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 :

• 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.

The response to our dinner has been really positive, and a speaker is flying in to deliver a short presentation on talent management. We're then spending the rest of the evening over dinner to discuss the issues facing corporate recruitment.

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

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.

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.

$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

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.