Abunayyan Holding: Smart branding attracts talent

We recently sat down with Feras Al-Sadi, Marketing Strategy and Corporate Communications Manager at Abunayyan Holding to understand how the renowned Saudi organisation leveraged its brand to attract top talent.

Abunayyan Holding is a leading empowering solutions provider in the power and water sectors. Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, it is one of the longest active companies in the power and water business, and has grown to accommodate 4,500 employees spread across its subsidiaries in the Kingdom and throughout the MENA region.

The challenge

In 2012, despite the fact Abunayyan Holding was investing a lot of resources in KSA and abroad on acquiring top talent, finding and attracting the best candidates was a considerable challenge. Like most employers in KSA, the company had a traditional recruitment process: agencies and word-of-mouth marketed its vacancies, and its unique career paths and open-minded culture were invisible to people on the outside.

“To hire smart people, you need to give them a smart recruitment experience. That requires marketing, branding, a good recruitment team, effective processes and technology.”

The solution

• Implement the Sniperhire e-recruitment platform to automate the hiring process
• Develop a strong employer brand: Mostaqbaly, Arabic for “my future”
• Create a candidate marketing strategy that includes communication tools such as a mobile career website, the first mobile-responsive career site in KSA

The results

• Time to hire went from 6-8 weeks to 2 weeks
• Within a 10 month period in 2015, Abunayyan made savings of 2M SAR from agency costs
• The company's highly efficient process and improved candidate experience produces 300% more quality candidates per vacancy than before
• Today, Abunayyan has 27,000 screened CVs in their talent pool