Bayt.com, the Middle East’s number one job site, is celebrating15 years of delivering effective, end-to-end employment solutions to job seekers and HR professionals throughout the region. Since its inception, Bayt.com has grown at an incredibly rapid pace – from a simple online job portal to the single largest career site and recruitment solutions marketplace for professionals and companies in the Middle East and North Africa. Bayt.com has continued to provide unparalleled value across the employment spectrum by maintaining its commitment, over the years, to deliver unique and innovative products that specifically cater to the region’s special employment needs.
"Using Bayt.com, Gulf International Bank (GIB) has become much more cost-effective in the recruitment function," said Nawaf Kably, Head of Recruitment & Staff Benefits, at Gulf International Bank. "In just one year, Bayt.com has helped us trim the time it takes to close our hiring targets to almost half, and saved approximately $150,000. Bayt.com solutions has especially been a terrific tool that has measurably improved our bottom line and quality of hire."
Today, over22,750,000 professionals and over40,000 leading organizations enjoy the job site’s fully-trilingual (Arabia, English, and French) recruitment platform. Bayt.com caters to all industry categories, job roles and career levels. In2015 alone, Bayt.com welcomed over3 million new members spanning the region’s hottest and most vibrant sectors and career profiles.
“From its very inception, Bayt.com set out to serve as an engaging, powerful, and indispensable online platform, designed to match the needs of qualified job seekers with those of employers across the career and industry spectrum,” said Suhail Masri, VP of Sales, Bayt.com. “In keeping with our commitment to redefining the recruitment landscape, we have managed to help bridge employment gaps across the region, contribute to the creation of vibrant career conversations and solid career trajectories, and build a fully-fledged professional community and marketplace that unites those at both ends of the employment spectrum. As we mark the15-year milestone, we would like to take a moment to thank all of our stakeholders, including employers, active members and HR professionals. They have played a pivotal role in our growth story and we remain committed to providing them with the most effective, enriching and engaging online extension of their careers and lives.”
Al-Masri also added, “Moving forward, our aim is to continue on our stellar growth path, keep tapping deeply into the Middle East’s rich talent pool, and further help organizations across the region cultivate a dynamic and highly competitive workforce.”
About working with Bayt.com, Khalid Al Soumali, Head of Talent Acquisition, Banque Saudi Fransi, said: "Recruiting top talent is a priority for Banque Saudi Fransi, and partnering with Bayt.com has empowered our recruiters to hire more quickly and efficiently, and has helped us create a huge talent pool of jobseekers."
"Since International Bank of Qatar (IBQ) started using Bayt.com’s services, we have been impressed with the massive database of jobseekers and are extremely pleased with the great customer service," said Maya El Feghali, Recruitment Specialist at International Bank of Qatar (IBQ).
Andrei Karpovich, Director of Career Planning at Rotana Hotel Management Corporation PJSC, said: “Since we started our partnership with Bayt.com in2012, we haven’t regretted a single time that we preferred this local provider to other famous branded career channels. Rotana’s Bayt.com-powered careers website has become our main source for recruiting candidates. Having at our disposal our very own pool of more than300,000 jobseekers of all career levels, departments and geographical regions, has helped us considerably reduce the ratio of utilizing recruitment agencies and other hiring sources, and hence, remarkably saving on our recruitment expenses.”
“From an administrative point of view,” Mr. Karpovich continues. “The platform is a very handy recruitment tool - the entire process is managed easily, allowing us to post vacancies, receive CVs, filter, screen, contact candidates and track all activities from the confines of a highly functional Employer Workspace. To crown it all, Bayt.com technical support team is very much responsive and efficient in handling not only sporadic system glitches but also in working together on introducing new features and developing the functionality of the website. We regularly receive commendable feedback from jobseekers using the website from their side.”
Looking back, Bayt.com’s15-year journey has been punctuated by a slew of milestones and industry ‘firsts’.
In2001, Bayt.com became the first bilingual recruitment portal in the region; two years later, it launched an application service provider enabling instant connections between relevant jobs and potential employees. In2004, Bayt.com launched a CV writing service, followed by professional career coaching in2006. This led to the first ever Virtual Job Fair in the Middle East, a platform now very popular with conglomerates and educational institutes seeking to engage real-time on a large scale with jobseekers and students across the region.
In2010, Bayt.com launched its Salaries platform, a salary benchmark repository and calculator which has since evolved into a comprehensive salary research tool for both professionals and companies. In2012, a mobile application was launched, making the site more accessible to professionals who wished to explore career options while on the move. In line with its mission to maximize community value, Bayt.com Specialties, the first pan-regional Middle East social career tool was introduced in2013. It enables professionals to showcase their interests and expertise while networking with industry peers. In September2015, Bayt.com Specialties hit the1-million-questions milestone and10-million-users mark in a resounding testimony to the dynamism of the career conversations on the site. As part of its efforts to encourage entrepreneurship and small business creation in the Middle East and North Africa, Bayt.com also launched its Start-up Kit earlier this year.
Bayt.com’s current roster of high value pioneering functions includes a ‘Learning’ section – that consists of tests and courses – especially created to empower members to enhance and develop their careers. In addition, it enables employers to gauge knowledge of new hires in a fast and simple way with pre-existing tests. There is also a new and highly differentiated mobile application, in an extensively augmented line-up of employer tools.
"We have increased the quality-of-hire drastically in the past few years,” said Bashar Alqudah, Recruitment and Training Senior Manager at Royal Jordanian. "Our hiring budgets have been closed consistently by using Bayt.com, with its portfolio of innovative recruitment solutions, optimized for hiring quickly and cost-efficiently in the Middle East in particular."
Masri concludes: "We are delighted with how far Bayt.com has come and we continue to expand assignments from loyal existing clients and attract strategic new business from market leaders in every industry. We are very proud of how our work in both the private and public sector advisory and core direct recruitment arenas has gone a long way in truly paving the region’s employment landscape and impacting the lives of millions of professionals and their families, in line with our mission to empower people with the tools and technologies to build a better life. Bayt.com remains the region’s leading platform for top talent and employers to meet, interact and effect highly informed employment decisions in the fastest, easiest and most efficient manner possible."