ALKHOBAR, 21 March 2006 — Bayt.com is an online Middle Eastern marketplace for global professionals and regional companies offering end-to-end recruiting, advertising and career planning solutions. The company aims to empower people with the tools and information to build their lifestyle of choice. Last week, Bayt.com held events across the Kingdom to celebrate their fifth anniversary and the registration of one million job seekers at the site.
“We arrived on the scene after the dotcom revolution was over, when most dotcoms had become dot bombs,” said Rabea Ataya, CEO and chairman, Bayt.com. “Everyone thought we were somewhat insane to be starting an Internet business at that time. But we felt there was a great opportunity, particularly in offering the social service of helping job seekers and employers better match opportunity and talent. It was a difficult time when we started, but I think that gave us great discipline as a company and we’ve gone from strength to strength. It’s been a great five years.”
Today, Bayt.com is distributed across 10 offices in the region — three in Saudi Arabia, two in the UAE, plus Pakistan, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. The company currently has 150 staff members with a plan to grow to 400 in the next 18 months. Bayt.com’s data base of job seekers encompasses more than a million people and the company serves about 20,000 employers. Ataya claims the company is highly profitable with the “top line growing at 100 percent year on year.”
It seemed strange to learn that a company with such a strong Internet presence would be interested in growing its brick and mortar operations. The fact is though, that across the region Internet penetration is still relatively low and most local businesses in the region are not necessarily that online savvy.
“We felt that we need to physically go in and help businesses. We must offer them customer service on the ground. Direct employer interface is very important,” Ataya explained. “Most of our job-seeker interface is online, so we’re not actually servicing the job seekers through the offices. For the employers though, you really need to go in there and explain to them the competitive advantages of using an online solution versus traditional methodologies and then the next step is ensuring the best usage of the Bayt.com system. It’s one thing for a decision-maker to decide that Bayt.com sounds very strategic for the organization and it’s something else for the actual implementors or HR personnel to use the system. So we provide training and localized support. It’s also been a great interface with which to grow local partnerships and the offices help us understand the local needs further.”
Bayt.com is now divided into three lines of business — recruiting, advertising and career planning. The company started off with a disintermediated process whereby the job-seeker and the employer got in touch directly by just using the website. Bayt.com sold employers packages to either advertise or search or a combination of both. This is still a significant offering for the company. However, what has happened over time, is that more and more employers have requested value-added services. Now Bayt.com offers employers filtered resumes and has delved into traditional recruiting and executive search. This involves both head hunting and interviewing and screening candidates on behalf of employers. Ataya stated that 60 percent of the company’s revenue currently comes from their disintermediated packages and 40 percent comes from the new value-added services.
While Bayt.com is still making the majority of its revenue from employers seeking new staff members, the company has decided to branch out and capitalize on its huge database. Bayt.com is currently offering targeted advertising. This means that a company can contract Bayt.com to send out ads to specific demographics.
“Research is also something that we will be doing a lot more,” Ataya said. “We have contracted with a research organization in order to start publishing quarterly reports about the job-seeker population. Historically we have been doing job-seeker polls and these have given us very valuable insights into the market. That though is more asking the questions then mining the data, which we plan to make more of a focus.”
Bayt.com has thrived because the company performs an essential service that helps conquer cultural issues. In the Gulf, employers frequently struggle to overcome nepotism, favoritism and connections, locally known as wasta or Vitamin W, when hiring new employees.
“Employers are happy to use us because they can search the database without job seekers knowing that there actually are openings,” Ataya commented. “The high level of confidentiality is important to employers. In other geographies, such as the USA, where there are companies similar to Bayt.com, the revenue mix between search and postings is usually about 70 percent ads or postings and 30 percent search. In the Middle East, we have the reverse. Fifty percent of our revenue comes from search and 30 percent from postings. Most employers do not want wasta to be a part of the process and therefore they try not to advertise open positions. They want to stay under the radar.”
Ataya continued, “Anonymity serves not only the employers, but also the job seekers. In Middle Eastern cultures, knocking on doors in search of a job is frowned upon. People never want to seem like they are looking for a job. Bayt.com has an option where confidential CVs may be posted and then searched by employers, but the identity of the job-seeker is hidden. There is also the possibility to make the resume unsearchable and only use it when replying to a specific advertisement. Confidential resumes allow well-known or high-level job seekers to respond only to the opportunities that come their way that are of interest. Twenty percent of our resumes are posted as confidential. Women of Gulf nationalities have found that Bayt.com is a great way for them to seek out jobs from the privacy of their homes. This is an opportunity that they did not have previously.”
While Bayt.com has succeeded and its future looks bright, one of the most important things about the company doesn’t appear on its bottom line. In many ways Bayt.com is a true reflection of the region. The company employs 150 people spanning more than 30 nationalities. When the company was started, the average age of the founders was just 27 years. Ataya put the average age of all the organization’s staff at somewhere between 25 and 30. To anyone who claims that the youth in this region are a burden — not an opportunity — just look to Bayt.com and see what a group of hardworking, dynamic young talents can achieve when they are given a chance.
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