Hishem Azzouz on recruiting in Dubai and Saudi Arabia: companies oversell themselves, candidates ghost at the final stage, and recruiters chase daily KPI targets like lead counts and CV sends. The pressure is relentless, but tracking metrics eventually converts to deals.
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I think Dubai is, like I said before, right, it's a bit of a wild west. There's people from everywhere, people are trying to set up businesses, and a lot of businesses that look on face value, you've got, they've got hundreds of people, they probably only have 3 or 4. It's just kind of like the face value that you see online. So you can constantly speak to a client and they might say, yes, we've got these huge projects going on, and I've been to Saudi and done the same, and they make you sound super excited, like we've got these 50, 60 hires, but it just, you know, often, often they're not. It kind of whittled down to nothing. A lot of people will interview candidates, window shoppers, they'll sign your terms and everything like that, you'll do everything and you'll get to the final stage and and they'll just, that's it. Don't hear back from them. If I had an extra CC a day, an extra couple of CV sends a day, I became so addicted to that. And I was 4 years into the business and, you know, doing 14 deals a month and things like that. Like, if there was a trainee that came in and was beating me in my own KPIs, it would make me crazy. So I would stay later. I'll stay 9, 10 o'clock in the office just so I could win that next morning send out where everybody's saying who's in the green, who's in the red. But I loved it because I knew the return investment from that. I love KPIs. I think it's the best way to measure someone. We used to do every day you have to get 3 leads, right? And then you would add 5 managers around that. So you put 5 new managers on the system from the leads that people are interviewing at, and then you follow up with CCs, right? So business development calls around that, and then you would follow up with 10 sends. So if you followed that process, there's no way that you can't not pull jobs. Um, and I think I became so addicted to— I wasn't getting the deals over the line to start off with, but my wins internally was that I was beating everybody else on the, the KPIs. So I knew eventually it was going to happen.
