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