eRecruitment - a view from here - EMEA and Asia Pac

Braindrain to begin again?

2008-10-15T13:57:00.002+04:00

I remember all the discussions about an exodus of talent from the UK to Eastern Europe in the early 1990's and wonder if we're at the start of another. Not to Europe this time, probably farther afield to China and the Middle East.

Figures out this week in the UK show two important trends emerging, largely linked to a slowdown in the economy and the financial turmoil:

Number of UK graduates applying to each position doubles
Figure joining unemployment in September at highest monthly level for 17 years

There is an article on the first point at www.onrec.com and the second point was released by the Govt this week.

I've also spoken to a lot of people recently, both recruiters themselves and candidates, who are moving abroad at ever higher rates. There really is no reversing this, other than fresh job creation but I think we'll see companies waking up to the fact that many of them still don't know who their best people are - so they don't have the chance to try and retain top performers outside of a sales environment.

£3,500 a day Job

2008-10-01T19:15:00.005+04:00

I found this pretty interesting. There was a job advertised on exec-appointments.com this week for a search engine optimisation specialist. There were very specific targets in the job ad aswell (get us to number 4 in Google listings for example).

Not bad pay either - £2,500 - £3,500 a day. Open ended contract, and negotiable on the pay; you just had to be exceptionally good at SEO. I’m sure this is one of those times when the school geek drop out who enjoys Nintendo and has been playing with websites from the age of 8 has just got his rewards!

RSS for Jobseekers

2008-06-24T15:19:00.002+04:00

I wrote a blog article about recruiters using RSS before so thought I'd look at from the other side here. Jobseekers.

RSS is a great way to not have to revisit a web page to check if there's any new content (jobs in this case). For a jobseeker who is considering maybe 15 employers where he'd like to work next, you can see how it could quickly become tedious.

Here's an example of a leading regional employer, DP World, putting this to good use.

http://careers.dpworld.ae/careers/dw/Page.aspx?PageID=3054&BusinessUnitID=495

If you're interested in subscribing to their RSS job feed to try this out then use the following link:

http://careers.dpworld.ae/careers/dw/rss.aspx?ID=495

Bill Gates and McKinsey on recruitment in the Gulf in 2008

2008-06-24T14:45:00.003+04:00

The title says it all really. When McKinsey and Company are running a conference on 'Building People Ready Businesses', as they just did in Dubai - and where Bill Gates gives the keynote address - you kind of get the impression that people are starting to sit up and realise that recruitment, people, performance, customers, cash; are all interrelated and are all potentially very big headaches!

Quite cleverly, if a little corny, it was put into context by explaining that 'the region needs to upgrade its software (read: people and people strategies) from Gulf 1.0 to Gulf 2.0. Gulf 1.0 being defined as companies importing labourers from Asia, and Gulf 2.0 being defined as Nationals working not only for the Govt sector, and general industry moving from labour intensive work to capital and knowledge intensive fields.

If this shift doesn't continue apace, then unemployment is going to be a huge problem pretty quickly in the region. 42% of the local population are under the age of 15. Bringing in foreign workers puts pressure on those guys. The region needs to create 4M jobs to keep unemployment under control, but only 82,000 jobs per year are being produced for locals (Gulf nationals) - so which way is this trend going to go.

The other nice little cliche I picked up from the McKinsey conference is that Dubai in the UAE is seen as being the innovator for HR strategies (they said the private sector was 'beta-testing' Gulf 2.0 in Dubai), but I think that is more by luck than design, and also at risk of changing.

Dubai in terms of HR strategy isn't really pushing the boat out, it is just able to attract more than its fair share of top quality people in HR. Those that don't join a backward or overly traditional firm, are often allowed to act as change agents and are seen as the guys and girls trialing Gulf 2.0

The risk is that with rising costs of living in Dubai many such people are being attracted to Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Turkey and so on. The GM of Dow Jones in the region was interviewed on the radio this week and said how his firm had stopped trying to recruit international candidates into Dubai completely as it cost more than hiring people in London. Good news for the local and/or National working population perhaps, if they can prove they have the right skills to do the job.

These issues aren't new, and I don't see enough HR leaders out there acting as change agents. Corporate Governance (check out some of the scandals brewing in the regions banking and real estate sector) could be forced in soon from a governmental level, forcing CEO's to act better and to encourage more thought leadership. If this happens then I think the pace of adoption of Gulf 2.0 could pick up another gear.

I hope the next conference has Steve Jobs talking about Gulf 'Virus protection', and how to weed out people in your companies that slow down or resist change agents..

MEA HR Consultancy Web listings Anyone?

2008-06-24T14:30:00.002+04:00

There's lots of rubbish HR work going on out there of course, but there's also a lot of good people & good work being delivered.

What strikes me is that for all the networking that goes on in the emerging markets of the GCC and surrounding areas; is that there aren't that many good referrals going on for projects in the HR space.

The amount of times I get asked for "2 or 3 good HRIS companies" is shocking really. Clearly there aren't enough good providers on the ground in the HR technology space just yet, but those people/firms that are out there just aren't easy enough to find.

I got asked today who could help implement a Peer-to-Peer review system in a company, yesterday I was asked for an Ad agency and branding specialist who focus on career branding. Truth is I don't know where to point clients all the time. There's loads of recruitment firms, too many, and the difficulty is finding the one to work with who best understands or is committed to deliver for you. For HR projects or consultancy it's the other way round.

What I'm getting at here I guess is the need for a website or blog etc where consultants and firms can list what their area of expertise is and which countries or sectors they cover. If you know of one then please let me know, and if you read this and want to start one then I'd be glad to hear about it.

What can you achieve within 100 days of implementing eRecruitment

2008-03-13T10:21:00.002+04:00

I don't use this blog for advertorials usually, but I've worked on a project recently which does act as a bit of a benchmark for what a large retailer spread over the mid east region can achieve very quickly by putting good eRecruitment systems into place.

They've configured and implemented a system, certified users after training, installed walk-in kiosks to handle offline applications, integrated to numerous job boards and received tons of quality applications. They actually posted a job 'for fun' in Turkey where they had no office but needed to hire senior staff to start ops. Never thought for a minute they'd get top competitors to apply, but had carried out 2 interviews within 3 days and had an offer accepted inside 5 days.

Anyhow if you like to read what their Chief Human Resources Officer had to say in a recent press interview then here's the link: http://www.albawaba.com/en/countries/UAE/222664

Recruiter Magazine: Recruitment Industry & Global Economy

2008-03-09T15:15:00.003+04:00

I participated in a piece of research carried out for an article written for Recruiter magazine, so thought I'd comment on the subject here; and the original article can be found online at http://www.recruiter.co.uk/Articles/336422/Selling+out+or+staying+put.html

The article was to discuss the impact of a possible slowdown on the recruitment industry, and what will happen for those trying to sell a recruitment business. My comment which you can kind of see in the article was that recruitment business owners are seldom brilliant at creating value in their own businesses. Too fee own patents, markets, IP, methodology - and too much is dependant on either business coming in or reputation.

What's interesting from the article is that amongst the 4 or 5 of us who were interviewed, whilst there are a couple of related points, we mostly had different views. Some felt a downturn represents an excellent time to sell a business because the fewer buyers on the market are generally seasoned buyers in the recruitment industry. True possibly, but I doubt they'd be buying in a down market unless they thought they could get higher ROI on a reduced purchase price - which basically means; bad time to sell if you're the seller. Certainly credit availability is drying up, and that will impact M&A activity. Whilst my view is that firms should spend more effort on creating barriers to entry, differentiation, focus on specialist sectors or emerging market high growth countries - another participant felt the best way to ride out a downturn was to be a generalist and make sure you have service offerings in temp recruitment, contract, perm and search. Eggs in many baskets.

Personally I think there is worse news to come out of the financial industry than the sub-prime concerns; however I think Europe & Asia will largely do unscathed, and most pain is gpoing to be felt in North America. The Middle East, with a barrel of oil hitting $106 yesterday, has huge excess in liquidity and I cannot see a slow down anytime before 2010.

Top 10 to maximise online success

2008-02-10T15:47:00.000+04:00

I was recently asked how to create a decent online candidate experience, and a great career portal. There's a good article on change work now's website where they talk about their top 10 factors for online success when encouraging online applications. The list is beautifully simple and if you do all of them then you won't go far wrong, so here they are:

1. Design the online process as a transaction
2. Career website content must be relevant
3. Do not be overly concerned with how long the online application process is
4. Provide immediate feedback online
5. Don't force candidates to register upfront
6. Provide specific feedback about why a candidate is unsuitable
7. Remember online recruitment is still a human activity
8. Ensure candidates are kept informed at all times
9. Speed and functionality matter to the candidate
10. Go through the process as a candidate

In a UK recruitment conference, Google also set out their top 10 hints for online advertising success. Naturally it gets slightly more technical and Google specific so I've added in a few words of description where appropriate:

Campaigns always on - nature of the Internet, and jobseekers. Great advantage over print media - although to be fair most print offerings now counter this by replicating their content online.
100% product coverage SEM - search engine marketing can/should be used across all your products, and cross-selling opportunities arise. So basically if I'm looking for flights on BA out of Heathrow to JFK, I might also be served BA jobs in Heathrow airport.
Dynamic keyword variations
High traffic CPC campaigns -yield should be measured and focussed, but essentially you can get a lot of traffic from segmented audience if yo udesign your campaigns correctly.
Landing page quality - the better design and relevance of the entry page (where somebody lands having seen an online ad or sponsored link), the higher number of candidates you'll convert. It really is like your shop window. You have to think of jobseekers as literally running through the job high street, glancing in your office window. If they don't like the look of the decor, or the blinds are shut altogether - well they'll go in the shop next door which has comfy chairs and a smiley shop assistant.
Fresh creative - ad content and creative should be aligned with your job/s message and employer brand. I imagine Heineken would run a recruitment campaign along the lines of "Probably the best place to work in the world".
Local Seasonality - if your target demographic are all offline celebrating Chinese New Year or sat on the sofa watching the FA Cup final - then probably best not to run the ad campaign. If you're hiring teachers, or Graduates for that matter; then there are specifc times to run recruiting efforts, and that is very much supported through internet advertising and CPM campaigns.
Leveraging brand - what are your audiences interests - maybe they are checking up on the sports news, or searching for science DVD's online - again this can be used to target people very well and to communicate to them when they are not necessarily looking for a job ad.
Google Tools - Google Maps, Youtube - even registering your sitemap for your careers site with Google is very worthwhile.
Regional focus - the internet offers great support for local campaigns, and you'll get better click-through rates and relevancy if you localise. There's little point in having 400 candidates come through to your, if you can only interview the 3 people who own a car and live within 20 minutes of the office.

With more and more tools and options coming out with regards to candidate attraction, I can see more roles being created within HR for marketeers with very special skill sets. Thankfully the so-called web 2.0 tools are easy to use, but with the abundance of them, and the speciality, I don't think an active recruiter can handle secondlife, blogs, search engine optimsation, AdSense, etc.

Ben Fawcett.

What happened in Recruiting in 2007, and what's in store for 2008?

2008-01-16T13:09:00.000+04:00

Back from my Fishing Trip!! Had I realised I wasn't going to be blogging for a while I'd have put up a sign! Happy New Year to you.

So, what happened in 2007. I guess in the MEA markets it was a case of a fuel economy driving everything, and recruitment trying to keep up the pace.

- Growth
- High oil price
- Weakening economies worldwide, seized on by Sovereign Wealth Funds of UAE, KSA, Qatar
- International growth by regional firms (Q: "How do we recruit in Algeria + Sudan?" A: "Good question!")

Attractiveness of working in the local economy is stronger than ever, however people are leaving at the same rate due to ripping inflation on the ground in the region itself.

Firms are still struggling to find executive talent, and retention of mid-managers below them is increasingly hard. The available talent pool is only going to shrink in 2008 I think; as what had promised to be the next great hunting grounds (India, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, China for example) are all growing and recruiting heavily themselves.

Expect to see India and China aggressively repatriating its senior executive talent for the next few years. Personally I can even see the junior professional workforce (check out any hotel lobby in Abu Dhabi or hospital in Jeddah) moving back to the Asian growth markets before 2010.

I'm not sure how much the Middle East can stop itself being a worker merry-go-round. National talent development and expatriates buying houses can only provide so much stability, but is crucial. I think what's sadly missing and has to be put in place pronto is wide-scale introduction of Long-Term Incentive plans, so I really hope to see leading firms doing so in 2008.

M&A Activity hotting up
Consolidation in the recruitment market - should lead to more professional levels of service and many mid-market generalist recruitment firms will struggle as clients turn to established brands or niche firms offering high quality in a specialist sector.

Andrew Banks of Morgan & Banks fame recently invested in InterSearch, and Manpower have of course just announced they've acquired Clarendon Parker Middle East. Expect more M&A, and more new entrants.

What is eRecruitment anyway?
On the recruiting technology side of things, the biggest change has been the end-user awareness and level of comfort. Recruiters and Managers across the MEA market finally showed in 2007 that they expect to see their firms leveraging technology, so it's still baby steps for the masses, but I expect to see larger firms really try to get to grips with recruitment technology and how it can make a difference to recruiting across the entire enterprise.

Receiving a CV over the company website is no longer understood to mean eRecruitment, as honestly that is what most leading employers felt online recruitment meant here until 2007 in my opinion. The bar has been raised now and more sophisticated and comprehensive solutions that make life easier for all concerned in recruitment are now firmly on the corporate wish list.

I don't feel video-CV's will feature in MEA during 2008, however SMS messaging to candidates, candidate care, interactive communication tools on career portals, more psych testing online and a more personalised candidate experience will be the recruiting technology landscape in 2008.

Death knell for Walk-in Interviews?

2007-12-13T11:46:00.000+04:00

Everybody was quite excited when Dubai Airports announced they were hiring 400 new staff, and they did a really good PR job talking about the walk-in interviews being held at a hired out college over 3 days.

What came next was a PR disaster though, particularly in terms of employment brand. The problem was that the company was using pre-2001 tactics.

30,000 people turned up on the first morning to submit there resumes and meet recruiters. With no recruitment system in place to coordinate, store, communicate etc; the company was completely overwhelmed and had to get back on commercial radio and into the press again to cancel the event and tell people instead to go to the affiliated Civil Aviation website and submit applications online.

The majority of large employers in the Middle East are still operating this way, so no particular shame on Dubai Airports; I just wonder whether such a public failure may spur on other large employers to realise that using technology and websites to do the screening first is a no-brainer?

In a congested City like Dubai where driving is rarely pleasurable, I feel for the thousands of jobseekers who most likely took a sick-day off and drove for an hour only to find the doors locked on arrival.

I remember going through this with a client in 2002 whereby we helped them implement an ATS to pretty much run the above scenario online. The recruiters then flew down to the interview location. At 8:30 on the first day they called the office and said it was a disastrous turn-out; only 180 people where they would usually meet 2,500. Initially we'd been concerned, but asked them to proceed with the interview day.

Turns out they hired 60 people which was over their quota. All that had happened was that all the initial screening had taken 2,500 down to 250 qualified people who were scheduled to the interview online, of which 180 turned up.

Have we seen the end of the mass walk-in interviews where 90% of the people present are looking for a job but not the ones you're interviewing for? I doubt it, not just yet; but I think the lessons have been made very public on this occasion and I hope a few leading organisations think harder about the candidates' experience before hosting their next walk-in event.

(PS - I've linked the DCA website above in case you want to apply for an airport job)

HR Summit in Abu Dhabi - no more get out of jail free cards for recruiters

2007-11-08T15:25:00.000+04:00

I attended the Middle East HR Summit in Abu Dhabi this week. Here's a review in case your interested and couldn't make it. Firstly the exhibition centre (ADENC) is a stunning facility and easily accessible from Abu Dhabi airport. The gala dinner was also in stunning surroundings (The Emirates Palace Hotel), and a client of mine from Gulf Bank was awarded the HR Excellence award of the year. Mabrook! (congratulations) Surour Al Samerai.

Generally the quality of delegates attending the event was high - and some of the speakers were genuinely interesting; including the CIPD Chairlady and Fellows from London Business School and Oxford.

Much of the content on show during the first day was nothing new, but still the coffee and the networking was hot! The general theme was attracting and retaining talent.
Last year there was a lot more theoretical discussion about lofty HR plans such as the effects of moving groups of staff from fixed pay schemes to variable or performance related pay. This year, it was all very practical and operational: "How do we get more good people, and how do we stop losing them so fast?"

I recall one delegate from the crowd asking for the microphone and asking the panel what they would suggest for her dilemma: "I work for a major national engineering employer. I had to hire 1800 people in a year, I managed 1000. However to achieve that, such is the scarcity of talent, both the line managers and myself had to lower our standards and hire very average staff. I feel guilty, what do you suggest?" The speaker, I think not knowing where to start or end, simply suggested they get a better handle on the requirements going forward and agree at the outset with line what is 'nice-to-have', and what skills are mandatory. Pay more, educate the line how important it is to get it right, get a recruiting system and a decent website to attract and educate jobseekers - would have been amongst my answers!

Clearly some companies haven't worked out yet that during a talent war, standing still is equivalent to running backwards. Many national employers are still operating recruitment the same way as they did in 1998. Leave recruitment, do not pass go, there can be no more "get out of jail free cards", go directly to another job!

The Head of L&D from real estate development giant Nakheel talked about how he was in the process of recruiting a psychologist into recruitment who would focus on the experience of humans, so for example if you have 10 staff on a training course - what should you feed them at lunch to maximise the learning experience - should you give them ice-cream to boost ceratonin so the brain can take on more info, and how can you combat those post-lunch sugar lows?

He also said how how detested 'Training' as a function in general, and that if we recruit the right people, then surely they would be best serving the company if they are not in a training room, and that they should know the job anyhow! Very interesting, and it did cause a bit of a stir which was partly why it was said I think. Certainly a thought-provoking presentation, and to a large degree backed up by the Oxford Fellow who showed that the least effective method of transmitting learning was 'classroom' based, with only 5% of the material delivered in that format being learnt.

From a technology perspective there was little to talk about, although RecruitGulf.com were there and told me they are happy to offer 3 and 6 month posting packages to clients, and also have an 'unlimited posting' philosophy which I think is great and will really help them step up their growth in the Middle East market. Unlimited was the original UK job board model in the early days as I recall, however nowadays if you take Monster as an example they will give you an unlimited (max 200 posts) contract, or an unlimited (up to 500 posts!) contract.

That's it for now, if you want any more details drop me a line on the blog.

Life Insurance for all overseas hires? Latte for me..

2007-10-24T10:30:00.000+04:00

Domestic recruitment (yes, housemaids for those living a life of less luxury than many here in Arabia!) is not my special topic, but I have just noticed an interesting change to the scene which could have wider consequences to general expatriate hiring across the region.

My view today comes from Starbucks in Kuwait Airport. It’s a great spot and one of the most happening bucks, well worth a visit. A glimpse into Kuwaiti youth pastimes, you wouldn’t believe how many 20-something’s come here to get online and play network games whilst having a latte and a chat.

Anyhow – back to the point. The Ministry of Labor & Employment of the Philippines has passed a law that any person sponsoring domestic workers in Kuwait have to provide life insurance for them. So have the Ethiopian Government – and every body else is expected to follow suit.

According to AbdulAziz Al-Ali who is the Chairman of the Union of Domestic Workers – the policy will only cost $50 a year so it’s hardly providing great coverage, sounds to me as though it’s a basic policy to cover events if a foreign worker sadly dies when overseas. This would seems to make sense as employers are already required to enroll domestic workers in government health programs so that medical care is provided for staff. Also end of service flights to repatriate workers are also a labor requirement.

So whilst it’s quite a morbid or sad story, it’s clearly a good thing to have in place. My interest in the story was that it might easily break out of the ‘domestic worker’ category and into professional expatriate hires. My life policy costs me $800 a year, so the cost to major national employers could be quite a hit.

Going to get mango frappucino..

Gap Job Applicants' Data Stolen - 800,000 of them!

2007-10-01T01:08:00.000+04:00

Gap Job Applicants' Data Stolen - 800,000 of them!

A thief stole a laptop computer containing unencrypted personal information of 800,000 people who applied for jobs at Gap Inc., the clothing retailer announced Friday.

The laptop stored Social Security numbers and other data from people in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada who applied online and by phone between July 2006 and June 2007 for jobs at Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Outlet stores.

This news comes hot on the heals of a security breach last month where online job site Monster.com exposed the confidential information of 1.3 million people looking for jobs.

Gap said the laptop was lifted from the offices of a third-party vendor that manages job applicant data for the San Francisco-based clothier. If you look at the link of the GAP career portal which is run by Taleo, there are still jobs published although the CEO of Gap is rightly taking this breach of security very seriously.

http://www.gapinc.com/public/Careers/Taleo/popup_taleo.html?source=gapinc_jobsearch_us

Storing data without encrypting it to protect it from hackers is contrary to Gap's agreement with the third-party vendor, Gap said Friday.

"What happened here is against everything we stand for as a company," said Gap Chairman and CEO Glenn Murphy. "We're reviewing the facts and circumstances that led to this incident closely, and will take appropriate steps to help prevent something like this from happening again."

Ouch - are your privacy policies strong enough, are those of your recruitment system vendors? This is serious business folks, please be careful. I'm not sure if Gap or the vendor will get sued, but this could get very messy if jobseekers start reporting fraud activity as a result of their stolen data. Job applicant data, especially in the US where it often includes social security ID numbers as Gap's did, is very highly targeted by hackers.

Talent Scraping

2007-08-26T13:45:00.000+04:00

What I refer to as talent scraping, or a squeeze, is becoming very noticeable today in Dubai and other leading GCC economies.

If you look in the job papers around the region you'll notice a couple of things. Firstly the volume of new recruitment firms each week is astonishing. Even if this is not new, it hasn't been running at this rate since 1999/2000. A lot of consultants are going out on their own, and the market will consolidate again once the boom slows down a little in 2009.

Secondly there are adverts for people living here to go work in developed economies such as the USA. What's interesting is that they are tapping up and trying to directly attract the skilled workers who have migrated here from MENA traditional (under-developed) sourcing markets such as India and the Philippines.

Add to this the growth in India's own economy and their efforts to attract non-resident Indians back to India - and you add a third level to the talent crunch. I wouldn't expect to see much movement back to the Philippines of their overseas workers, as they represent a massive part of the Filipino GDP (2 largest contributor I believe is remittances from overseas workers).

So with fast developing economies such as Dubai's now starting to feel inflation, and starting to lose knowledge workers, the need to develop local resources is more important than ever. The problem for Dubai is that the local population is so small that it can not meet the demand. All of this means we face a continual recruitment cycle where we're bringing a dozen people each month in the front door; whilst ten leave through the fire escape.

Qatar is facing the same pressures, with similar demographics and economic growth; whereas Saudi does at least have a large enough population to eventually stop the merry-go-round.

Companies are going to have to get their heads around the concepts of talent warehouses, just-in-time recruitment pipelines & robust talent retention strategies if they want to be stable between now and 2010.

Jobcasting - audio job boards

2007-06-30T01:16:00.000+04:00

Check out www.jobsinpods.com

It is an uber cool jobsite that is essentially a job board, but using audio rather than text to share a message and advertise work at a firm, and the firm itself.

Another fine example of web 2.0 and how interactive recruiting is becoming. Matching technology and video are the most exciting areas of innovation for me at present in online recruitment, but this site deserves a mention. If used properly, recruitment advertising and web 2.0 should generate much stronger employment brands, as well as leading to better candidates.

I believe video is best used in the same format for erecruitment (ie employer driven content, not video resumes) and expect to help clients get to grips with implementing this in 2007. Basically what jobsinpods are doing is interviewing a recruiter about a position, recording the interview, and posting the audio file to their website, and even copying it onto the clients career site also if required.

I expect corporate recruiters to start asking line managers to describe their requisitions (on camera) and then embedding the video/audio into the actual job descriptions. So your jobseekers will be checking out a job on your website, and they'll see a little button saying "listen to our CEO describe our graduate fast-track program".

If anybody wants to beta this approach, get in touch and we can set it up for you and see what results are like. I'm sure that candidates will respond well and I hope we'll see leading recruiters experimenting with these tools shortly.

Newspaper Recruitment Advertising and t'Internet

2007-06-29T02:20:00.000+04:00

The buzz in online recruitment, well at least the jobsite side of things, seems to be a resurgence in newspaper job ads.

This isn't all too surprising given the number of traditional publishing houses that have acquired jobsites. Basically what I've seen coming down the pipe is a scenario whereby if you buy an online advert with a jobsite, they'll throw in a free copy of the advert in the newspaper.

What was you first thought? Mine was, "good value for money". The Sunday Times in South Africa have just launched such a program in conjunction with http://www.careerjunction.co.za/ which is SA's leading jobsite. Not sure what a posting costs, but let's assume $250, and they'll throw in a paper advert that costs triple that. Now I'm thinking great value!?

This demonstrates a few things, not least of which the ways in which traditional business models in recruitment are still learning how to adapt to the digital recruitment era, and also how complementary the two era's can actually be.

Guessing that the newspaper claims a higher quality of responses, and clearly has seen a decline in sales. I also imagine that they can't afford to run this promotion for very long as its designed to increase people using the site and to draw them back to the newspaper - but I also see this will have to bring the newspaper ad costs down a little bit in time. That has to be a great trend for recruiters.

I remember launching the online jobs section of the company website for a large search firm when there were only one or two job sites in the UK. Here we were a few hundred exec search consultants handling a thousand assignment across the globe, and not using the Internet. 75% of the staff probably didn't know how to use the Internet to be honest. This is only 11 years back so it's funny thinking about it now. Anyhow, back to when we decided it would be a good idea to put each of our assignments onto the company website.

There was much debate about whether clients paying $50,000 fees for exec search would be a little unhappy with us putting these jobs on the website; which previously had office telephone numbers, a client list, and little else. Luckily the CEO was 30-something so we got away with it. Clients didn't care of course, so long as we delivered, but they wouldn't elect for it to happen, or request it, as of course they didn't understand the Internet thingy either at this stage. So what we did was made the decision for them. We stopped asking permission, put every brief online, and added 100 pounds sterling to every retainer invoice that went out of the door.

The revenue increase wasn't huge, but it was a healthy and profitable move, it was innovative at the time, and it helped us find a few candidates along the way.

I think it's great to see what has changed in a decade and how the Internet continues to change how we operate. In the mid-late 90's we discretely popped a copy of an advert onto our website which was a service client would pay $50 grand for, and added 100 pounds for the privilege. By they way if the brief was to be put into a newspaper, they'd get charged another $15,000 for that plus 12.5%.

Fast-forward 10 years and jobsites are starting to be used to push packages including a freebie newspaper classifieds ad.

The pace of change is also gaining speed, and I think we'll see in only a year or 2 down the line, that jobsites will have to be bundling recruiter video services for hiring managers to be able to visually sell an opportunity. This along with an online job posting, a virtual way of allowing candidates to search for a job and then really determine if the company is for them before they apply - has to be the way forward.

I'll write more about video recruitment in my next post.

In a related little soundbite a read that Harvey Nash have just launched an online 'newspaper' (their name not mine) for executive jobs. A slight variance on a jobsite, they're really trying to find a new way to get senior execs online to search for jobs, without having to go to a job board. Actually its what I was doing with my old search firm a decade ago - but that wasn't my point, rather that people are still trying to merge the old and the new. They're scared of fully utilising the Internet and having to reduce their fees, but also appreciate that execs are now online but perhaps need to be served the job content in a VIP format.

Nation's capabilities tied to Manpower - the 8pm rule

2007-06-20T10:28:00.000+04:00

I was in Kuwait a fair bit in the last two months, and was quite encouraged to see a lot of activity from the government sector relating to employment and labour.

The Arab Times on Sunday April 22nd reported on Kuwait hosting a regional forum to discuss ways to limit the negative impact of imported labour. Much of the talk from a previous forum on foreign manpower was on bringing the law further in line with the International Labour Organisation, and how to boost Kuwait's cooperation with GCC manpower.

All sounding good so far then.

Saleh Al-Shaikh form the Labour Affairs Ministry of Kuwait went on to detail that some of the discussion points were related to studies into nationalising the workforce, understanding unemployment, and working out ways to keep foreign workers money in the country. Slightly concerning last point, however that is a key role of governments to fuel their own economies, so fair enough.

"Nation's capabilities tied to Manpower" was the lofty title of another piece in the Kuwaiti press, where two Ministers said that the country's capabilities relied on its qualified and trained people, and that the Ministry had great interest in training.

So much hope, and Kuwait has so much potential to deliver on some of these ambitions, but then last week they announced that women can't work beyond 8pm. Well I guess they did say Man-power, nobody said anything about Womenpower. How this is going to affect the hospitality/retail/healthcare etc sectors I don't think anybody really knows yet. What about crew working for Kuwait Airways - or is it okay so long as you're off the ground or in the airport, or in a taxi on the way to the airport. What about nurses, do we have to be sick before 7:30 - or only have babies before sundown?

Lot's to explore here, but it doesn't seem as though this law may have to be revised ever so slightly.

Copy Cat Recruitment Systems

2007-06-20T10:14:00.000+04:00

This kind of carries on from my recent post, so it's going to be a short one. We've noticed a trend, not a new one, but as MENA is an emerging market, it has kind of taken on a new life here recently.

When companies are investigating and buying recruitment systems, all too often the people writing the RFP's are doing so for the first time - or certainly for the firms first hiring platform. As we know it isn't easy to succinctly list a bunch of requirements, ranging from the wild to the sublime, and to do so in such a way that all vendors will give us the clearest answers. So what do you do?

Well, what some are tending to do is to use an RFP template from a vendor as it's a great time saver. Sure we've all tried to be so 'helpful' to prospects, but what companies need to be very careful of is that they don't end up selecting a product that they don't actually need or want. Even worse if it doesn't address many of the underlying issues.

Bedding in serious hiring platforms into companies with thousands of employees and hundreds of line managers takes time, and you often only get one shot at getting it right. Fair evaluation and selection is so imperative that many leading firms are outsourcing this piece to independent consulting firms, which is one of avoiding mistakes. Seems to make sense to me as it also prevents recruiters being sidetracked for a year doing the investigation, tender writing and selection. Whichever way you do it, take your time and be sure you are fairly evaluating the best options to your own requirements.

Let me know your own tender experiences, successful or otherwise?

Recruitment System Tenders/RFP's - be careful out there!!

2007-05-09T12:55:00.000+04:00

A word of warning for companies investing in recruitment management systems. I've seen too many firms struggle with a solution they have chosen, simply because they didn't really know what they wanted. The difficulty is in documenting the requirements which are often sophisticated, and writing it in such a way that vendor responses are properly evaluated and investigated. Many companies in the region are investing in ATS technologies for the first time, and so don't understand the many pitfalls.

A common mistake is to focus in one area and not understand the breadth of these solutions. An example would be to focus on functionality simply to make it easier for the jobseeker to apply, but to ignore Line Manager access to that data. That often leads to loads of CV's, but hiring managers being inundated with emails that haven't been vetted.

Often IT run a tender as they're buying software after all, but they don't understand recruitment at all. Of course everyone thinks if they've been to an interview then they understand recruitment, so they don't consult the business and the Recruiters when
writing the RFP. Recruiters (or Users) are brought in then to see the products on show, but often the scope of the solutions are very limited.

The opposite is more common, where Recruiters write a requirement, but of course the typical technical understanding of a recruiter is limited. Sure we all understand how to post a job ad online, and we may know about blogs and search engines, but data security, back-ups, storage, SLA’s, uptime, bandwidth, servers, systems integration??, the list goes on.

The risk potential is enormous, and I see many companies making mistakes in this area. You have to start of course by putting together a team, who will commit to the requirements gathering/tender/evaluation/selection/implementation process for a whole year, because often it takes that long. You have to ensure the team reflects the needs of all sides of the business, and that there is an agreed recruitment strategy or a vision of what recruitment should look like in 2-3 years.

It’s a tricky area, but the more effort you put into, the more chance there is of getting a solution that is fit for your firm. Good luck with those RFP’s!!

One of Africa's Great Firms to Work For & Cyber Squatters

2007-05-09T12:53:00.000+04:00

Hiring Solutions launched www.careersatceltel.com this week in a project which aims to make Celtel the best Internet recruiter in Africa. The first phase of the project seems to have launched well and rolls out now across fourteen countries and in various languages so definitely a benchmark careers portal in the making.

One shame was that the company planned on using celtelcareers.com, but looked it up and left it to a department to register. Two weeks went by and it was mysteriously snapped up by a cyber squatter.

This scam happens a lot. Basically when you're searching for career portal names for your company make sure you do your research discretely and if you have to check the availability of a name/URL on www.register.com or www.thename.co.uk then if you see a name you need then make sure you buy it immediately.

Recruitment Firms riding a wave..

2007-05-09T12:52:00.000+04:00

..and fees seem to be getting fatter.

The feedback I'm getting from agencies and clients is that recruitment firms are raking in the deals at the minute, with ever increasing fees being earnt. This is normal in a growing market, but I do find it strange that so few major employers have realised they can employ internal head-hunters.

Sure firms are looking to technology to take on some of that role, but time and again they fail to let recruiters conduct true research assignments, they get too quickly drawn into admin tasks or 'special projects' and before you know it they too have to contract an agency to do their recruitment job for them.

Oil & Gas Recruitment Innovation

2007-05-09T12:51:00.000+04:00

The conference I presented at last week in Kuwait was poorly attended to be honest, however the quality of people there was quite good. A broad range of subjects were covered which is good for generalists attending to increase their knowledge, but no so for specialists who have specific problems to fix. One of the most interesting presentations was from the Oil & Gas sector.

The presenter talked about the shortage of students entering engineering disciplines at Universities. Compounded with the fact that the baby-boomers are due to retire in the coming 5 years; means that petroleum engineers and the like simply do not exist in the requisite numbers. This is clearly a massive worldwide problem for recruiters, so when you have to attract people to offshore fields and to less desirable countries you really have to be attractive. In the past salary has done the trick, but now employer branding and the recruitment process are critical also.

O&G recruiters are having to consider offering virtual status, so that new hires don't even have to leave their home countries and families, and allowing retirees to work 2-3 days a week. These workforce dynamics are new in the Middle East and it will be intriguing to see how many such appointments are actually made. This is a double-edged example of the crunch being caused by the Knowledge Economy. As the mature experienced heads are leaving the workforce, the new blood are choosing Law, Technology & Business degrees at Universities.

The War for Talent in this sector is entering a stage similar to that present in the Healthcare industry where we commonly see hospitals short of nurses.

Jobsite Launch Party & CareerBuilder $500M stock deal

2007-05-09T12:49:00.000+04:00

www.exec-appointments.com held their launch party in the Metropolitan Hotel Dubai at the end of April which was good fun.

Good luck to Gamal Abdulla and the team as they grow that business. The site adds another badly needed Vertical jobsite to the Middle East and I hope the trend continues. There are a few Horizontal Regional sites now but specialists are surely needed.

Slightly related is the news I spotted on another blog yesterday about a deal between Microsoft and CareerBuilder. You can see the post here http://jimstroud.com/2007/05/10/microsoft-buys-a-stake-in-careerbuilder/
The headline is that Microsoft buys nearly $0.5bn of stock in CareerBuilder. As it happens it appears the deal is more an advertising swap where CareerBuilder have signed a deal to be the provider exclusively to MSN and other MS sites until 2013, and instead of paying $413 for the privilege, they'll give Microsoft a load of stock.

It's also a minority interest, so quite cleverly it values the company very highly even though no sale or exchange of cash has occured. In terms of cashflow, CareerBuilder have bought an endless amount of advertising but not parted with cash. Sweet deal! I wonder if this is going to set a precedent for how online portal and related recuitment software companies will grow in the next few years?

CareerEx 2007 in Kuwait

2007-04-21T22:12:00.000+04:00

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!!)

Mid East Online Recruitment Advertising Booming?

2007-04-02T18:19:00.000+04:00

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.

107 Saudi firms banned from recruiting

2007-04-02T18:17:00.000+04:00

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.

Umniah - Hanania

2007-04-02T18:09:00.000+04:00

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.

Microsoft Excel 2007 - any good for Recruiter reporting?

2007-04-02T18:07:00.000+04:00

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.

Selfish Recruiters - what's wrong with that? Ask the CFO if he cares.

2007-03-15T00:50:00.000+04:00

"It depends on having the right people on board" - we hear that all the time on the industry. People often quote Jack Welsh of GE and how made HR an executive priority. However what most people overlook is that Welsh also critically understood that he had to get the best Recruiters and HR professionals on board.

Every country a new GE business entered, they would go out to find the best Compensation & Benefits person in the field. Cisco's approach to get great results was to make every employee think like a recruiter, and to contribute to the company recruiting efforts.

How do you get a sales man to focus on the kind of sales that are good for the firm, and not only what's best for his/her pocket? It's very hard, especially in large organisations, however there are three obvious things that most firms do:

1. Talk endlessly about the company mission, strategic direction etc
2. Incentives - top sales people are linked to company performance, often with KPI's, and these affect their own earnings potential.
3. Hire the right people into the role

Here's my point. The above simply does not happen in the Recruitment Department, well all too rarely anyhow.

90% of the time, business unit Recruiters are only concerned with their own workload and making things as easy as possible
for themselves. They have little care or understanding of corporate recruiting objectives, and often counter what is for the good of the company.

I'm talking about simple things such as sharing talented CV's, recording recruiting costs, or submitting evaluation sheets so that colleagues can see interview notes in the future. Imagine the reaction of a CFO if he found out that an accountant was not declaring cost of sales -- the auditors would go crazy, it could even affect share price if it was deemed to have hidden information on performance.

This practice has to change in order for national employers to become successful recruiters. I believe that it is this attitude that is driving (and hindering at the same time) the move to Centralised recruitment departments.

It is a bit of a Catch 22. Large employers need to be able to report and measure their recruiting activities in order to improve, and they need individual recruiters across the organisation to use centralised tools to help improve recruiting on an enterprise-wide or strategic level. Again though it's often those same individual recruiters who have no genuine interest in 'Group' views or goals for recruiting.

Therefore to ensure and meet quality targets, there seems to be no choice but to centralise recruiting, or at least manage recruiters against SLA/KPI's. Certainly I think corporate recruiters should be rewarded against their performance (as you do for Agencies), and the performance of the company on a whole.

Technology of course makes all this possible and easier to measure, but that isn't really the point of my rant here. I just continue to be amazed by recruiters in large organisations who has such a myopic vision, little ambition, and no consideration towards corporate objectives. More troublesome is that this is allowed to take place without complaint.
Executives in the Middle East, until now, have preferred to ignore that their business leaders often don't want to work with internal recruitment functions, and would rather pay through the nose for external support when hiring. Now though with unprecedented growth, escalating hiring costs, high turnover and limited talent supply; the tides may be about to change and we may see CEO's taken a keen interest in 'Corporate Recruitment Performance.

Above is an example of a cost analysis report that an HR Director now runs every quarter and discusses with the Board of one of my clients in Kuwait. This only started in 2006.

It's drill down report so if they see anything that looks incorrect, they can mine down into fine details and work out exactly where the recruitment budgets are going and if they're getting value for money. In this Telco client at least we have seen a mindset change in the recruitment department now that they know the CFO are analysing their activities.
Long may it continue I say, as it seems to be finally driving a quality and corporate consciousness into recruitment, which was sadly lacking before.

Which countries work when it comes to Internet recruiting and Sourcing candidates?

2007-02-15T18:11:00.000+04:00

Well many of them of course, and often different sourcing areas are better depending on which skill sets you're looking for.

Never the less we were doing some analysis last week on this topic and the results were quite interesting and worth sharing I thought.

Below are two images, firstly is a specific campaign run by a client based in Dubai, and where there candidates came from.

Then below there is a pie chart on which countries are the best performing markets (outside of the region itself) for generating online candidates. :

How to make Email add value to Recruitment?!

2007-02-15T17:30:00.000+04:00

For many recruiters still using email addresses to receive CV's, email is your worst nightmare I'm quite sure. But it needn't be useless. There are many really cool ways email can be very helpful; and here's just two ways that are easily set up if you have a candidate management system in place:

1. Systemised Emails to Deliver Candidate Vouchers
Initaitives are always worth talking about, and this isn't revolutionary but still very underutilised in the realm of employer branding. Basically every time you complete an interview, you set the system up to send a thank you letter/email to the candidate. With it you include a voucher for them to redeem against your products. It could be 20% off a cup of coffee or CD (depending on what you sell). The options are limitless and costs next to nothing to put into place. What's the point of this? Well you can imagine the impression you'd have if after your last interview you received a free cinema ticket, or a bottle of wine for you and your partner when you next go to dinner. It would be positive right? Regardless of if you get the job offer next week, or they tell you that you've missed out on the job - you're going to think they're a great company. You may not even spend the voucher, but you'll tell people to think about applying to them. We've done this for retail and hotel clients, but there is no reason most employers couldn't do this. The mareketing department would love recruitment for it (there's a first!) and you'd be creating customers for the company whilst making candidate attraction easier for yourselves.

2. Recruiter EMail Footers to Carry Hotjobs
This can be done whether or not you have a hiring platform in place or not, it can just be automated and more usuful if you're lucky enough to have one. Get all recruiters or even HR staff to update there email auto signatures to include the 3 'hot jobs' of the moment. This free marketing tool will generate awareness and free candidates. It may even cause employees to be aware of those hard-to-fill jobs and refer you fresh candidates.

RSS for Recruitment Staff Knowledge

2007-02-15T17:28:00.000+04:00

We're implementing a massive retail talent management platform for a client currently, and the project champion told us this week how his recruiters across many countries are relying on RSS feeds to keep them up to date with news from around the recruitment/jobs/jobseeker world that is the Internet. I'm not sure how many others are doing this but I thought I'd scribe about it here briefly.

What is RSS, well it stands for Really Simple Syndication; and is an easy automated way of having content sourced from across the Internet for you without having to go and find it yourself. Imagine you like to check the weather each morning in Glasgow (it's raining I can tell you!), and like me you check the sports news or your share values. Well through RSS you can set up a page, think of it as your own private homepage on the Internet, and all those items of interest will be brought into your page for you. It only brings you news when their is latest news to show you, so it saves you going to a site if there's no need.

Back to the recruitment scenario. So as a recruiter you can set up RSS feeds for your business concerns, senior appointments, new jobsites opening up, legislation & staff tribunal cases, salary data, exchange rates, housing prices; and of course the sport!

Quite a nice way of keeping up to speed as a recruiter. Speak to your IT dept/Portal Managers and see if they can help you set something up, it's extremely simple and many RSS readers are free.

'War for Talent' Banking Conference - my thoughts

2007-02-15T17:25:00.000+04:00

Well I went to the 'War for Talent' in Banking Conference a fortnight back, and I wasn't really given the impression that the audience were in battle mode. It was quite disappointing from that perspective. I had hoped HR staffers would be there talking about how they were finding advantages over each other, and who was leading the field; but nobody seemed to be using any tools or techniques worth a mention. I spoke individually to a number of senior recruiters and HR generalists to ask privately what challenges they were facing and how they were reacting....nothing, nobody home.

Shocking really, and I only hope that the Executives of those banks represented are aware at the lack of action being taken, or that there are actually steps being taken to be competitive but that nobody wanted to share their ideas. There were no stand-out employers except HSBC maybe who at least seemed to be going to good efforts to implement locally some of the international retention strategies in the local set up. Even these efforts though seemed to be limited to Opinion Surveys, Exit Interviews and Employee of the Month Awards for staff recognition.

It struck me that the HR Banking community doesn't fully understand yet how difficult it has got to hire great talent in the Middle East markets. Part of the problem I think is that Bankers, not unlike Hoteliers, see banking as something that runs through your blood. Therefore so long as you're a good bank, then you'll attract good bankers (as they won't want to work anywhere other than a bank). The finance markets are changing very quickly across the MENA region as they have in Asia; and corporate recruiters need to see it. There is a diversifying pool of jobs for bankers now more than ever; stock markets being born, Islamic Banking on a meteoric rise, corporate and infrastructure financing and IPO's abound. Banks need to start implementing tools and techniques that the rest of industry has been doing for a couple of years. General employer branding (wider than just targeting bankers) and targeted selection to develop talent pools in key skill areas. Using the Internet to develop relationships ahead of time with that talent.

Banking is so regulated and every risk has to be mitigated; hence training & development is always a mandatory measure.To compound this issue further for banks, is the very fact that have invested in Training so heavily (also as a retention tool) they are a good target for highly developed staff - which others will continue to feed off.

As banks in the region outsource and offshore more of the back-office functions, I foresee a huge crunch in talent shortages in the retained core banking areas; and very few employers in this sector are prepared for this.

Jobsite Fraud - be careful out there!

2007-01-21T15:46:00.000+04:00

I noticed there is a conference being held in London's Cafe Royal this quarter, where some of the leading jobsites (fish4 group for example) are gathering to discuss online fraud that occurs on jobsites. See www.onrec.com for details.

This of course happens in developing markets also, but it is little talked about and we have some local examples that you should be wary of.

So what kind of online fraud would happen on a jobsite or in recruitment in general?
Well it's simply about exploiting a situation, usually to extract cash from someone.

I had an airline client who was using an agency in Kazakhstan to interview customer service staff before they would be offered and flown into the Middle East to start work. The staff turned up to work with their uniforms already; which was a first for the training department who usually issue them. Turns out the agent had provided them at a cost of $500 to each
candidate. Most corporate recruiters are used to agency fraud though and have learned how to deal with it.

A client in Kuwait was telling me last week how he learned that joinees were having to pay back a fee to the agents from their first two months wages.
He made all the staff sign a paper that they had been scammed, and for how much. He then made the agent fly into Kuwait with a bag of cash, and go down a line of staff to hand them back the amount they had paid each.

Online fraud is usually attempted on a big scale, and it happened recently to one of the most successful jobsites based out of Dubai.

An agency in Nigeria advertised a position for a GM based in Nigeria. Hundreds applied, and 400 were individually told that they had been selected (after a phone interview and several email communications). The 400 were then asked to transfer $1,500 (each) to the agency which would be used for visa purposes and reimbursed by the employer once they arrived into the country.

Now I don't know how many unfortunate jobseekers made the transfer; but that's a $600K fraud! And this is just one job opening, from one agency on one site this year. The implications for jobseekers and employers are frightening.

So, how do you prevent this sort of thing happening? Well only the established jobsites can really have the resources to have preventative measures in place. You should ask your jobsites what lengths they go to in validating that all the employers and agencies using their site are legitimate.

It matters to you because once a site gets a reputation for this happening, jobseekers will not trust the site. Imagine you see an ad for a 20-30 year old cabin crew role; and your first thought has to be to check out if it's safe to apply? Imagine being offered a job that ends up costing you $1,500.

Of course most people responsible in recruitment departments for paying for adverts/jobsites know now that they should only use SSL protected or 'secure' sites with decent online payment gateways in place. But finding out if the site has a good reputation amongst jobseekers is a much harder task and one that could have a large impact on eRecruitment right across Asia,
ME & Africa.

Next generation candidates - Jobseeker 2.0

2007-01-09T17:29:00.000+04:00

There is a massive change in how jobseekers are going to be using the Internet to research and find their next few jobs, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts on how that is happening. It is natural that following "Web 2.0", should follow "Jobseeker 2.0" (note: 'Jobseeker 2.0' - you heard it here first ;)

The volume of content is amazing that is available on the Internet is enormous, and growing at a staggering rate. There were 20,000 blogs in 2002, and there are 58 million today. The growth rate is one per second worldwide, with the largest number of new blogs currently being created in Chinese I believe - so please don't disregard this as an American thing. This will affect how you hire in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, I promise you.

Candidates are going to start connecting more with people than companies. Web 1.0 was all about gaining access with a company (from a candidates perspective). Now 2.0 jobseekers are social animals and they will trust a companies employees who are writing on a blog far more than they would buy into the corporate spin. They are busy on the Net looking for new ways to find people, contacts, careers. The corporate spin is still VERY important and dedicated careers portals will continue to grow - however they will also have to learn how to cater to Candidate 2.0
That might mean having employees post to a blog on your careers site for example and include video diaries.

On a side not I was watching an episode of 'Sex and the City' last night, and heard a comment that every person in New York is believed to "always be looking for either a new apartment, and new partner or a new job". How true is that, and does it apply to other major capital centres I don't know; maybe Carrie Bradshaw could holiday in Dubai and carry out some research.

Web 2.0 is all about how easy it has become to publish diverse content, to the Internet. It was always fairly easy for a large firm to get a web design company to build and host a corporate website (web 1.0), but now you and I can write blogs, use social networking sites, upload videos to myspace or youtube.com, or broadcast interviews via pod casts. That has all really all taken place in a very short space of time, and I expect to see an awful lot more of it well through 2007 as more people gain confidence to try out their Internet skills.

However jobseekers are already there, well in the game.

2.0 jobseekers have realised that uploading your CV to Yahoo is no longer that clever, and they will seek out information and contacts for their next job/s this year using a wide variety of tools.

Credibility is being built today by individuals. Search for 'Microsoft blogs' on Google, there are hundreds of MS staff talking about a huge range of things from the work environment, to the pay, to their hobbies and exercise routines. It isn't all about blogs though, far from it. Jobseeker 2.0's are starting to use social networking sites such as linkedin.com, myspace, and recruiting sites are embracing this technology such as jobster and theladders.com to become more than just a website advertising jobs.

The companies that are willing to embrace Web 2.0 will see a win-win with Jobseeker 2.0's. They will be able to connect with great potential hires, who have a good insight into the company and its people before they even apply. That accessibility is essential and ignoring it, or not understanding it, is a recruiting faux-pas for employers today.

eRecruitment on Suppliers: Survival of the Fittest

2007-01-09T17:19:00.000+04:00

Having had a great family Christmas break back to the UK, I have found no end of recruiting technology topics to blog about first in 07. That's partly from having cleared my head on holiday, but to be fair a client also inspired me when he asked this week about what 'risks' they should expect from recruitment firms by introducing a web recruitment software package.

Naturally I am involved in implementing a number of ATS packages into large corporates at any given time. A current project is into the largest retailer in the Middle East of the Sniperhire ATS Corporate Edition version 5.2.

So the Corporate HR Director asks a great question on this conference call and we get into a four way discussion about what kind of push back to expect from trusted recruitment firms, and how do intend to handle that. Now any company introducing eRecruitment technology wll face resistance to change from within, more from HR and Line Managers than from Recruitment staff; but recruitment suppliers can be a world unto themselves. Fortunately now the majority of established recruitment firms have had to start using one product or another for their largest customers.

Suppliers are critical when hiring markets are tough, and in developing markets they are always tough so nobody wants to upest their recruitment suppliers unduly.

One of the first things to mention here is that agencies around the world are now depending heavily on the web themselves to source candidates, which they then interview, repackage and send over email to the client and charge $?,000's for. So if the suppliers can themselves use the Net to find candidates, it shouldn't be a big ask to ask them to submit the same CV's to you (their clients) over the Net also. The only loser in that equation is the email tool, not the supplier.

The next thing we discussed is that as corporate employers introduce and manage their PSL (preferred suppliers list) of recruitment firms, they need to be able to understand (read: Report) on the performance of those supplied services to be able to decide which firms to reward best (read: give more work to). So really the corporate employers facing this challenge
should consider their communications plans carefully for the PSL members, and openly encourage that they support the corporate efforts to manage their recruitment supply chain better and streamline their operations by using eRec technology.

I read an article on workforce.com today and the MD of Stallion Security in South Africa was talking about hwo hard it is to find decent recruitment suppliers. That is one of the great reasons that corporate employers force their agencies onto ATS systems because they can then work out which firms are worth working closely with, and which ones to cut relations with.
"It took us a long time to find the right agencies," Zullberg says. "Most of them just want to pump out CVs to you and don’t want to work with companies that use behavioral assessments or other complex tools for evaluating candidates."

There are other benefits for recruitment suppliers in using ATS technology to submit their CV into also, for example they can receive instant feedback once the client has reviewed or made a decision on a candidate, they can get alerts when interviews are scheduled or offers are issued.

Suppliers can also be informed when they are proposing a candidate that the client already has in their database, rather than waste time only to find out that the candidate was considered by the client previously. That transparency and collaborate approach can help the supplier work smarter and save themselves time, and therefore make their fees faster.

The biggest fear that recruitment suppliers have when it comes to their clients forcing them to use the ATS platform, is that it will lead to them being given less briefs, and make less money; but that simply isn't valid. If a recruitment supplier is skilled in sourcing and providing the best CV's, and they can evaluate them better/faster than the employer, then they will continue to win business.

Certainly the employers introducing recruiting technology do become better themselves at sourcing and managing candidates, so to some extent they will be reduce their supplier dependency - but the fittest will survive. Are clients under pressure to watch costs, absolutely, but that's only right and also only because they're spending more than ever on talent.

Bottom line is that it is well worth the risk for all parties, and if a supplier cannot supply a service at a higher level than the client can themselves, then yes they will lose business, but good suppliers will remain.

Happy new year and happy recruiting by the way, hope you have a great one.

We're Hiring

2006-12-19T15:54:00.000+04:00

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.

Dr Lien's Talent Management Conundrum

2006-11-29T14:29:00.000+04:00

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.

Chief Talent Sourcer?

2006-11-23T18:01:00.000+04:00

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.

Changes to my blog

2006-11-17T10:17:00.000+04:00

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,

What War for Talent?

2006-11-13T23:34:00.000+04:00

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.

Human Capital Conference @ JW Marriott Dubai

2006-11-13T23:32:00.000+04:00

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.

SAP Portal for MEA

2006-11-05T09:52:00.000+04:00

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!

Goldmine Recruitment & Creating jobs for women in Saudi

2006-11-05T09:38:00.000+04:00

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.

My week in Riyadh (and a Dinner with Recruiters)

2006-10-10T13:05:00.000+04:00

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?

2006-10-07T08:13:00.000+04:00

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?

2006-10-03T14:04:00.000+04:00

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?

2006-10-03T12:47:00.000+04:00

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

2006-10-02T17:07:00.000+04:00

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.

.jobs Domains

2006-08-27T23:31:00.000+04:00

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.

eRecruitment this week in Arabia

2006-08-27T23:04:00.000+04:00

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

MonsterGulf launches - more choice has to be good

2006-08-11T02:05:00.000+04:00

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??

Internet for Dummies

2006-08-11T01:21:00.000+04:00

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.

Search Engine Optimisation for Careers in Saudi

2006-08-07T00:28:00.000+04:00

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.

Confusion in Kuwait

2006-08-06T23:33:00.000+04:00

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..