Been a bit slow on the blog front recently as I took some time out with the family for a break to UK and Czech which was fantastic.
Back to it now though and I'll find myself in Kuwait tomorrow morning to attend and present in an HR Conference there called CareerEx 2007. Lots of good people attending this one so I hope to have a few interesting industry news clips at least to share this week.
Following on from my last comments about jobsites starting to market themselves in different ways, I did notice www.MonsterGulf.com on local radio and satellite TV in the last few weeks. It willk be interesting to check their visitor number which I intend to do on www.alexa.com shortly. It'll take a while to see the impact but you'd expect to hear PR about their traffic hike shortly (unless it didn't have the desired affect that is!!)
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Monday, April 02, 2007
Mid East Online Recruitment Advertising Booming?
Interesting to see Monster.com advertising in Dubai this week (7 days newspaper), but not under the new MonsterGulf brand. Perhaps Monster have locally changed their advertising strategy back to the core brand. This would obviously make things easier from a cost and design perspective.
They've also put geo-redirection into place so basically if you go to Monster.com
from the GCC then you get taken to MonsterGulf.com by default. It's actually quite hard to get to Monster.com which is annoying but there you go.
Monster also started TV advertising (forget which channel) in Dubai this week - it was on Satellite TV so probably covered the region. Great to see, and we'll be monitoring the reaction over the coming months which I suspect will be quite strong.
One negative thing I have seen in the last few weeks is jobsites giving different prices out to different customers. I may get my company more involved when we have the time to protect clients and become a central buying agent for their online budget spend as I hate seeing clients getting ripped off. We have stepped in and helped clients broker sensible deals from time to time, but I think there may be scope to get involved in bulk buying deals in the near future.
A more general observation coming through with jobsites, and not just regional ones but also global players, is that they seem to be looking to derive 75% of their revenue from CV database search these days, and 25% from Job Advertising. That struck me as odd - can anybody comment on that as I am a bit suprised and would really like to get feedback from the market
on whether that is right.
They've also put geo-redirection into place so basically if you go to Monster.com
from the GCC then you get taken to MonsterGulf.com by default. It's actually quite hard to get to Monster.com which is annoying but there you go.
Monster also started TV advertising (forget which channel) in Dubai this week - it was on Satellite TV so probably covered the region. Great to see, and we'll be monitoring the reaction over the coming months which I suspect will be quite strong.
One negative thing I have seen in the last few weeks is jobsites giving different prices out to different customers. I may get my company more involved when we have the time to protect clients and become a central buying agent for their online budget spend as I hate seeing clients getting ripped off. We have stepped in and helped clients broker sensible deals from time to time, but I think there may be scope to get involved in bulk buying deals in the near future.
A more general observation coming through with jobsites, and not just regional ones but also global players, is that they seem to be looking to derive 75% of their revenue from CV database search these days, and 25% from Job Advertising. That struck me as odd - can anybody comment on that as I am a bit suprised and would really like to get feedback from the market
on whether that is right.
107 Saudi firms banned from recruiting
Yet again the government have had to get heavy to enforce the regulations encouraging employment opportunities for the National population. Hiring foreigners has been frozen for selected firms who have deemed to have abused their obligation to recruit Saudi nationals. Of course hiring is hard in Saudi at the best of times, and I'm sure these firms have been trying,
but it will be interesting to see how it impacts the growth and success of those firms.
See ArabNews website for more details.
There will be a few reactions to this, and I imagine outsource firms have a great future in KSA as outplacement of non-nationals could be a great way to increase the ratios of Saudi nationals that a company 'employ'. This of course isn't restricted to Saudi, and certainly there has been a rise in the number of banks who have contracted out their call centre and retail banking support centres to external service providers.
The productivity has probably risen because all of a sudden they're using an outside firm that has to be paid a fee (all good), but the effect on Nationalisation quotas must also be driving this trend I imagine. Is that increasing the number of Nationals employed in a bank though - or just reducing direct employment of non-nationals whilst reducing the employee size overall??
Not sure, but this topic only seems to get more interesting.
but it will be interesting to see how it impacts the growth and success of those firms.
See ArabNews website for more details.
There will be a few reactions to this, and I imagine outsource firms have a great future in KSA as outplacement of non-nationals could be a great way to increase the ratios of Saudi nationals that a company 'employ'. This of course isn't restricted to Saudi, and certainly there has been a rise in the number of banks who have contracted out their call centre and retail banking support centres to external service providers.
The productivity has probably risen because all of a sudden they're using an outside firm that has to be paid a fee (all good), but the effect on Nationalisation quotas must also be driving this trend I imagine. Is that increasing the number of Nationals employed in a bank though - or just reducing direct employment of non-nationals whilst reducing the employee size overall??
Not sure, but this topic only seems to get more interesting.
Umniah - Hanania
A Jordanian client of our recruiting package, Sniperhire ATS, is a really interesting mobile operator. They're interesting in that they are incredibly entrepreneurial and have grown amazingly quickly. They are called Umniah and I spotted this week an announcement that they have appointed Joseph Hanania to run the business. We also support Bahrain Telecoms group and they acquired Umniah last year.
Joseph is a well known leader in the communications/technology space in the region and spent a long time heading up HP in the Dubai office. Great to see people moving from IT into Telecoms, as I think all too often companies are not brave enough to look outside their own direct competitors. My opinion is that that attitude restricts growth so I'm right in this case, and that Umniah continue to soar under Mr Hanania. Visit www.batelcocareers.com which is where Umniah jobs will shortly be available online.
KSA GSM Operator Recruiting
More Telecoms recruitment related news. My firm are implementing a package for the new mobile operator in Saudi Arabia. The Operator name is not yet known, but it will be great to be associated with the new GSM licensee and to help them recruit a few hundred people in what is already a challenging market. Check out www.mtccareers.com for update on this over the coming weeks.
Joseph is a well known leader in the communications/technology space in the region and spent a long time heading up HP in the Dubai office. Great to see people moving from IT into Telecoms, as I think all too often companies are not brave enough to look outside their own direct competitors. My opinion is that that attitude restricts growth so I'm right in this case, and that Umniah continue to soar under Mr Hanania. Visit www.batelcocareers.com which is where Umniah jobs will shortly be available online.
KSA GSM Operator Recruiting
More Telecoms recruitment related news. My firm are implementing a package for the new mobile operator in Saudi Arabia. The Operator name is not yet known, but it will be great to be associated with the new GSM licensee and to help them recruit a few hundred people in what is already a challenging market. Check out www.mtccareers.com for update on this over the coming weeks.
Microsoft Excel 2007 - any good for Recruiter reporting?
One of our chief geeks (it's okay - he proudly wears a 'Geek' bracelet that he won in a Microsoft competition) is at a Business Intelligence conference hosted by Microsoft today, and the reports coming out of the conference are that Excel 2007 holds a lot of promise for Recruiters. Well at least those using a web-based recruiting system, because those of you who do, should at least be able to get some fantastic reporting functions out of the new Excel.
I mention it here as I think it's worth Recruiters investing a bit of time now to get familiar with how to manage 'Pivot tables' in Excel as these tools are going to become more and more a part of your daily lives if you want to satisfy the demand of Execs and their appetite for information on what we do in recruitment and where the money is going. We've been doing a lot of work in this area last year, believe me if you haven't already, then get familiar with it.
The 2007 version of Excel, which will take a while to get onto the PC of many of you out there for sure, has native OLAP tools built in which is a first for Excel. This means that MS have made a big improvement in usability (you won't need to install or download drivers to get it to run great reports). If you don't know what a Pivot table is, visit the help section in excel or
speak to the support team of your ATS vendor.
I mention it here as I think it's worth Recruiters investing a bit of time now to get familiar with how to manage 'Pivot tables' in Excel as these tools are going to become more and more a part of your daily lives if you want to satisfy the demand of Execs and their appetite for information on what we do in recruitment and where the money is going. We've been doing a lot of work in this area last year, believe me if you haven't already, then get familiar with it.
The 2007 version of Excel, which will take a while to get onto the PC of many of you out there for sure, has native OLAP tools built in which is a first for Excel. This means that MS have made a big improvement in usability (you won't need to install or download drivers to get it to run great reports). If you don't know what a Pivot table is, visit the help section in excel or
speak to the support team of your ATS vendor.
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