Abunayyan Holding, a family-owned conglomerate in Saudi Arabia with wide ranging interests in the power and water sectors, has adopted a novel approach to attracting top talent while also cutting recruitment time by up to 50 per cent.

A first-of-its-kind in Saudi Arabia, the Mostaqbaly online portal was developed in response to the challenges that the company faced when recruiting qualified Saudi talent to fill vacancies across its strategic business units (SBUs) throughout the kingdom, said a statement from the company.

Mostaqbaly is a web-based digital initiative that provides an active online professional engagement platform and a dedicated career vacancies service to attract the best talent in Saudi Arabia and abroad.

The professional online recruitment system has helped the talent management team at Abunayyan Holding manage the large volume of more than 25,000 resumes that are received, while at the same time providing detailed company information and a platform for candidates to keep in touch with the company, it stated.

Saeed Al Mabrouk, the head of strategic HR (human resources) development, said:  "Attracting and retaining people with the right specialist skills and experience is an ongoing battle. By launching Mostaqbaly, we have created a platform where we can track and trace the careers of people with the qualities we require and continue a dialogue until such time we have an appropriate vacancy."

"By taking our recruitment online through our own portal, we have developed a secure space to capture, reach out and engage with qualified candidates who can support our continuing drive for growth in the sectors in which we operate," he noted.

The company is a major turnkey partner which provides integrated solutions in water, power and energy applications.

To complement this strategy, Abunayyan also collaborated with LinkedIn to further enhance Mostaqbaly's reach. Through the popular professional social networking platform, Abunayyan's profile page gained a massive fan following which jumped from 300 to 8,000.

"The result of these two initiatives means that we now have a pool of top quality candidates for vacancies and can search for appropriate skills and experience as new opportunities arise. We've already had over 10,000 views on our job pages, while increasing our brand awareness by 50 per cent as we continue on our journey of becoming a top ranked employer of choice," commented Feras Al Sadi, the head of strategic marketing and corporate communication.

"Currently, Abunayyan Holding is aiming to fill 38 vacancies across its diverse SBUs which operate in the power, water, oil and gas sectors," he added.-TradeArabia News Service