The online recruitment agency Bayt.com has a large geographical footprint with eleven offices throughout Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In its eight-year history, the agency has grown from the Emirates to the Levant to Morocco. Bayt.com has grown by other measures as well. Its staff had a year-on-year growth of 100% in 2007 and the company saw $10 million in revenue. This year it expects revenue to double.
“We have a larger number of job seekers than any other medium, whether on or off-line. We have over 2.25 million registered candidates, so we have a large database in addition to the large geographical area that we cover,” said Dany Farha, chief operations officer of Bayt.com.
This financial and geographic growth has prompted the company to open its newest office in Beirut. Bayt.com has 78,000 registered job seekers in Lebanon alone. As a result, they would like to be “physically present to serve the customer base,” said Farha. The service provided ranges from customer acquisition to personal visits aimed at helping subscribers set up their new account and navigate the website. Farha added that this was a very important point since the service adds new functionality to the website “essentially every quarter.”
Beyond its physical presence, Bayt.com stays competitive by focusing on its local knowledge. As opposed to non-local recruiters, job listings on Bayt.com are predominantly from Middle Eastern employers like ABC, Bank Audi, Fatel and Emirates Airlines. Other online agencies usually have jobs posted by international recruiters operating from India or the United Kingdom and not from Middle Eastern employers. That poses difficulties with candidates who want to get hired by a local company in their vicinity.
Another distinguishing feature for the website is its use of technology. Cutting edge design makes it possible to search using 24 criteria. For example, it is possible to search by job title, which is unique because most online recruitment sites only allow a search by key words. Further, an employer can search by job function, industry, company and university, to name but a few.
Playing into social networking, Bayt.com recently introduced a technological feature that allows individuals to recommend others. “A job seeker can have a former professor or dean from his college or a former boss write a recommendation. This recommendation is then imported to the resume. And if that recommendation is good, then an employer and go and see who else has been recommended by that same person,” said Farha. Bayt.com recently added this feature and has found that people with recommendations are being hired more often than those without, so the new addition is proving popular.
Farha added that Bayt.com’s talent pool “is larger than other recruitment agencies in the region by a factor of 10. The employers who subscribe to Bayt.com are based in the region. And we have cutting-edge technology to help the talent and opportunity to mix and match. Finally, we have 300 staff on the ground.” He argued that regional presence of Bayt.com gives it a leg up on the competition as most other recruiting agencies in the region are telecommuting from India. Bayt.com currently has offices in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar, Amman, Jeddah, Riyadh, Al-Khobar, Casablanca, Beirut and Manama.
Nationalization of labor markets
Many governments in the region, especially in the Gulf, are nationalizing or localizing their labor markets. This can be challenging for online recruitment agencies. One of the ways Bayt.com is dealing with the nationalization issue is by looking at local talent via going to university sponsored career fairs across the region, especially in countries where these issues are pressing like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE. This allows the company to have a strong selection of nationals for each country’s recruiters. Furthermore, it works closely with governments to assist them in powering their job sites. For example, Bayt.com powers the Abu Dhabi government job site and does the marketing as well. The website also makes it possible to search for job candidates by nationality. If an employer needs a Saudi national, he can come to Bayt.com and find that specific employee. And it is likely that he will find more than one candidate to fit the bill. Farha concluded by saying, “As we have the largest registered number of job seekers in one place there is no other repository of candidates bigger than ours, including government systems and newspapers.”
While other online recruiters do exist in the region, it appears that they will have to do a lot of work to catch up.
