who has worked with Saudi Aramco (60,000 employee oil major based in the Eastern Province of Saudi). He has spent the last 20 years in human resources with Aramco so knows a thing or two. It was a little suprising to hear just how difficult even this company find it to hire the right experienced hires and to attract national graduates. Aramco is a company that 5 years ago or more, forced all their suppliers to be 'Internet ready' and where possible to make orders, provide documentation and respond to tenders all via the Net. Alarming then that Job Descriptions were not common practice until very recently.
So, what happened at the HR Conference we ran in Riyadh then..? I promised to write about the event so here we go..The attendance and response was pleasing, with around 50 HR Directors gathered in the Sheraton conferecne centre to listen to a great speaker who flew in from Abu Dhabi. Omar is an HR Veteran and shared thoughts and experiences on 360 degree reviews, and tapped his experience of having done this in a company in Abu Dhabi that controls 10% of the worlds oil reserves. It was a 3 year project but the results were impressive and 10 years on it is still clear to see how it continues to improve the business performance and attitudes of employees.
Speaker aside, the rest of the event was about networking and discussing today's hot recruiting topics in Saudi Arabia with dozens of the guys responsible for their companies people management issues. I spoke with a CEO of a mining company who employ over 5,000 people; and after 4 years in the job he was explaining how they still can't get recruitment right. For skilled workforce it takes them an average 18 weeks to recruit, and even then they have to compromise on quality. We discussed the need for his company to have a complete recruiting 'make over' and to create an attractive employment brand. They've played with the hiring process already, but haven't tried anything radically different to attract people differently, or to interact with them in a different way once they've applied. Employer branding is key for them as they are a really interesting career choice and have so much to offer, but nobody knows about it and just thinks of them as a heavy industry minerals producer. True enough, but they're massively profitable, invest heavily in staff, have a massive supply chain and can offer a diversity of experience few companies can match. Here's some of the specifics the CEO liked the sound of and decided to try out at his firm:
Uni Reach out campaign - also known as a 'milk-round', they'll basically go to UNiversities in target locations and schools related to their industry, and have an Exceutive talk to the student body about the company and the kinds of career paths they offer. Success here would be measured by an increase in graduate applications and by the company hiring a better quality of graduate than before.
Interview skills - They're going to reduce the number of people who hold interviews, and train them in how to communicate the company values properly to jobseekers. The company has a high turnover rate, and there's a likelihood that the wrong people are being hired in the first place and that they don't really understand the company before they join - therefore it isn't that shocking that a portion of new hires leave within 6 months.
Induction/Orientation - Linked to the above, we discussed introducing some simple things such as assigning a work colleague to each new hire to help them settle into the company and tackle their concerns. They're also planning to introduce better induction materials to people along with offer letters, so that they can know what to expect. The CEO then suggested that they could create a 1 page "First 30 days" fact sheet which will be given to all new hires once they've signed their offer letters. These files are all going to be made available over the Internet so that overseas candidates can get access to the materials very quickly.
Image Gallery - To let potential hires 'feel' the work environment we discussed that it'd be a great idea to have some web pages describing the work culture, and images to show their offices and manufacturing locations. I can see how a diamond field, a lab technician at work, or a picture of an engineer placing explosives into a hole to blow open a pit wall; could really show jobseekers the opoortunities.
Another interesting topic that sticks in my mind was that of creating work opportunities for females in Saudi Arabia. Jeddah (Western Province of Saudi) has taken the lead in this regard but there is still a long way to go. I still find it strange hosting a conference or presentation in Saudi; where the attendance is great but there is not a single female in the audience. Don't forget this was in the Sheraton hotel, and all the staff helping run the conference, receive guests, run the restaurant - everybody, every conference delegate or hotel employee was male.
I discussed this with an HR Director from a Government authority involved in developing the national labour force for employment. He explained that efforts are being made, and many businesswomen are frustrated with the obstacles they face regarding investments or jobs. Transportation is an obvious problem as women aren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia - so getting to work is often prohibitive to applying for a job even if the job was open to female applicants. The Human Resource Development Fund and the National System for Joint Training Program are working hard to remove the barriers, and I'll write about equal opportunities and any major ground made on this topic as and when I hear about significant progress.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
My week in Riyadh (and a Dinner with Recruiters)
Well the intention of my blog is to share my views and experiences of recruitment and recruitment technology from the Middle East and surrounding markets - and this week I'm in Saudi Arabia and hope to have some interesting stories to share by Thursday. I arrived last night into Riyadh and am hosting a dinner at the Sheraton which is being attended by dozens of human resource professionals.
For those who have never been to Saudi, it boasts huge natural resources, and not just oil although it does account for 45% of GDP. Here are a few facts about Saudi Arabia with regards to human resources and why recruitment and retention are huge issues in Saudi :
Companies are really struggling to compete for talent, and jobsites and how to leverage technology to recruit better and faster, are top of mind for HR.
I remember years ago when the Aramco (the largest oil firm) opened a recruiting office in North America simply to meet and greet potential hires, primarily experienced oil engineers. They were also able to deal with key recruiting suppliers more readily. Now companies have realised that the Internet creates a level playing field; and those same advantages can be realised by having a decent website and some smart recruiters behind it.
I'm really looking forward to the event and will be back at the end of the week with feedback.
Ben,
If you want to read about or attend our Riyadh event tomorrow night, then here's the link:
The Hiring Solutions Company KSA is honored to invite you to a very special Iftar Dinner to be held at the Sheraton Riyadh ...more
For those who have never been to Saudi, it boasts huge natural resources, and not just oil although it does account for 45% of GDP. Here are a few facts about Saudi Arabia with regards to human resources and why recruitment and retention are huge issues in Saudi :
- Saudi boasts a population of 27M, with 5.5M expatriate labour force, and a growing economy. The total workforce is approximately 6.7M.
- The Saudi male unemployment rate is 13%, some estimates range as high 25%. There are no figures available for females.
- Literacy is high and 85% male literacy, 71% female literacy, and females entering the working population is now becoming a more accepted practice.
Companies are really struggling to compete for talent, and jobsites and how to leverage technology to recruit better and faster, are top of mind for HR.
I remember years ago when the Aramco (the largest oil firm) opened a recruiting office in North America simply to meet and greet potential hires, primarily experienced oil engineers. They were also able to deal with key recruiting suppliers more readily. Now companies have realised that the Internet creates a level playing field; and those same advantages can be realised by having a decent website and some smart recruiters behind it.
I'm really looking forward to the event and will be back at the end of the week with feedback.
Ben,
If you want to read about or attend our Riyadh event tomorrow night, then here's the link:
The Hiring Solutions Company KSA is honored to invite you to a very special Iftar Dinner to be held at the Sheraton Riyadh ...more
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Recruiting Brain Drain in Dubai - Evolution or Revolt?
Dubai policy makers introduced a law this year stating that all Human Resource Management roles must be held by a local National within 18 months. The spirit being that private companies must do more to train and develop UAE nationals in the HR field.
Sound in principle, except for the thousands of expatriates that will be out of work perhaps. I must admit I thought that we'd just see expat HR folk having their job titles changed to 'Advisor' (to the HR Manager). That is what has happened in other GCC states such as Oman and Qatar.
To aid the process the government have set up new departments to help drive the change and the required development, such as the Dubai Institute for Human Resource Development (DIHRD), and Tanmia are involved also.
Even though the cut off date for compliance is not until December 2007, already the effects are being felt. A well thought of Human Resources Director in Dubai resigned from his post as he faces the prospect of being replaced in January 2007. He felt the Ministry were being too vague abot the law and constantly moving the goal posts. Mainly as the HR professional in question didn't want to be on the jobmarket at the same time as 1000's of peers, he took the bold move of resigning his post.
His choices now are to become self-employed, move to another country, join a company in a free-zone, or to become a consultant.
I believe the logic is that companies with a UAE national HR leader are more likely to hire more UAE nationals, develop them. I also think the private sector is slightly to blame as had they done more to hire and develop national youth talent across the board, then this targeted change on one sector might not have been so dramatic. Only time will tell if the changes will be good for the economy, but I can't help feeling sorry for families who have move to this country and invested here; with their careers and their cash or savings.
The wider Middle East region will certainly benefit as many expereienced HR pro's will now be looking for employment outside of the UAE.
An article on te specific law changes and quotes can be found through the following press link:
http://www.gulfnews.com/indepth/labour/Emiritisation/10049590.html
eRecruitment Workshops for UAE National HR Folk
From my end, we've started educational seminars free to Emirati HR professionals to gain knowledge about best practice recruitment and to discuss regional/global trends in how companies are using the Internet and leveraging technology to benefit their HR strategies.
Initial response to the workshops has been very good. As the objective is closely in line with the Dubai governments own plans to develop HR knowledge amongst UAE natioanls, I did meet with the above mentioned DIHRD to see if they wanted to be involved in any way. It's been a month since our meeting and they're yet to reply; so that doesn't fill me with confidence in their understanding of the issues or the reality of the private sector. Never mind.
If you or a colleague are keen to join one of upcoming eRecruitment workshops in Dubai then please get in touch as you're more than welcome to join in. We're proud to be shaping the way people hire and in how the Internet is making recruitment add more value to the corporation.
Sound in principle, except for the thousands of expatriates that will be out of work perhaps. I must admit I thought that we'd just see expat HR folk having their job titles changed to 'Advisor' (to the HR Manager). That is what has happened in other GCC states such as Oman and Qatar.
To aid the process the government have set up new departments to help drive the change and the required development, such as the Dubai Institute for Human Resource Development (DIHRD), and Tanmia are involved also.
Even though the cut off date for compliance is not until December 2007, already the effects are being felt. A well thought of Human Resources Director in Dubai resigned from his post as he faces the prospect of being replaced in January 2007. He felt the Ministry were being too vague abot the law and constantly moving the goal posts. Mainly as the HR professional in question didn't want to be on the jobmarket at the same time as 1000's of peers, he took the bold move of resigning his post.
His choices now are to become self-employed, move to another country, join a company in a free-zone, or to become a consultant.
I believe the logic is that companies with a UAE national HR leader are more likely to hire more UAE nationals, develop them. I also think the private sector is slightly to blame as had they done more to hire and develop national youth talent across the board, then this targeted change on one sector might not have been so dramatic. Only time will tell if the changes will be good for the economy, but I can't help feeling sorry for families who have move to this country and invested here; with their careers and their cash or savings.
The wider Middle East region will certainly benefit as many expereienced HR pro's will now be looking for employment outside of the UAE.
An article on te specific law changes and quotes can be found through the following press link:
http://www.gulfnews.com/indepth/labour/Emiritisation/10049590.html
eRecruitment Workshops for UAE National HR Folk
From my end, we've started educational seminars free to Emirati HR professionals to gain knowledge about best practice recruitment and to discuss regional/global trends in how companies are using the Internet and leveraging technology to benefit their HR strategies.
Initial response to the workshops has been very good. As the objective is closely in line with the Dubai governments own plans to develop HR knowledge amongst UAE natioanls, I did meet with the above mentioned DIHRD to see if they wanted to be involved in any way. It's been a month since our meeting and they're yet to reply; so that doesn't fill me with confidence in their understanding of the issues or the reality of the private sector. Never mind.
If you or a colleague are keen to join one of upcoming eRecruitment workshops in Dubai then please get in touch as you're more than welcome to join in. We're proud to be shaping the way people hire and in how the Internet is making recruitment add more value to the corporation.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Career Site Branding - does it really count?
Career branding or positioning is so critical today as recruiting has become global for all but the smallest firms. The last hires for my own company have come from the UK and Egypt, with candidates in the Far East and South Africa having been closely considered.
Career branding is however difficult for many companies to get their heads around. Recruiters to continue to spend many thousands of dollars on advertising for specific jobs, but little effort or budget goes to advertising the career brand or company career site.
One of the worlds largest recruitment networks (Reed) have just published results of a survey of 2,500 graduate jobseekers. The results should alarm the majority of companies in the Middle East and Africa as over a third actively switched brand loyalty (stopped buying your products!!) following a negative experience while applying for a job with that brand. When you think about it graduates are not the most fussy when it comes to brands, however they would most likely apply for work with brands that they previously admired or used. So for them to switch due to a bad candidate experience shows you just how bad some companies are at recruiting and that it costs them lost sales.
Worrying for the Recruitment Departments out there, the research revealed that 22% had turned down a job offer because they had been put off by an organisation's behaviour during the recruitment process.
Just to counter this and let you know how much a positive career brand can pull good candidates to your company, one of our clients who's career site is www.kojcareers.com received over 30,000 visitors in August 2006, and had in the region of 70 jobs posted at the time. They ensure the candidate experience is so well taken care of, and their brand well represented that they receive an average of 400 jobseekers per job with minimal advertising.
I am awaiting stats from their HR department on how much the quality (sales performance numbers) of their hires have increased which I'll write about later, but I would also wager that KOJ have received a few new customers into their retail stores as a result of how they handle recruitment.
Career branding is however difficult for many companies to get their heads around. Recruiters to continue to spend many thousands of dollars on advertising for specific jobs, but little effort or budget goes to advertising the career brand or company career site.
One of the worlds largest recruitment networks (Reed) have just published results of a survey of 2,500 graduate jobseekers. The results should alarm the majority of companies in the Middle East and Africa as over a third actively switched brand loyalty (stopped buying your products!!) following a negative experience while applying for a job with that brand. When you think about it graduates are not the most fussy when it comes to brands, however they would most likely apply for work with brands that they previously admired or used. So for them to switch due to a bad candidate experience shows you just how bad some companies are at recruiting and that it costs them lost sales.
Worrying for the Recruitment Departments out there, the research revealed that 22% had turned down a job offer because they had been put off by an organisation's behaviour during the recruitment process.
Just to counter this and let you know how much a positive career brand can pull good candidates to your company, one of our clients who's career site is www.kojcareers.com received over 30,000 visitors in August 2006, and had in the region of 70 jobs posted at the time. They ensure the candidate experience is so well taken care of, and their brand well represented that they receive an average of 400 jobseekers per job with minimal advertising.
I am awaiting stats from their HR department on how much the quality (sales performance numbers) of their hires have increased which I'll write about later, but I would also wager that KOJ have received a few new customers into their retail stores as a result of how they handle recruitment.
$100,000 a year and you still lie in your CV?
In the online recruitment industry we're often thrown the line that "People lie when they apply online", or "how can you do psychometric online when you don't know who is filling in the answers".
Well yes it's true, people do extend the truth when applying for jobs, but this has nothing to do with the Internet or online application forms. Shock horror, people that lie can do so by fax, by post, by email and during interviews also.
Anyhow, I have just been discussing this with a Recruiter who pointed out some recent research they had read. Of all applications made by the financial services jobseekers, a worrying 38% of male applicants have at least one major false item on their CV. This is paper CV's and online CV's so the statistic doesn't refer to the method through which the CV were received, just that they lie in them.
Interestingly having a high income bracket doesn't prevent jobseekers from falsifying their career details. The income group with the largest number of discrepancies were earning between $105,000 to $115,000 per annum.
These stats are scary for the Middle East where most major employers and recruitment agencies don't often take up references.
The usual suspects for false info in a CV are; the employment dates, the job title, or levels of responsibility and success people experienced in their previous roles.
Would love to hear from any Recruiters who have caught out any interesting cheats, or any of you who are adopting thorough reference checking in your firms.
Ben
Well yes it's true, people do extend the truth when applying for jobs, but this has nothing to do with the Internet or online application forms. Shock horror, people that lie can do so by fax, by post, by email and during interviews also.
Anyhow, I have just been discussing this with a Recruiter who pointed out some recent research they had read. Of all applications made by the financial services jobseekers, a worrying 38% of male applicants have at least one major false item on their CV. This is paper CV's and online CV's so the statistic doesn't refer to the method through which the CV were received, just that they lie in them.
Interestingly having a high income bracket doesn't prevent jobseekers from falsifying their career details. The income group with the largest number of discrepancies were earning between $105,000 to $115,000 per annum.
These stats are scary for the Middle East where most major employers and recruitment agencies don't often take up references.
The usual suspects for false info in a CV are; the employment dates, the job title, or levels of responsibility and success people experienced in their previous roles.
Would love to hear from any Recruiters who have caught out any interesting cheats, or any of you who are adopting thorough reference checking in your firms.
Ben
Monday, October 02, 2006
8 Link Deep Mining of Google Crawlers
Having been on a wonderful holiday in Spain recently, I am posting today some of the recent happenings I have picked up on online recruiting in Europe, with a view to what that means for the Middle East and Africa.
Firstly, huge areas of Spain have no mobile connection and the Internet goes down when it rains - so just as when the postal system used to deliver letters a week to late - if you are sending offer letters out now via email, it may be worth considering simple back up plans such as sms messages or post/fax; or even copying emails to a private url so candidates can pick up copies of all emails sent to them. We've just provided training of a web based recruitment platform to a client in Sudan in North Africa, and the Internet connection speeds were not fantastic - but certainly good enough to run a business application for recruiting over the Net, and for job applications to be made.
8 Link Deep Mining:
Did you know that the crawlers sent out by search engines like google.com (to search and index every website out there) will literally crawl 8 links (clicks) deep and read all the pages within that reach? There's a catch though, they won't mine or crawl through JavaScript, SO if you have a subset of really interesting pages about what it's like to work for your company on a careers site, or even your jobs listings, if the link to them is a flashy button with JavaScript controls - then they will be invisible to search engine crawlers!!
Why is that so important? Well, if a job description includes the words "Dubai, 777, tax-free and Pilot", somebody could run a yahoo or google search for that exact phrase and your job or jobsite wouldn't even appear. You can see why I thought this was worth a mention, and please make sure you know what you're doing if you're thinking about building a careers portal.
Going back to my first point about candidate communications, I saw from a Guardian newspapers study that 1 in 50 URL's requested by UK employees while at work is a house or job-hunting site. However, of websites requested but blocked by employers, the study showed webmail to be in the top 3. So basically their seems to be a trend of employers blocking access to webmail providers such as hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc. So those of you using recruitment technology which makes it possible to communicate with thousands of candidates in a day and organise mass events such as career fairs or assessment centres at the click of a button - be aware that candidates may not be seeing your emails that quickly. The same can be said of course for jobseekers that use their work email ID's (why would you ever do that, but believe me many do), they can't often access work emails for days on end.
Encouraging applicants to come back to a webpage to see communications, sign up for sms alerts or even set up their own rss feeds will have to become more widely used.
Traditional Hiring & the Induction Process:
On my return into Dubai International Airport from Europe at midnight I was amazed to see about 200 engineers being herded sheep-like through immigration with 'lost and confused' written all over their faces. Their Herders were two chaps either side of the line holding aloft pieces of paper with "KBR New Hires". Good to see traditional recruiting still going strong, I just hope they got put into a decent hotel and didn't have to start work the next morning else I suspect half of them will be on a plane back home within two months.
I'll write later on how the web is working today to provide smooth onboarding, and remove that 'rabbit in the headlights' look from the faces of your new hires.
Firstly, huge areas of Spain have no mobile connection and the Internet goes down when it rains - so just as when the postal system used to deliver letters a week to late - if you are sending offer letters out now via email, it may be worth considering simple back up plans such as sms messages or post/fax; or even copying emails to a private url so candidates can pick up copies of all emails sent to them. We've just provided training of a web based recruitment platform to a client in Sudan in North Africa, and the Internet connection speeds were not fantastic - but certainly good enough to run a business application for recruiting over the Net, and for job applications to be made.
8 Link Deep Mining:
Did you know that the crawlers sent out by search engines like google.com (to search and index every website out there) will literally crawl 8 links (clicks) deep and read all the pages within that reach? There's a catch though, they won't mine or crawl through JavaScript, SO if you have a subset of really interesting pages about what it's like to work for your company on a careers site, or even your jobs listings, if the link to them is a flashy button with JavaScript controls - then they will be invisible to search engine crawlers!!
Why is that so important? Well, if a job description includes the words "Dubai, 777, tax-free and Pilot", somebody could run a yahoo or google search for that exact phrase and your job or jobsite wouldn't even appear. You can see why I thought this was worth a mention, and please make sure you know what you're doing if you're thinking about building a careers portal.
Going back to my first point about candidate communications, I saw from a Guardian newspapers study that 1 in 50 URL's requested by UK employees while at work is a house or job-hunting site. However, of websites requested but blocked by employers, the study showed webmail to be in the top 3. So basically their seems to be a trend of employers blocking access to webmail providers such as hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc. So those of you using recruitment technology which makes it possible to communicate with thousands of candidates in a day and organise mass events such as career fairs or assessment centres at the click of a button - be aware that candidates may not be seeing your emails that quickly. The same can be said of course for jobseekers that use their work email ID's (why would you ever do that, but believe me many do), they can't often access work emails for days on end.
Encouraging applicants to come back to a webpage to see communications, sign up for sms alerts or even set up their own rss feeds will have to become more widely used.
Traditional Hiring & the Induction Process:
On my return into Dubai International Airport from Europe at midnight I was amazed to see about 200 engineers being herded sheep-like through immigration with 'lost and confused' written all over their faces. Their Herders were two chaps either side of the line holding aloft pieces of paper with "KBR New Hires". Good to see traditional recruiting still going strong, I just hope they got put into a decent hotel and didn't have to start work the next morning else I suspect half of them will be on a plane back home within two months.
I'll write later on how the web is working today to provide smooth onboarding, and remove that 'rabbit in the headlights' look from the faces of your new hires.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
.jobs Domains
Forgot to mention, we are launching what we believe to be the first .jobs extension corporate careers portal in the region shortly. Not necessarily a good thing being first here, as not all jobseekers know yet about www.yourcompany.jobs as an option.
It made me think that some clients may also not yet know much about this. Well the powers that be behind the Internet have launched .jobs extensions, however there are a few rules associated to this new address. Firstly only employers can have and use the extension, so that means no recruitment agencies or jobsites should be allowed to register one (we'll see!).
I believe also that you have to have the same name registered under .com to be allowed to register the .jobs version. So in theory the company who own the career portal www.jamjoomjobs.com should able to register www.jamjoomjobs.jobs also, given that the company is called Jamjoom and that it is a direct employer.
I think that the .jobs extension if used properly could become a success as jobseekers should be able to remember and locate these sites easily, and without having to wade through any corporate sites to get to them, just type in the the company name, with .jobs on the end instead of .com
Contact me if you want any further details on this as the .jobs domain registration process is still a bit difficult.
It made me think that some clients may also not yet know much about this. Well the powers that be behind the Internet have launched .jobs extensions, however there are a few rules associated to this new address. Firstly only employers can have and use the extension, so that means no recruitment agencies or jobsites should be allowed to register one (we'll see!).
I believe also that you have to have the same name registered under .com to be allowed to register the .jobs version. So in theory the company who own the career portal www.jamjoomjobs.com should able to register www.jamjoomjobs.jobs also, given that the company is called Jamjoom and that it is a direct employer.
I think that the .jobs extension if used properly could become a success as jobseekers should be able to remember and locate these sites easily, and without having to wade through any corporate sites to get to them, just type in the the company name, with .jobs on the end instead of .com
Contact me if you want any further details on this as the .jobs domain registration process is still a bit difficult.
eRecruitment this week in Arabia
The Hiring Solutions Company, the company I run, held a few client discussions this week about careers portals we are currently building. The session led to us as usual surfing and brainstorming, discussing best practice, and also seeing some of the worst sites out there.
One site of note was www.thenewbreed.info which is the careers site of a video gaming company in the UK. They had creative freedom due to their business, but it isn't the cool factor that we benchmarking. The company in question had a poor reputation when it came to attracting talent. People in the market believed them to be a 'hire and fire' organisation, to work people too hard, etc.
The firm felt that some of the perception was unfounded, and that in some cases; yes they were a challenging firm to work for. Instead of hiding skeletons in their closet, they decided to attack, and openly discuss these issues on their career portal. If you visit the site you'll see that they state they seek to hire the best, and if you're not up to scratch then yes they will let you go. They are seeking to lead their field and innovate with great new gaming products, and that means hard work - so it isn't a place for the weak.
Does the same honesty occur in the Middle East markets? Not very often I must say. Clients tend to gloss over their issues, and try to push the positives such as a tax-free earnings environment and a nice lifestyle in a booming economy, where it is safe. Whilst it's hard to argue with promoting yourselves as a potential employer, I feel companies would do well to consider a better balance and start addressing the issues too. For example, would it be smart to tell families before they relocate their whole families that the environment is harsh; 50 degrees at times and arid (a desert tends to be!). Again I think employee blogs have a great opportunity here to add value and sincerity to a companies careers portal as they are more likely to provide useful personal info, and to be believed.
Mobile recruiting..
We launched great ATS functionality this week to allow further management of the recruitment process by recruiters and hiring managers when their on the road. And it's good stuff too. However having just launched that I then listen to a BBC documentary today explaining that there are 440Million mobile phone users in China, compared to only 110Million internet subscribers. Now you have to be careful with such stats, but it does make you wonder how important mobiles/PDA's are going to become for jobseekers. Currently we have great push technology in place to get info out to jobseekers via sms to their mobiles; but it looks as though it won't be too long before we should expect to see more demand for jobseekrs to be able to register basic interest in a company on the corporate careers site via their mobiles.
Regards for now..
Ben Fawcett
One site of note was www.thenewbreed.info which is the careers site of a video gaming company in the UK. They had creative freedom due to their business, but it isn't the cool factor that we benchmarking. The company in question had a poor reputation when it came to attracting talent. People in the market believed them to be a 'hire and fire' organisation, to work people too hard, etc.
The firm felt that some of the perception was unfounded, and that in some cases; yes they were a challenging firm to work for. Instead of hiding skeletons in their closet, they decided to attack, and openly discuss these issues on their career portal. If you visit the site you'll see that they state they seek to hire the best, and if you're not up to scratch then yes they will let you go. They are seeking to lead their field and innovate with great new gaming products, and that means hard work - so it isn't a place for the weak.
Does the same honesty occur in the Middle East markets? Not very often I must say. Clients tend to gloss over their issues, and try to push the positives such as a tax-free earnings environment and a nice lifestyle in a booming economy, where it is safe. Whilst it's hard to argue with promoting yourselves as a potential employer, I feel companies would do well to consider a better balance and start addressing the issues too. For example, would it be smart to tell families before they relocate their whole families that the environment is harsh; 50 degrees at times and arid (a desert tends to be!). Again I think employee blogs have a great opportunity here to add value and sincerity to a companies careers portal as they are more likely to provide useful personal info, and to be believed.
Mobile recruiting..
We launched great ATS functionality this week to allow further management of the recruitment process by recruiters and hiring managers when their on the road. And it's good stuff too. However having just launched that I then listen to a BBC documentary today explaining that there are 440Million mobile phone users in China, compared to only 110Million internet subscribers. Now you have to be careful with such stats, but it does make you wonder how important mobiles/PDA's are going to become for jobseekers. Currently we have great push technology in place to get info out to jobseekers via sms to their mobiles; but it looks as though it won't be too long before we should expect to see more demand for jobseekrs to be able to register basic interest in a company on the corporate careers site via their mobiles.
Regards for now..
Ben Fawcett
Friday, August 11, 2006
MonsterGulf launches - more choice has to be good
Quick post.. It was great to see our first client job postings appear on MonsterGulf today. They launched this week and Monster India are running the show which I think will work well to start with.
The job site scene is at last hotting up now, and a few major offline publishers are also getting into the market with their own jobs sites, aswell as one of the leading ISP's who are launching a regional site next month in 6 countries. Of course there is CareerMidEast and Bayt, who are already being given a run for their money by NaukriGulf a new site of Naukri.com, which is one of India's top 3 jobsites and employ something like 900 people which is quite staggering.
The choice and competition is already giving recruiters food for thought. I expect to see vertical sites tailored for this region, and the obvious sectors would have to be Oil & Gas, Hotels & Aviation. Let's see what else unfolds in 2006 as there is certainly room for many more good sites.
Got any more scoop on upcoming job sites??
The job site scene is at last hotting up now, and a few major offline publishers are also getting into the market with their own jobs sites, aswell as one of the leading ISP's who are launching a regional site next month in 6 countries. Of course there is CareerMidEast and Bayt, who are already being given a run for their money by NaukriGulf a new site of Naukri.com, which is one of India's top 3 jobsites and employ something like 900 people which is quite staggering.
The choice and competition is already giving recruiters food for thought. I expect to see vertical sites tailored for this region, and the obvious sectors would have to be Oil & Gas, Hotels & Aviation. Let's see what else unfolds in 2006 as there is certainly room for many more good sites.
Got any more scoop on upcoming job sites??
Internet for Dummies
The title of the post is meant to be a joke, and probably more to do with the person I sat next to on the flight back from Riyadh, than the recruiting issues I went there to discuss.
I spent a day working out an eRecruitment strategy for a large retailer across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is the largest market in the Mid East, with 25M population. A wealthy country spoilt by endless natural resources and the price of oil, often getting Saudi nationals into the workforce is the biggest recruiting challenge a company can face.
A key Saudi recruiter was trying to get to the bottom of how to get Saudis to apply for jobs on the Internet - especially for sales roles, which culturally are not that cool for a Saudi which I learnt today and found quite interesting.
Any pioneering users of recruiting technology will have faced the question: "do our candidates really use the Internet, will they apply?"
Well the signs here are good and getting better. The Middle East has amongst the highest growth rates in the world in terms of internet usage, 266% last year, whilst penetration is only at around 8-10%.
It was a great sign that a group of company Directors came in to work on a weekend today to work out how they were going to get the Internet to drive their recruiting program, but I wonder if enough education about how to use the Internet is happening across the region. I also question whether browsers are easy enough to use for those who have had only basic touch time with a PC.
These were really valid concerns for the group today, and whilst we all know retailers in particular now rely heavily on the Net for sourcing hires; more across this part of the world needs to happen in regards to languages, browsers and education of just how useful and simple the Net can be.
We decided to launch a bi-lingual (Arabic-English) careers portal, create CV kiosks and offer support to would-be candidates that may need support to make an application, to put some snazzy posters up in the shops to promote the site and to slip a promotional careers card into the bag of all Saudi national customers for 3 months along with their receipt. We're hoping a combined online/offline and customer visible approach will help to spread the word.
I guess this is viral marketing in a developing country (in terms of Internet usage) with a very Arabic flavour. I think it's a neat and practical approach, and really hope it works as well as we expect. As always, if you have any thoughts tips or practical experience to share then I'd love to hear them.
Ben.
I spent a day working out an eRecruitment strategy for a large retailer across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is the largest market in the Mid East, with 25M population. A wealthy country spoilt by endless natural resources and the price of oil, often getting Saudi nationals into the workforce is the biggest recruiting challenge a company can face.
A key Saudi recruiter was trying to get to the bottom of how to get Saudis to apply for jobs on the Internet - especially for sales roles, which culturally are not that cool for a Saudi which I learnt today and found quite interesting.
Any pioneering users of recruiting technology will have faced the question: "do our candidates really use the Internet, will they apply?"
Well the signs here are good and getting better. The Middle East has amongst the highest growth rates in the world in terms of internet usage, 266% last year, whilst penetration is only at around 8-10%.
It was a great sign that a group of company Directors came in to work on a weekend today to work out how they were going to get the Internet to drive their recruiting program, but I wonder if enough education about how to use the Internet is happening across the region. I also question whether browsers are easy enough to use for those who have had only basic touch time with a PC.
These were really valid concerns for the group today, and whilst we all know retailers in particular now rely heavily on the Net for sourcing hires; more across this part of the world needs to happen in regards to languages, browsers and education of just how useful and simple the Net can be.
We decided to launch a bi-lingual (Arabic-English) careers portal, create CV kiosks and offer support to would-be candidates that may need support to make an application, to put some snazzy posters up in the shops to promote the site and to slip a promotional careers card into the bag of all Saudi national customers for 3 months along with their receipt. We're hoping a combined online/offline and customer visible approach will help to spread the word.
I guess this is viral marketing in a developing country (in terms of Internet usage) with a very Arabic flavour. I think it's a neat and practical approach, and really hope it works as well as we expect. As always, if you have any thoughts tips or practical experience to share then I'd love to hear them.
Ben.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Search Engine Optimisation for Careers in Saudi
The topic of SEO for recruitment is a subject that deserves a fair amount of attention, and I'll serve up some of the ingredients later in the week. However, it has just dawned on me that I neglected to mention a bold client in my last post. I touched on the confusion in Kuwait forgot to share with you the wonderful client who asked for advice in how to get their careers site on top of Google et al.
For many/any of you reading from the States this may seem trivial, however we are not aware of MEA clients who have any significant spend from their recruitment advertising budget going on search engines. Postbacks from any corporate recruiters in the Middle East or Africa who are, would be great!!
So there we were having a classy business lunch in the food court of Faisaliah Tower in Riyadh, which incidentally would not be out of place in Manhattan, Moscow or Kuala Lumpur, and the recruiter responsible for attracting SAP consultants to projects in Iran, Saudi and surrounding countries is asking how we intend to get them to the top of Mount Google.
This was somewhat of a turning point in my week. A great conversation ensued about how much effort/budget might have to be redeployed into any new and creative means that were likely to reach the eyeballs of overseas technical skills. The diversity of thought and effort going on in places like Saudi Arabia to address recruitment challenges would astound many people I think. I hope some of our suggestions over lunch come to light and really help source some great SAP people. Once we're done with the CPM's, banners and sponsored newsletters, I'll report back on how it went.
For many/any of you reading from the States this may seem trivial, however we are not aware of MEA clients who have any significant spend from their recruitment advertising budget going on search engines. Postbacks from any corporate recruiters in the Middle East or Africa who are, would be great!!
So there we were having a classy business lunch in the food court of Faisaliah Tower in Riyadh, which incidentally would not be out of place in Manhattan, Moscow or Kuala Lumpur, and the recruiter responsible for attracting SAP consultants to projects in Iran, Saudi and surrounding countries is asking how we intend to get them to the top of Mount Google.
This was somewhat of a turning point in my week. A great conversation ensued about how much effort/budget might have to be redeployed into any new and creative means that were likely to reach the eyeballs of overseas technical skills. The diversity of thought and effort going on in places like Saudi Arabia to address recruitment challenges would astound many people I think. I hope some of our suggestions over lunch come to light and really help source some great SAP people. Once we're done with the CPM's, banners and sponsored newsletters, I'll report back on how it went.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Confusion in Kuwait
I have been looking for the inspiration to start my blog for some time, and found it this week when visiting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Firstly I'll aim on the blog to share my perspective of the eRecruitment landscape from across the Middle East, Africa and the Far East markets.
The inspiration initially came from seeing yet again just how confusing eRecruitment is being made by a multitude of sinners (read: Vendors). I visited a Corporate in Kuwait City who thought they has bought an ATS, only to find they had actually procured a Pychometric test product which handles Assessment Centres. Clearly the client needs to up their vendor selection process here, but this is something we see time and again across the region, and in my mind only serves to slow down progress.
In researching the various blog providers I did see a related article discussing the difference between, an ATS, a TAS and a TMS - see how easy it is to confuse - but maybe more on that in a future blog.
One of the most interst things I've seen recently when reviewing blogs, is all the talk about companies having blogs dedicated to recruiting. Seen good work from Skype, Microsoft in this regard and PwC have just launched their own too. We're working with a retailer who represent The Body Shop in the MEA market and have been discussing adding a blog to their popular www.kojcareers.com careers site. The debate so far has been whether each employee should have their own blog, or whether a collective approach is wise. Any opinion on this would be most welcome as we are breaking new ground for the Middle East here and it would be good to have some sound reference points.
Blog you shortly..
The inspiration initially came from seeing yet again just how confusing eRecruitment is being made by a multitude of sinners (read: Vendors). I visited a Corporate in Kuwait City who thought they has bought an ATS, only to find they had actually procured a Pychometric test product which handles Assessment Centres. Clearly the client needs to up their vendor selection process here, but this is something we see time and again across the region, and in my mind only serves to slow down progress.
In researching the various blog providers I did see a related article discussing the difference between, an ATS, a TAS and a TMS - see how easy it is to confuse - but maybe more on that in a future blog.
One of the most interst things I've seen recently when reviewing blogs, is all the talk about companies having blogs dedicated to recruiting. Seen good work from Skype, Microsoft in this regard and PwC have just launched their own too. We're working with a retailer who represent The Body Shop in the MEA market and have been discussing adding a blog to their popular www.kojcareers.com careers site. The debate so far has been whether each employee should have their own blog, or whether a collective approach is wise. Any opinion on this would be most welcome as we are breaking new ground for the Middle East here and it would be good to have some sound reference points.
Blog you shortly..
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
