E-recruitment - Gaining ground by the day in the Arab Region
By: The Interest Zone Editor

While e recruitment – the identifying and hiring of staff via dedicated internet sites - is a well established industry in advanced nations … it has only recently started gaining ground and credibility in the Arab region. 

Recruitment alternatives:
The Internet is rapidly changing the recruiting game, making the search for quality staff less expensive, faster and more efficient than hiring outsider employment agencies or placing advertisements. Agencies would traditionally charge their clients one month or more of a recruited person’s annual salary; while newspaper advertising costs are high, time exposure is short (unless you advertise repeatedly) and their circulation and geographic boundaries can be limiting. The elapsed time - from confirming a recruitment need in an organization till the identification of the most suitable short list of candidates – ranges from several weeks for the newspapers’ advertising approach, to a couple of weeks for using an employment agency to hours when using internet recruitment (where an employer can search a large online database using specific selection criteria, pull relevant resumes instantaneously and communicate rapidly with targeted job seekers). 

It is worth mentioning that internet recruitment is better used in relation to university graduates ranging in seniority from juniors to middle level management. Senior executives could be rarely found via the internet; even the best established head hunting firms in the United States – the most advanced market for internet recruitment –dedicated to the selection and placement of senior executives, have had limited success in their online endeavors (such as Hedrick & Struggles’ LeadersOnline.com and Korren Ferry’s FutureStep.com). 

Among the better known and most active internet recruitment companies around the world are Monster.com, Jobsonline.com and Hotjobs.com , these boast millions of visitors every month, they carry several million resumes and at any given point of time carry several hundred thousands job vacancy announcements. There are also the niche or specialized sites for certain professions like IT, health care or hospitality. 

E recruitment in the Arab world:
In our part of the world, there are two or three at best credible regional e recruitment companies with reasonable traffic (however nothing to compare with the US sites), a good resume database and descent content. While these are described as regional; their real focus is on a more limited geographical area: the Arab Gulf and Egypt and to a lesser extent Lebanon and Jordan. 

These e recruitment companies – very early on – discovered they cannot be local (ie. limited to a single country); this is due to the a number of key facts, namely:

• the Gulf states’ heavy reliance on ‘expatriate’ staffing, thus the need to tap on the most obvious job seekers ‘exporting’ markets…such as Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. While the subcontinent (India and Pakistan) is also a major skill bank for the Gulf, none of the regional e recruitment companies have aggressively tapped this area via heavy advertising or ‘on the ground’ presence;

• Outside the Gulf region, Egypt is the biggest employment market and has the largest number of internet users (corporate or individuals) in the Arab world, hence the need for a high profile presence in that country. It was normal that the two largest e recruitment companies have their head offices in Cairo.

• Qualified staff are on the look for more rewarding career opportunities; they are more attracted by recruitment sites offering them opportunities in and outside their countries of residence. It must also be noted, that Arab expatriates in the Gulf will sooner or later seek to go back to their homeland and this usually require finding the right job opportunity back home before making the move.

The region’s e recruitment companies are not threatened by their large American and European counterparts; since the latter have little interest to invest money and effort in this part of the world that has little impact on their global operations. They remain useful however for an Arab based company seeking to recruit someone from the United States or Ireland for example. 

E recruitment sites are not all equal:
There are a number of factors that differentiate an internet recruitment site from the other; which directly impacts the ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ of resumes it has and ultimately the quality of services provided to companies using it for recruitment. These could be summarized in the following:

• The e recruitment company’s brand development (advertising, promotional events etc…) which directly correlates to the size of its registered job seekers.

• The attention given to content (professional advice, recruitment tips, employment news….) on the web site which leaves a strong impression on new visitors and help generate recurring interest in the site.

• The recruitment site’s ease of navigation and user friendly tools for both job seeker and employer…Worth noting that the more elaborate the search/selection criteria provided by the site are; the more relevant the results for corporate users become.

• The confidentiality provided to job seekers, whereby in the initial phases of search by corporate recruiters on the site, the former’s identity (name and employer name) are not revealed. Such confidentiality features attract a better quality of professionals would otherwise not register with the site to avoid any complications with their current employers. This obviously requires a more advanced technology solution to support the site.

• A key aspect, often ignored (or avoided for its high cost) by most e recruiters is the checking and verification of registered job seekers resumes to guarantee a minimum level of relevance and objectivity. This is particularly important in our region since in most cases submitted resumes tend to miss critical information or overstate certain skills.
  Also, since English is the second (or third) language for most of the Middle East residents, mistakes happen due to language misinterpretation. Minimizing (if not eliminating) junk, errors and useless resumes is vital to save the time and effort of corporate users. While there is a very obvious need for such a human review and verification process, it requires a significant investment in hiring and training of back office staff to support it; most e recruiters therefore tend to avoid it completely.