Regional employers turn to internet for recruitment

The poll, conducted throughout November and December last year, attracted respondents who answered five basic questions regarding their recruitment procedures. When asked what method was employed to source professional candidates, 63 per cent said online job sites, while newspapers came in at a distant second with only 15 per cent. Approximately six per cent of employers still rely on networking/word of mouth to source the bulk of their professional candidates.

"Online search tools have been developed extensively over recent years, an advance which has enabled employers to swiftly and effectively meet their specific criteria when searching for potential candidates. I believe this is why we are seeing a surge of interest in the field of online recruitment," said Rabea Ataya, CEO, Bayt.com.

"Employers and human resources departments are increasingly demanding a system that is both time-effective and user-friendly to meet their recruiting requirements. They are now able to fulfil their needs online from the comfort and convenience of their own offices while enjoying the confidentiality and control the online process allows."

Some 75 per cent of respondents said they believed that Internet recruitment was faster than traditional methods with 42 per cent of respondents indicating that internet recruitment has speeded up their recruitment activities by as much as 81 to 100 per cent.

Thirty seven per cent of those polled believed the biggest advantage of online recruitment was the speed of the whole process, while 16.3 per cent credited its ease of use.

The results showed that there was an overall feeling that online recruitment provided a complete and timely solution. Many of those polled credited the size of the jobseeker database as another reason to search online, while others were pleased with the disintermediation and the control it allowed.

When asked what employers looked for when choosing an online jobsite, 33.8 per cent cited regional expertise and reputation to be a priority, while 20 per cent looked at the quality and quantity of the regional employers already listed on the site.

These statistics bode very well for the specialised regional job sites such as Bayt.com which have firmly committed themselves to maintaining a specialised regional platform and to remaining unequivocally from the region and for the region. Bayt.com is the first and largest Arabic-English bi-lingual jobsite in the area and prides itself on the depth and breadth of its regional resources and databases as well as its pioneering state-of-the-art technologies.