It has been a busy year for the Bayt team. One year ago this June, Bayt established an office in Dubai and began development on the regions' first fully comprehensive and bilingual recruitment site: Bayt.com.
Today, over3,000 of the regions' leading companies are using the site for their recruitment needs and the Bayt database has grown to more than65,000 registered jobseekers, making it the fastest growing site of its kind in the Arab World.
In the last year, Bayt has also secured partnerships with global technology leaders Oracle and Sun Microsystems, has been selected as a service provider for the Oracle Venture Network and has emerged as the online job engine of choice, powering the career sections of leading portals such as Arabia.com and Maktoob.
Unparalleled Growth
Bayt.com was launched in November2000. Within its first month, the site was already listed in the ITP Web Index* as one of the top ten websites in the Middle East in terms of traffic and visits and had registered over600 regional companies to use its service by January. Today, more than3,000 leading employers in the region are registered to gain access to Bayt's global talent pool, which encompasses all career levels from entry level to senior management and spans over94 industries.
In terms of online metrics, Bayt has shown a steady increase in both traffic and registered users. Bayt.com has rapidly shot up to a ranking of4th place on the Web Index with over4 million page views in May, surpassing its competitors and making Bayt.com the number one destination for online recruitment in the region, despite being a relative newcomer to the e-recruiting space in the Middle East.
Traffic is great, but what about revenues?
Whilst registrations and record page views are a testament to Bayt's online leadership, the company is aware that traffic is not the only metric for success. Is Bayt making money? "Yes. In fact, Bayt has been earning revenues since its first month of operation" says Dany Farha, Bayt's Director of Operations and Sales. "Our first few months served to pinpoint our target markets and we are now rolling out an aggressive expansion plan to service the regions and industry sectors where volume and revenues are highest."
Bayt has already consolidated its leadership position in the UAE by setting up a dedicated presence in Abu Dhabi to serve its clients there and to support the head office at Dubai Internet City. Plans for regional expansion are also on schedule, with Bayt offices established in Riyadh and Al-Khobar last month and plans for3 more major cities in the Middle East within the next6 months.
"Twelve months ago, Bayt made a commitment to provide jobseekers and employers in the Middle East with a fast, easy and effective recruitment solution", says Bayt CEO, Rabea Ataya. "Our achievements to date show that we are well on our way to realizing this vision and are now ready to move into the next phase of development. We remain dedicated to a best-of-breed approach in everything we do, from partnership building to client servicing."
*The independence of the ITP Web Index is assured by the involvement of Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting), which validates the results of those companies that choose to submit their statistics for verification.