If you thought online recruitment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is yet to come of age, think again. Hiring Solutions has reported that one of its clients, who implemented its intelligent recruitment platform just two months ago, received and effectively managed over 20,000 job applications for its KSA vacancies in August. Of this, nearly 14,000 applications were from Saudi nationals!
Hiring Solutions is the region’s only talent solutions provider for large organisations. Its solutions currently empower over 125 businesses in 40 countries. Its online platforms run the worldwide as well as the Saudi hiring operations of DHL, Zain (formerly MTC), Atos Origin Middle East and Azadea Group, to name a few.
Edward Musiak, Country Manager – KSA, Hiring Solutions, says, “We have always believed that enterprises headquartered in Saudi Arabia can easily tap and manage their own quality talent pool, both from within KSA and the world over. All that is needed is for board-level executives to realise this is a job-seeker’s market and push for change in the organisation’s approach to recruitment.
“Last year, our clients received in excess of two hundred thousand job applications for their Saudi vacancies resulting in hundreds of hires,” says Musiak, adding, “Today’s winning organisations recognise that good candidates have a choice in the job market. Our web-based technology is so advanced, it helps organisations treat job applicants the same way they would treat potential customers – by deploying good marketing programmes and effecting swift response and service.”
Musiak’s comments may surprise large corporations that are struggling to find quality candidates in a country like Saudi, even though KSA internet usage has grown 11-fold between 2000 and 2007. In fact, if you search for “Jobs in Saudi”, Google returns tens of thousands of results.
With most recruitment firms and employers seeking candidates on the internet, leading organisations like Zain and DHL approached Hiring Solutions to set up a state-of-the-art online recruitment platform.
Soon after, not only did they receive thousands of online applications from within Saudi Arabia itself, the system was able to automatically identify quality candidates using intelligent evaluation tools.
For most corporations, hiring the right candidates and eliminating lost opportunities is very important. Using an effective recruitment platform, winning organisations are attracting thousands of candidates, managing CVs with ease, integrating with recruitment agencies and job portals, monitoring performance of these channels, creating an attractive career brand, managing a talent pool for speculative jobs, the list just goes on.
Ben Fawcett, Director, Hiring Solutions, says, “Saudi Arabia’s biggest challenge is shortage of available talent and the only way forward is to redefine the approach and create a successful employer brand. Our solutions are helping many large Saudi and regional companies overcome this dilemma. I’d strongly suggest that any Saudi firm trying to work out how they win their war for talent and what the pay back is, to visit the ‘Business Case’ section on hiringsolutions.com and read about how it’s worked for other regional leaders.”
Hiring Solutions opened a direct office in Riyadh in 2006, and have held educational seminars regularly which have been well attended by industry peers and executives keen to learn about the latest trends in using the Internet to attract and retain talent.
