Sharaf Retail is on an expansion mode and is set to hire 1,500 additional employees over the next 18 months, the company announced on Tuesday.
The company behind a number of retail and hospitality brands such as Sharaf DG, Forever 21, Cotton On, Sanrio, Adventure HQ, Yellow Hat and Hello Kitty Spa is adding more brands to its portfolio and opening new stores in various markets to meet the growing demand.
The additional staff will be assigned to new and existing outlets in the Gulf, Levant, Far East, Asia. Analysts earlier estimated that the GCC retail industry alone is expected to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 8.3 per cent until 2015.
“Besides the overall positive market trend, there’s a clear increasing demand for retail. Furthermore, Sharaf operates 16 major international and five in-house brands each with huge potential. We’re also adding new brands and new stores. When you put all of these in perspective, then clearly we are in expansion mode,” Yasser Sharaf, managing director of Sharaf Retail, told Gulf News.
Sharaf said their customers prefer to talk to sales professionals who know a lot about the products they’re selling, so they are putting a big emphasis on recruiting the best candidates who are passionate about what they do. To facilitate the hiring, Sharaf Retail, with the help of its partner Cazar, has just launched an interactive career portal, www.tareeki.com.
Through Tareeki, which means “my path” or “my journey” in Arabic, candidates can browse through a list of vacancies, apply, track their application and subscribe to email alerts for future opportunities, among others.
Considering that the company is anticipated to receive and process a huge volume of applications, Mohammed Owais, chief technology officer of Cazar, said managing the recruitment across stores, locations, jobs, departments and tracking them at various stages can be challenging without an efficient and scalable system in place.
“All these new staff, regardless of where they are applying from or the location or store, or where the need is, can use Tareeki.com from the initial steps all the way to joining [the company),” he added. The look and feel of the website is designed to attract today’s Generation Y, which makes up a large proportion of Sharaf Retail’s workforce.
