While it may seem like a bit of a challenging proposition, recruiting candidates to work abroad simply requires a bit more calculation and tactical thought. The central issue with any career move abroad is the cultural and linguistic differences, and if your aim is to recruit Westerners to work in the Middle East, this is obviously going to be quite a large obstacle.
Fortunately, the exceptional quality of life in the Middle East provides a handy incentive, helping to offset the negative impact that an alien culture and language may have on a prospective recruit. Thanks to the ever-present worldwide need for oil exports, countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have a particularly high standard of living, allowing employees in those nations to enjoy a standard of living far beyond what they could expect at home.
While a convincing argument, the above is only an effective technique if there are interested candidates around to be convinced in the first place. Fortunately, in such a well-connected world there are many ways to engage with interested candidates, allowing you to best extol the benefits of your particular vacancy.
Meet Potential Applicants Face to Face
Recruitment fairs are a staple of the recruitment industry, and there’s a reason why this technique is still so widely utilized: it works. Allowing enthusiastic employees and recruiters to engage face to face provides an easy means for their most pressing questions to be answered, while also allowing enthusiasm, knowledge, and passion to be passed onto the potential recruit in person.
While advertising for Middle East-based vacancies at a standard job fairs is certainly not a terrible idea by any stretch, your efforts will be that much more effective if they are targeted at a specialist, Middle Eastern-focused job fair event, or a more general overseas recruitment fair. This way every attendee that you speak to will already be interested in working in a non-domestic setting, automatically getting your recruitment pitch over the first hurdle faced by overseas recruiters.
Use Social and Professional Networking Sites to Your Advantage
There are easier, if less direct, ways to attract interested parties to job opportunities in the Middle East, and social networking is one the most efficient. By cultivating an interested, relevant following on professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, you can quickly spread the news of vacancies to those who are most interested, or best placed to take advantage of the opportunity. If shared and promoted to the right audience, job offers can spread far beyond the reach that you alone would have been able to exert. In essence, you can get specific communities and special interest social media groups to do your work for you, allowing you to recruit a far wider array of people than you otherwise would have been able to.
As with the use of recruitment fairs, the more focused your approach, the more successful your recruitment campaign will be. Getting your vacancies talked about in specialist Middle Eastern emigration, or Middle Eastern expatriate groups will vastly increase your chances of recruiting an interested, qualified candidate.
Specialist Recruitment Sites Do a lot of the Work for You
As you would no doubt expect, a large range of specialist recruitment sites exist that cater to a specific region, or professional area, and these should be actively utilised by any recruiter looking to hire non-domestic employees for work in the Middle East.
The two central benefits of this approach are that those viewing the advertised vacancies will already be on board with the idea of working abroad, or in a specific vocational area, and will therefore be far more interested in applying for the role. In a similar way, the additional expertise of the employees in the specialist recruitment company will be used to help achieve your recruitment goals, fine-tuning your ads and content to be as effective as possible.
Recruiting for foreign markets is all about optimizing already common recruitment techniques to focus specifically on the demographic most likely to be susceptible to Middle Eastern recruitment methods. By expending your recruitment efforts on only those candidates who are most likely to be interested, you save time and money.
