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.