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29 March 2024

Psst… Want to get hired in UAE?

Published
By Shuchita Kapur

The chances of getting hired can increase substantially only if jobseekers knew where exactly do employers look for candidates and what are the exact channels that are used to make actual hires.

According to a new report by Cazar, an organisations that helps companies achieve their recruitment objectives, candidates who rely just on online job portals or job classified sections are not doing justice to their job search.

Their findings show that the often thought reliable hiring sources may not be high on the list of recruitment channels for employers.

Where to source top candidates in 2014, as the report is called, goes on to state that employers themselves are now taking the task of getting candidates without relying on an external agency or a source.

So, in a nutshell, they now prefer to do it without a so-called middleman. First, let’s take a look at the channels that help in attracting job applications.

Applicants mainly come to companies’ via their own career website. A majority (45 per cent) of job application were received through a company’s own career website. This was followed by job boards – 28 per cent of job applications were made through this channel.

Next on the list are non-recruitment websites (such as news and trade websites like Facebook and Twitter) at 6 per cent and search engines at 5 per cent of the job applications.

Gaining important is professional networking (at 2 per cent) and LinkedIn (at 3 per cent). Internal sources also play a part in attracting job applications - internal head hunting (1 per cent), employee referral (2 per cent) and Intranet (4 per cent).

Offline media (which includes newspapers, career fairs, walk-ins and all other offline tools) also helps in getting 1 per cent of job applications and the same chunk (1 per cent) comes from the exiting talent pool. The good old agencies manage to get just 2 per cent of the total job applications that companies receive.

Employers look at these sourcing channels but where do actual hires come from? Of all the channels discussed above, the leading source of new recruits is company career websites, which delivered 24 per cent or 3,410 of the hires in this study.

This shows that these sites are doing their job of informing and attracting good candidates and delivering great candidate experience.

The second highest performer was company’s own talent pools of previous applications. Not only did they produce 22 per cent of hires, but they were also the most effective sourcing channel by far with one in every twelve people presented to hiring managers being recruited. This also resulted in very fast time to-hire at no additional cost.

News, trade and social media websites came next, at 13 per cent. Within this category, only a handful came from Facebook and Twitter, the majority resulting from adverts and blog/forum entries.

Employee referrals and traditional professional networking proved to be highly effective sources and resulted in respectively 9 per cent and 5 per cent of hires.

Intranet applications from existing employees produced 8 per cent of all the hires in the study. Whilst this number of internal promotions is good news, most of companies are aiming for higher numbers in the future as the talent shortage increases, says the study.

Despite its strong performance attracting applicants (28 per cent), job boards only produced 4 per cent of hires, which means that the quality of candidates coming from job boards is on average quite low.

Meanwhile, 3 per cent of new employees came from search engines such as Bing and Google.

Third party agencies produced 9 per cent of hires and corporate recruitment teams head hunted 1 per cent of new recruits.

LinkedIn, which is a growing source of applicants, produced 1 per cent of hires. Offline recruitment methods such as walk-ins, job fairs and traditional newspaper ads produced 1 per cent of hires.

So, now when you sit down and plan your job search, you know exactly at the channels you should be tapping. This study was conducted throughout 2013 across 30 companies in a wide range of sectors including construction, retail, energy, education, transportation, hospitality, IT and finance.

It examined 3.9 million job applications which resulted in 14,212 people being hired across Asia Pacific and the Middle East. The jobs advertised varied from customer service staff to mid-level management and senior executives.

(Home page image courtesy Shutterstock)