High Success Rate for Regional Job Sites
In February 2006 a Booz Allen Hamilton survey conducted for the DirectEmployers Association as reported by marketingvox.com reported U.S. companies’ primary source for hiring employees is the internet, producing 51 percent of all hires. According to the report, some 74 percent of U.S. companies expected to increase their spending on corporate employment websites in 2006, and general job boards accounted for the highest recruitment-spending category for corporations, taking up 27 percent of the recruiting advertising budget. A 2007 outlook on online recruitment advertising in a recent report from Borrell Associates (see Editor and Publisher) found that online help wanted advertising is expected to grow to $10 billion by 2011.
How does the landscape look in the Middle East? No less rosy for the internet job boards or their users. A pan-regional poll conducted by bayt.com in January 2007 revealed that over 22% of polled applicants found their last job through an internet job site such as bayt.com compared to 11% through a recruitment company and 30% through a newspaper advertisement. With more and more traditional recruitment companies posting the bulk of their jobs on local jobsites such as bayt.com which have the local reach, commitment and market expertise as well as a track record for lavish regional marketing and R&D spend, prospects for online jobseekers look even brighter in 2007! This year we can all expect time-to-hire and costs-per-hire to be reduced dramatically with the new technologies and we can look forward to even more of what the most successful job boards have always delivered on: Choice! Choice! Choice!
New Year . . . New Beginnings
New years mean new beginnings and a fresh chance to expand on past successes and to succeed in matters that may have perplexed us in the past. So for how many of us is finding a better job (and a better life) at the top of the resolutions list for the new year? Chances are a lot of hands are raised – at least the consistent surge in jobseeker traffic on the bayt.com website, the region’s #1 employment website, post new year would seem to indicate this. The same trend is true outside the region. According to Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, “the market share of visits to the Business and Finance - Employment and Training category increased by 31 percent comparing the week ending January 6, 2007 versus the previous week, ending December 30, 2006. But what can you do differently this year to ensure that your job search activities strike a more successful chord with employers and resound in the right quarters? The answer is: a lot! Here are a few tips from bayt.com on how to optimize your job search strategy for the new year:-
Exercise creativity. Search for and employ new ways to apply to jobs. If you have previously relied on one method, say newspaper ads or global recruitment sites, augment your activities with new methods such as job fairs, region-specific online recruitment sites, your college alumni network, your high school alumni network and aggressive word of mouth networking.
Perfect your toolkit. The paper your CV is printed on may be politically correct award-winning A-grade recycled parchment imported by courier straight from Europe for the purpose and you may have the correct address and a suitably environmentally friendly postage stamp on the envelope; however it does you little good if your CV and cover letter are flawed. For a perfect CV and cover letter read some of the bayt.com articles on how to perfect your toolkit. Think of yourself as a warrior in the mine-ridden brick and mortar world of job mobility and seek nothing less than perfection in sharpening your essential toolkit which should consist of a complete, candid and compelling CV, a well-researched and attention grabbing cover letter, and at the back-end, a simple, detailed system to manage and document the job search workflow.
