Mariam Nihal
Saudi Gazette
It is time to change your passwords. Apparently, hundreds of millions of hacked usernames and passwords are being traded in Russia’s criminal underworld a security expert told Reuters recently. And as much as that seems like a plot for a Hollywood movie, it is not. Although much like a script, the events played out in sequence. During the hunt, Cybersecurity firm Hold Security exposed the data breach when it came across a young Russian hacker bragging in an online forum that he had collected and was ready to give away 1.17 billion reThe hunt for senior talent is getting more and more competitive. When it comes to Saudi Arabia, evidence shows that it is increasingly challenging for employers to find candidates with the required skills. According to the Bayt.com Skills Gap in the Middle East survey, May 2016, this difficulty is emphasized when recruiting for senior positions, with 7 in 10 employers claiming they find it difficult to find senior-level candidates for their job vacancies.
When looking at the online behavior of senior professionals, we can say that they have become incredibly web savvy and many of them are creating personal websites, online profiles, blogs and accounts on various platforms. As more and more senior talents post examples, tutorials, videos and portfolios of their work on the internet, finding talented individuals for high-level job roles is quickly moving into the mainstream, with online job sites largely increasing the efficiency with which hiring decisions take place.
Regional HR surveys by Bayt.com show that 74% of professional respondents in the Middle East believe that online job sites have facilitated the hiring process; 42% of them saying they use general job sites, such as Bayt.com, when searching for a job.
Here, the experts at Bayt.com, the Middle East’s leading job site, provide some pointers to help you leverage the power of online hiring:
• Use a multifaceted approach
Few would argue that there are substitutes for online job sites as an integral part of the recruitment arsenal of successful employers, and fewer still would argue that today’s top talent are not overwhelmingly searching for jobs online. Online recruitment today with top pan-regional job sites remains by far the easiest and most effective way to recruit top talent, including senior-level candidates. According to the Bayt.com ‘Recruitment Practices in the Middle East and North Africa’ poll, May 2015, 20% of polled employers say that posting job vacancies on a website accessible to millions of job seekers, such as Bayt.com, is the best way to hire job seekers who are actively looking and applying for jobs online, while 36% of them believe that searching through millions of CVs is the easiest way to headhunt more passive candidates.
Respondents in the same Bayt.com poll said that the following would also make hiring easier: having the vacancy highlighted in a highly visible location (16%), the ability to automatically filter out irrelevant candidates (8.7%), the ability to filter candidates (7.9%), and tools to manage the recruitment process online (7.5%). Over a third (34.3%) said that a combination of all of these would ease the hiring process.
• Target the right
candidate pool
Make sure you are fully aware of what the job entails and that you have a clear idea of the kind of candidates you need before narrowing down your search to target the specific pool of candidates. This can be greatly facilitated online, may it be via CV search options, job postings, targeted mailers, or targeted ad banners. The advantage of online hiring techniques is that not only can you cast the net wide in spreading your employer message, but you can also focus in on the best candidates with highly sophisticated tools.
Online job fairs, such as the ones pioneered in the Middle East by Bayt.com (better known as vFairs), are another innovative and highly effective way for sourcing top senior talent, and have been extremely popular with job seekers and employers alike since their introduction by Bayt.com in 2008. To learn more about how to get a hold of the candidates with the right set of skills, qualifications and experience, you can get in touch with us at Bayt.com – we’ll be glad to help you.
• Keep your branding
creative – go Premium
According to the Bayt.com ‘Social Recruiting in the Middle East and North Africa’ poll, October 2014, 80% of professionals check a company’s online profile before applying for a job. Having an active and customized profile for your company on the internet will definitely help you stand out and attract top talent. Premium Company Profiles by Bayt.com, for example, are a great option when it comes to creating and customizing corporate profiles online. A premium company profile allows you to build your very own brand and unique space on Bayt.com. You can use your profile to inform visitors on Bayt.com, as well as over 24.5 million registered members on the site, about your latest news, job vacancies, events, CSR activities, awards, milestones, etc.
• Network with specialists
Networking does not only benefit candidates; it is also crucial for employers looking to hire great talent for their companies. According to the Bayt.com ‘Recruitment Practices in the Middle East and North Africa’ poll, the majority of hiring professionals surveyed (81.6%) said that interacting with candidates on professional networks would be beneficial, with 57.9% saying it would be highly beneficial. Make networking a strategic habit, and make it a point to fit into your busy schedule as a time for networking with top talent in your industry regularly. Seek to regularly call on friends, family, peers and acquaintances to ask for sourcing leads and expand on your circle of professional connections while also enquiring specifically about professionals who may be available and recommended for the job.
Bayt.com Specialties is a great way to get in touch and interact with top senior talent who engage in daily discussions related to their areas of knowledge and expertise. This open, socially-enabled platform was designed to reinvent the entire hiring process by giving you access to a candidate’s conversations, recommendations, and activity ranks. That way, you will know who’s truly a star in their field in a way that goes beyond the limits of a traditional CV.
• Build your own
branded career site
According to the Bayt.com Recruitment Practices in the Middle East and North Africa survey, 9 in 10 employers feel that their company’s recruitment would benefit from having a career site on their corporate website. The solution? Branded career sites, such as Talentera. Talentera is a comprehensive recruitment solution by Bayt.com through which employers can create branded career channels to source, track, assess, and hire professionals right through their own websites. Through beautiful, customizable career portals and applicant tracking systems, Talentera provides some great features for employers looking for top talent, such as interview scheduling and recruitment analytics tools, and is already helping hundreds of companies in Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East region streamline their entire hiring process and find the talents they need.
About Bayt.com:
Bayt.com is the #1 job site in the Middle East with more than 40,000 employers and over 24,500,000 registered job seekers from across the Middle East, North Africa and the globe, representing all industries, nationalities and career levels. Post a job or find jobs on www.bayt.com today and access the leading resource for job seekers and employers in the region.cords for just 50 roubles (around three riyals). After eliminating duplicates, the cache contained 272.3 million stolen accounts, according to Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, and former chief security officer at US brokerage R.W. Baird.
The accounts include tens of millions of IDs for the biggest email providers including Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as Russia’s Mail.ru,German and Chinese email providers.
However, reportedly the hacker agreed to give up the dataset to Hold researchers for free, after they agreed to post favorable comments about him in hacker forums. Holden said his company’s policy is to refuse to pay for stolen data. However you never know who has the data and what they are going to use it for.
The huge reserve of stolen credentials is said to be the biggest to be revealed since cyber attacks hit major US banks and retailers two years ago. A great many of the stolen accreditations seem to belong to representatives of the biggest retail, banking and manufacturing organizations in the US. It is also important to note that the stolen data could be used to engineer further cyber attacks, because many people use the same passwords across multiple websites, Hold Security warned.
So make sure you have a strong and unique password for each account. This essentially involves something no one will be able to guess, thus requiring a combination of lowercase and uppercase characters, symbols and numbers. Try not to login using your password on a public Wi-Fi. Try not to repeat the same password across multiple sites; this just makes the job easier for hackers. Try and avoid using easy or family names in your passwords or any information that can be found on your social pages easily.
