The years 2021 and part of 2022 were when the global economy rebounded from the pandemic, and companies looked to hire. “Great Resignations” had now become a widespread phenomenon, forcing companies to ramp up hiring rapidly and on a large scale to address the high level of turnover. Therefore, when recruiting the best and brightest candidates, the competition for top talent can be fierce. That’s even before considering that the UAE’s employment rate has stood between 94% and 99% over the last decade. That means your next hire is probably not actively seeking a new role.
The best talent will not settle for anything less than the best employer, so you’ll need to get creative and put effective recruitment strategies in place if you want to get suitable candidates through your Dubai or UAE-based business door.
So, if you’ve ever had difficulty recruiting the right talent or even had problems attracting your preferred candidates, here are ten ways to boost your recruitment efforts from some of the world’s biggest global brands.
1. Define Your Value Proposition
When you think about it, future hires are similar to new customers. They’ve got a challenge – the next step in their career –and they need your help to overcome it. So it’s essential to define your value proposition. If you want them to stick around for the medium to long term, you need to sell them for more than pay. You need to deliver on a promise – such as clear career progression – alongside a key critical differentiator: what is it about working for the company that will make them choose you over a competitor?
Creating fast-paced and disruptive video content as part of your recruitment campaign can clearly define your employer value proposition and brand. Take the world-leading sparkling water brand SodaStream. Their ‘Join The Revolution’ campaign video features a series of comical interactions, including their CEO, employees, and Game of Thrones Star, Thor Bjornsson, and aimed at attracting ‘extraordinary global talent.’
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2. Build Your Employer Brand
As soon as you’ve made your first hire, you’ve got an employer brand. Now it’s down to you as an employer to shape that brand to make it as appealing as possible to the best and brightest talent. Why’s that so important? Studies show that around 75% of job seekers consider the employer brand before applying.
An employer brand goes much deeper than simply managing people and their work. Like your business brand, your employer brand helps to define your value proposition, not only as a place to work but in terms of personal growth and career progression. Your employer brand defines your company culture, represented by your people and work. It shows future employees what it’s like to work for you and why they should stick around for the long term once they’re through the door.
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An effective employer brand will create excitement around your business as a workplace, making it more desirable for future hires. Take BUPA Arabia, for example. In 2021, it won two prestigious CIPD awards for its employer brand and employee engagement initiative based on various criteria, including diversity and inclusion initiatives, employee retention, and team performance. LinkedIn also awarded BUPA Arabia the ‘Best Employer Brand’ based on the impact of its employer branding strategies.
3. Seek Referrals
Finding the right talent for your organization is a constant networking activity backed by the ongoing promotion of your employer brand and the continuous building of a talent pool. Good people tend to know good people, so referrals from new or existing employees are a great way to source top talent. Research shows that the number one way people discover new jobs is through referrals. A simple way to do this is through an incentive scheme.
Salesforce uses Recruitment Happy Hours, where employees invite referrals they feel would be an excellent fit for a company social event, making it a fun, informal, and more relaxed way to network with potential hires.
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4. Promote Company Culture
When it comes to being an employer, your biggest advocates are existing employees. They offer prospective employees a window into what it’s like to work for your business. As well as providing a network of referrals, existing employees can help promote the company culture by sharing their experiences working for you on social media and your website – whether that’s re-posting and commenting on special events or writing blog posts about their experiences both inside and outside the company. Employee testimonials are a powerful way of promoting your company culture and making it appeal to candidates.
It’s also vital to promote company culture within your organization as well. Dubai-based luxury retailer the Chalhoub Group currently has17 people experience communities that advocate and promote a happy workplace and a positive company culture. The result? They’ve been awarded the Great Place to Work® Certification for three years in the UAE.
5. Increase Online Engagement
Amplifying your employer brand via social media channels is a great way to attract talent to your company and build a relationship with them. Research by LinkedIn shows that 65% of professionals use a social media platform to find new job opportunities and potential research employers. For employers, increasing your visibility on social media is vital if you want to engage with the right talent.
However, many employers in the MENA region still rely solely on more traditional channels to advertise open roles, such as job postings or careers pages. That doesn’t mean they should stop using these methods – quite the opposite. Employers can leverage social media as a recruitment tool to drive potential talent traffic to the careers page of their website or a job posting on a recruitment platform.
Global Quick Serve Restaurant (QSR), McDonalds, uses social media to meet its millennial target audience where they are – on Snapchat on their smartphones. Their revolutionary ‘Snaplication Campaign’ invites potential candidates to record and upload a 30-second resume video to a recruitment portal. Of course, the social media platform you choose depends very much on the age group you’re targeting.
6. Have An Open House
Another stumbling block for recruiters in the UAE is the limited uptake of emiratization in the private sector, with only 28% of employers targeting nationals. This means a considerable amount of top talent is going under the radar. However, the comprehensive federal program Nafis aims to readjust this balance by providing financial incentives and creating employment opportunities.
One way to encourage interest in your company is by hosting open house events in the office or at a location such as a racecourse to give potential candidates a deeper insight into your company culture, employer value proposition, and what it is like to work for you. Another great way to showcase your offering as an employer is through video. Retail giant Amazon co-creates video content with highly engaged employees to promote its employee value proposition. The employee stories focus on their experiences and a sense of purpose, alongside the career opportunities on offer – giving prospects a glimpse of their potential future career.
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7. Show Them The Future
The best and brightest hires need to see a career roadmap laid out in front of them. If there’s nowhere to go and no clear opportunities for progression, you will struggle to attract top talent and retain them. The role they sign up for today might differ from the one they’re doing in a year.
When you recruit, keep one eye on the future and have the candidate’s potential at the forefront of your mind. The best talent will always be on the lookout to grow – so show them the future opportunities of your organization. For example, the Emirates Group, which offers a wide variety of career opportunities, shares via its website ‘a day in the life‘ interviews with current employees working in different roles. This also includes a typical daily schedule so that potential candidates get a clear picture of their day-to-day.
8. Optimize Job Postings
In the MENA region, there’s a discrepancy between the skills employers value and the skills employees value. According to LinkedIn, whilst employers tend to privilege skills such as analytical skills, technical expertise, creativity, and openness to other cultures, employees place great importance on education and time management.
That’s why it’s important to get job postings and job descriptions right. It’s worth crafting your job descriptions to appeal to your ideal candidates. At the same time, transparency is key. With a permanent placement, there’s no point getting them through the door only to lose them six months later because your company or the role didn’t live up to the initial promise.
The Emirates Group Careers page provides prospective candidates with information about potential roles and clear and straightforward information about career progression to ensure that only the right candidates apply.
9. Streamline Your Recruitment Process
In the current climate of the global job market, top talent doesn’t hang around for long, and your competitors will undoubtedly be using evermore efficient and time-saving tactics to bring in the best hire. So what can you do to keep up? Streamlining your application process is one way to ensure you keep potential hires engaged and in the running. You can still be thorough in your screening and selection process, but do you need three rounds of interviews and a cognitive test?
If you’re an international entrepreneur or global business setting up in Dubai, one way to streamline your hiring process is to set up within a free zone, such as Meydan. This means that everything from business licenses to employment visas can be processed quickly and efficiently through an online portal. This eliminates the need to print and post relevant documents manually.
10. Hire Faster But Go Steady
It pays to do your Research. By sourcing potential hires before the recruitment process begins, you can tailor your efforts toward your preferred choice of candidate. Applying the marketing principles of a target audience, or even a particular niche, helps you narrow your search. Taking steps to hire faster does not mean dropping your standards. It means finding ways to optimise your hiring process to get the right hire at the right time. Rushing the hiring process can leave you wide open to the wrong candidate selection, and you can end up wasting time and money on putting things right.
People at the top of their game know their worth, so coaxing them out of a secure role with another company, and attracting them to your business, takes skill and determination. But by applying some of these tried and tested recruitment strategies, you make the right hires for your business, bringing the best and brightest talent onboard.
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