Hiring C-suite, or top senior executives, is one of the most important decisions your company will ever make. Indeed, finding top-level candidates who can take your organization to new heights takes a lot of time and effort. However, almost a third (29%) of employers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) say that sourcing relevant senior executive talent is the biggest challenge they face when hiring, according to the Bayt.com ’
Hiring Management in the MENA‘ poll, August 2012.
Traditionally, C-suite executives have been recruited through headhunting agencies or referrals. These methods may be more expensive and potentially less optimal. Fortunately, the recruitment landscape is changing for the better. Where once online recruitment was used primarily to recruit entry-level and mid-level professionals, it is now a major platform to source and hire C-suite executive talent.
Here’s why C-suite recruitment has moved online:
High opportunity cost. Today, there are more than 135 million individuals using the internet in the Arab world, as revealed in the ‘
Arab World Online 2014: Trends in Internet and Mobile Usage in the Arab Region’. Similarly, 51% of employers who took part in the ‘
Hiring Management in the MENA‘ poll say they hire senior executive talent online. Leading job sites, such as Bayt.com, serve as a highly effective online intermediary. In fact, Bayt.com has almost 20 million job seekers registered on its website, ranging from interns and entry-level professionals to middle managers, team leaders and C-Suite executives. The sheer size of the Bayt.com database means that the opportunity cost of not being online is huge - specifically given the volume and momentum of recruitment activity that takes place on Bayt.com everyday, at every end of the career spectrum and across all industries.
Senior talents are online. The C-suite talent pool has become incredibly IT and web savvy and most professionals have active online profiles. In fact, 55% of professionals in the region feel they’re more likely to be hired if they are active online, as per the Bayt.com ‘
Social Recruiting in the Middle East and North Africa’ poll, October 2014. These profiles give a recruiter a better idea of a candidate’s personality, achievements, knowledge, and hands-on experience. In many cases, highly established executives have their own blogs. Nearly all of them are on social media as well. These online activities can assist companies in gaging potential candidates while simultaneously avoiding the costs of hiring the wrong person. In fact, as more and more C-suite talent post examples, pictures, videos, or portfolios of their work on the internet, finding talented individuals for a C-suite role will move into the mainstream. Evaluating their actual work will also prove to be an accurate assessment approach. Sourcing becomes easier as almost everyone becomes ‘findable’ on the internet and social media.
HR departments are budget-driven. Time is money, and today’s budget conscious, ROI driven HR departments are anxious to save both. The Bayt.com ‘
Skills and Hiring Trends in the MENA’ poll, January 2015, reveals that 48% of companies in the MENA take quite a long time to fill an open vacancy in their company – between 1 and 3 months. The internet has emerged not only as a faster, easier and more effective way to source and screen top talent, but also as an efficient tool to manage the entire end-to-end recruitment process, in the short and long run. With amazing technology available in the market today, companies can search through millions of CVs and promptly narrow them down to the exact candidates required. The Bayt.com
CV Search and
Job Postings are only examples of the wellspring of services that help employers find the perfect match for their job vacancies. With the possibility to filter CVs by key criteria, such as years of experience, nationality, location and industry, the chances of finding the right candidate becomes much higher.
Top executives engage in active online conversations. Professional networking forums are the new frontier in online recruitment and a top choice for identifying leaders in their area of expertise, especially at the senior end of the spectrum. This could be attributed to the fact that 81% of professionals feel that professional online platforms, such as
Bayt.com Specialties, are a good way for employers and candidates to engage together through industry-related comments, discussions and questions, according to the Bayt.com ‘
Social Recruiting in the Middle East and North Africa’ poll.
Bayt.com Specialties invites specialists from all over the world to come together and engage in industry-related discussions. Specialists with the best content are endorsed by their peers and get badges and ranks on their CV.
Bayt.com Specialties has proven to be a great tool for companies to pick the best amongst top executives in their industry. This indirect approach to hiring, which relies on networking and relationship building, is necessary to get to know a candidate well beyond the limits of a traditional CV.
The global economy. C-suite talent is scarce. This is why sourcing C-suite executives has become a global process. Companies want to take advantage of the vast executive talent pool across the world. As the workforce is becoming increasingly global, and mobile, employers are looking to hire individuals who can lead a multicultural organization and craft practical strategies that will ensure long-term profitability. Recruiting online greatly reduces the distance between global companies and job seekers, ensuring that these companies make the best C-suite hires.
As an employer, you must realize that if you want to win in the recruitment arena and hire the best C-suites for your company, you will have to gain a competitive edge in order to stay ahead of the trends and the adopted practices of other companies. If you delay taking action, it is almost impossible to catch up if you fall too far behind, because your talent competitors will be continually moving ahead of where they were when you originally benchmarked against them. So in order for you to stay ahead and build a competitive talent advantage, you will have to move online and start developing your plan for addressing the upcoming challenges and for taking advantage of imminent talent opportunities.
