Ask anyone about his or her experience applying for a job and chances are you will hear some unflattering comments about the ordeal. The biggest grouse for most job seekers, especially in the Middle East, is the unprofessional manner in which candidates are kept in the dark about the status of their job application.
Employers of choice have overcome this challenge by implementing recruitment platforms that automatically email candidates their application status at various stages of the recruitment process. And leading the way is M.H. Alshaya Co., popularly known as Alshaya, which recently became the region’s first enterprise to integrate SMS solutions to their Sniperhire recruitment platform.
Nic Beesley, Senior Vice-President – Group HR, says, “From now on, all jobseekers applying for Alshaya vacancies will henceforth know exactly where they stand. Whether they are short-listed or called for an interview, every candidate will receive real-time SMS updates, regardless of which part of the world they live in.”
“Candidates need to be spared the agony of second-guessing the status of their application. We are in a business where candidates are also customers and by enhancing candidate experience with features like SMS and email updates, we hope it will reflect well on Alshaya.”
Alshaya operates over 40 international retail brands including Starbucks, Mothercare, H&M, Debenhams, The Body Shop, MAC and Estee Lauder, throughout the Middle East, Turkey, Cyprus, Russia, Poland, Egypt, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. It currently runs 1400 stores and intends doubling that number.
Paul Williams, HR Director – Middle East, says, “Hiring the best retail talent globally requires competing with the world’s biggest retail employers. The SMS solution is part of our hiring strategy to compete with the best. Mobile phone penetration is higher and more accessible than email the world over and we wanted to capitalise on this before anybody else in this region.”
Richard Jenkin, Head of Resourcing at Alshaya, says, “We are in the midst of increasing our staff strength dramatically. We are taking our operations to countries outside the Middle East region, and we need top talent from around the world to continue the success story. We chose Hiring Solutions because their Sniperhire recruitment platform is a world-class solution and their understanding of the regional recruitment scenario is unparalleled.”
Sniperhire is an intelligent recruitment platform that works on many levels to better recruiter efficiency. With Sniperhire, recruiters can focus purely on processing applications of quality candidates and respond faster to line-manager requisitions.
Apart from the SMS feature, Sniperhire can screen, score and rank thousands of CVs in a matter of seconds. It can be integrated to independent psychometric test engines as well multiple sourcing channels such as recruitment agencies, company career portal, job boards and blogs. Recruiters at Alshaya publish new vacancies on their choice of sourcing channels with just a few clicks.
All CVs coming into the organisation are electronically organised by Sniperhire to form a private talent pool that can be used for future vacancies – this radically reduces the time and money spent on recruitment.
For a group like Alshaya, Sniperhire ensures that every company under its banner is working in harmony and no duplication of work happens. For example, a good candidate rejected by one Alshaya brand is still accessible to another Alshaya brand at no extra cost. From the status of a vacancy to creating reports on which sourcing channel is providing quality candidates, Sniperhire reduces the cost of lost opportunity.
Ben Fawcett, Director, Hiring Solutions, says, “Alshaya is a leading organisation in its field because it recognises the importance of talent in an increasingly competitive world of business. The SMS feature is just one small part of the recruitment platform and yet has lasting impact both for the company and the candidates. Alshaya does not even have to set-up a separate phone line or hire a SMS distribution service. It is all done automatically and centrally through the Sniperhire system.”
“With Sniperhire, they now have access to the best candidates around the world 24/7 and their recruitment team can concentrate on important tasks instead of spending hours on admin-heavy tasks like reading scores of CVs everyday.”
HOW THE SMS UPDATES WORK:
SMS updates work on various levels and each organisation can pick and choose what kind of updates they intend sending and to what category of candidates. Each SMS is sent in addition to an email.
• In a fully functional SMS update scenario, as soon as a line manager’s request for additional staff is budgeted and approved, he or she receives an SMS stating that the vacancy is ready to be posted.
• The line manager later receives another SMS stating the names of all the sourcing channels on which the vacancy is published.
• For every application received an SMS is sent. It thanks the person for applying along with the registration id for future correspondence.
• Short-listed candidates then receive SMSes informing them about their current status.
• When a candidate needs to be interviewed, an SMS is sent requesting to log on to the company’s career portal and select from the vacant interview time-slots most comfortable to them.
• A day before a scheduled interview, the line manager receives a reminder SMS about the upcoming interview.
• The same routine continues for the next round of interviews whereby SMSes are sent to selected candidates and candidates that did not make the cut.
• The candidate finally selected receives a congratulatory SMS informing about the job offer and requesting the person to check his or her email inbox for all the details.
About M H Alshaya Co.
Alshaya, today, has become a byword for trading and commerce in the Arabian Gulf. Since its foundation in 1890, it has become a major player across a variety of sectors, initially in Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and more recently throughout the Middle East, Turkey, Cyprus, Russia, Poland, Egypt, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.
Alshaya Retail operates more than 40 international retail concepts. These include many of the world's leading Fashion & Footwear, Health & Beauty, Casual Dining, Starbucks, Optical, Pharmaceutical and Sports Fashion brands all carefully chosen to bring the highest quality products to the region's premier retail locations.
The group currently operates over 1400 stores across 16 countries. Their wide geographical spread is supported by sophisticated infrastructure, professional management and a long-term investment in state-of-the-art M.I.S. and logistics.
About Hiring Solutions Company
WIN THE WAR FOR TALENT
Hiring Solutions is among the world’s few and the region’s only provider of intelligent recruitment solutions. The comprehensive yet niche solutions are currently empowering over 125 businesses in 42 countries.
The integrated recruitment platform, called Sniperhire, allows organisations to streamline all aspects of internal and external hiring. The world-class system helps organisations improve overall talent quality while significantly reducing time-to-hire and recruitment costs.
Be it industry best practices, career portal engines, sourcing across various global channels or optimised hiring processes, Hiring Solutions ensures corporate leaders win the war for talent.
