Firms go smart to hire the best

ALKESH SHARMA / Emirates Business

Drifting away from traditional norms of recruiting using emails and phone calls, the 21st century recruiters are strategically using smart devices to hunt the right talent in the market. The GCC nations are prolifically using mobile technology to attract, engage and hire potential candidates.
According to the reports, UAE is the main harbinger in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region when it comes to following the technique of mobile recruiting. Around 64 percent of recruiters in the Emirates admitted attracting right talent through mobile recruiting while 58 percent declared customising their in-house technology to facilitate the cycle of mobile recruitment.
“Current generation is highly driven by smart-phone revolution. As per our survey, majority of the UAE youth, in the age bracket of 20 to 26 years, is engaged with their smart-phone for over six hours on any normal day. And 52 percent of this time is usually spent for finding future job leads,” Anshul Kataria, Principal, Head-Tracker, a leading HR-firm that is headquartered in Dubai, told Emirates Business.
“So what could be a better place than a mobile to find a suitable job candidate? Corporate sector understands this and therefore they have started doing customised changes to their technology, websites and apps in order to reach the right talent pool in this region,” pointed out Kataria.
Industry experts say that corporates are investing up to 5 to 10 percent of their annual budget in improving their internal mobile activities.
In one of its recent survey reports titled ‘Using Social Media for Talent Acquisition – Recruitment and Screening’, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) says that two-thirds of organisations — nearly 66 percent — have taken steps to leverage mobile recruiting, particularly to target the smart-phone users. Most commonly, organisations have optimised their career websites (39 percent), job postings (36 percent) and application processes (36 percent) for mobile users.
Mobile recruiting, eventually leading to the digitisation of the overall HR functions, usually offers free time and leaves resources for organisations to concentrate on other activities like talent development.
Raaid Damati, Human Capital SaaS Sales Strategy Director, Oracle, ECEMEA Region, said, “Digital HR environment will allow the organisation to move with an employee, from his recruitment phase to the skill development and assessment phase. Digital technologies also automate many routine activities of the HR, thereby freeing up HR staff to add more value to the company’s management of its staff.”
SHRM survey also reveals that nearly 23 percent of the organisations frequently update applicants via email, text or phone and around 21 percent of the enterprises are making use of technology that is specifically designed for mobile recruiting.
It should be noted that SHRM is one of the world’s most reliable organisations when it comes to gauge human resource trends. It is the world’s largest HR membership organisation devoted to human resource management. It represents over 275,000 members in more than 160 countries.