Puja Pannum
Blis’s looks at recruiting and retaining talent in a high tech company – and how to get hired by one
Every tech company the world over wants to succeed. And we all know that success is no accident; it comes down to careful planning, the ability to make the most of your resources and, above all, recruiting and retaining the best people for your business. Here at Blis we have identified a particular mix of skills and mindset that strongly correlates with success, even as the economic downturn creates new challenges for businesses across the Middle East.
When it comes to recruiting the best and brightest, the old-fashioned application or CV is still the first calling card for many. It’s a quick and easy way to get a feel for relevant education and experience. Yet we would miss out on great people if we only looked at what college a candidate went to. In this part of the world we can access a huge talent pool, often with non-traditional educational backgrounds.
Keep in mind just how transferable key skills can be. For example, when recruiting for people to join our sales team, we may not find candidates with deep experience in the still-young adtech sector. A person who can demonstrate experience of building relationships with customers and driving business is someone that we want to meet. At Blis, many of our best people have come from traditional marketing or sales roles (think TV or traditional billboard advertising) and successfully made the leap to the world of digital. Our engineers are not just mobile location specialists, but work with our commercial teams to understand the attribution for the brands we work with.
CV and experience aside, our top criteria is to find people who really want to work for us and are excited to join our company and be part of our journey to the next stage of our growth. Such talent is likely to be interested in tech companies and the digital world already. They will use social networks and digital platforms, have experience with coding (even at school) or other hands-on skills.
Some of our latest hires have already monetised their digital hobbies, such writing a blog, building an app or gaming. We often find that people who are a good fit for us are naturally drawn to the online networks where they can share their ideas and exchange with like-minded digital enthusiasts via Linkedin groups, chat forums or other communities. Offline, they’ll be at informal networking meetups or will make time to attend events and stay abreast of all the industry news.
A great hire for us is not just someone that we want to employ – they also have to really want to work with us, demonstrate an interest in our business and share our company values. At the interview stage, we expect people to have done their homework and researched our company. This should be beyond the specific area that they will be working in – we would expect an interviewee to know about our global initiatives and investors, to have checked us out on social media and to have prepared questions in advance.
On a very personal level, we want to recruit people that we could share an office (or a business trip) with. That means great interpersonal skills and evidence that they will be able to succeed within our teams. And even if we decide that someone is not the right fit, it’s always heartening when they follow up on an interview by connecting on Linkedin or sending us a short email. Adtech is a growing industry, so even if things didn’t work out for this job, there’s still the opportunity to build a professional relationship for the future.
Recruitment is the start – but retaining people is just as important. We need to ensure our people future-proof their careers and keep their skills up to date. That means investing in their ongoing training and development. In a tech company, where the only constant is change, this is absolutely critical. We nurture our talent by investing in courses and training and learning pathways and learning KPIs for all our people.
Formal training aside, we strongly believe that peer-to-peer learning helps us not only strengthen our collective skill, but also build our company culture. We encourage our people to learn from others in the company, especially colleagues from completely different departments. For example, client-facing people can learn a lot from spending time with the operations teams. And we appreciate that we can learn from (and be inspired by) other tech companies in the region, so our teams attend events such as Step in Dubai. It’s about being curious and open-minded and seeking out connections.
No company is immune to competition or to wider economic downturns, but we can guard against these challenges by investing in our people. That means being open-minded about where we find talent, being proactive about finding the right person for each job and making sure we recruit people who want to work with us. Diversity and inclusion are important to Blis and we are constantly working to drive up our male-to female ratio to get to 50:50. The company is currently made up of 57 per cent men and 43 per cent women. Not bad, but we can do better.
It also means valuing those people we do employ and spending the time and effort to invest in their future. Because that effort doesn’t just help to retain talent – it will also attract talent in the years ahead. And perhaps it is this power of attraction that is the greatest strength of any company, a kind of company charisma that we all want a part of.