“Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was – and still is – the most important thing we do.”
– Marc Bennioff, Founder of Salesforce
Throughout our journey in the field of connecting global companies with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) professionals, we realized how finding the right talent and linking it to the appropriate job opportunity is much more than just a business. This job has been bringing employment opportunities for talented women & young people in the Middle East & North Africa’s untapped market.
Therefore, our hiring process has gone through many improvements until it reached the current version which meets our clients’ different needs and gets the best out of the MENA’s professionals.
Our work is not limited to hiring developers – they are the most demanded category nowadays, though – but we also source designers, translators, voice-over performers, content writers, admin assistants, and transcribers, just to name a few. We also provide a variety of flexible service delivery models that fit our clients’ business requirements, such as staff augmentation, dedicated team, and project-based sourcing models.
So how do we guarantee to acquire the TOP talents while managing the diverse requirements?
This is all managed through an adaptable recruitment process implemented by the collaborative efforts of the MENA Alliances’ team and is summarized in the following 10 steps:
- Identifying the Hiring Need.
The whole hiring process and its success depend mainly on identifying the recruitment needs accurately. And to do so, we listen carefully to the client and ask the right questions that enable us to lay our hands on their priorities, business goals, development gaps, talent shortage, budget, and other particular needs.
“MENA Alliances team’s ability to listen to our needs and work with us in growing the team as needed have made them true and valued partners!”
– Naama, COO of Colabo
This is how one of our clients in the USA describes our partnership.
- Devise the Recruitment Plan.
After we discuss the client’s requirements, we make the necessary adjustments to our recruitment plan to fulfill their specific needs. Modifying the plan includes strategizing how to publicize the hiring position, criteria for candidate screening, what the assessment approach will consist of, and how the interview process will look like; all based on the client’s terms.
“MENA Alliances’s flexibility has allowed us to recruit both temporary enforcement for immediate short tasks and to grow our team on a more permanent basis with senior and experienced developers working remotely alongside our in-house developers.”
- Writing a Job Description.
To get the right person to apply to the job, it all starts with the job description!
In the job description, we write the necessary information that we need the applicants to be aware of before applying to save our time and efforts in the reviewing step. This comprises a clearly defined job title, a straight-to-the-point job overview, a list of specific anticipated responsibilities, and required skills. And we conclude it with a strong call-to-action to encourage high-quality candidates to submit their applications.
At this phase, we start implementing the recruitment plan that we set earlier.
Finding highly-qualified potential candidates begins internally as we look through our talent database to pick up from the available candidates that we assessed in previous hiring processes but did not get chosen. Then, we check the availability of the needed talents in our network.
In addition to that, we advertise the job vacancy externally on our social media platforms and job posting sites, like LinkedIn, and spread it out to our online community and other remote workforces. Besides that, our recruitment team uses “headhunting” to find the right professionals for the job.
By using different approaches in this stage, we get the best of the best professionals.
- Reviewing, Screening, and Shortlisting Applications
Once we receive job applications, our recruitment team reviews them regularly on the basis of minimum qualification.
Later on, they filter and sort the CVs that have the preferred credentials by looking at the expertise and the specific skills that are required for the role.
Finally, the most qualified candidates are shortlisted to the next phase, and we send them emails to inform them about their acceptance and arrange for an interview.
- Initial Interview & Assessment
Our recruitment team prepares for the first video interview to get to know the shortlisted applicants face-to-face before nominating them for our client.
The shortlisted applicants get filtered after the interview based on the requirements of our client, English skills, and their level of professionalism, and the final candidates are sent to the client to prepare for the next level of assessment.
Paying a lot of efforts in this stage drove our clients to consistently praise our speed and accuracy in shortlisting the best candidates to the interview, as one of our regular clients says:
“We have reached out several times with very specific talent requirements and were matched with relevant interviewees within a day or two. We are constantly impressed by the developers we meet and have yet to have an irrelevant interview!”
We also add the final shortlisted candidate in our database for future job nominations in case they did not get the current client’s job opportunity. (As mentioned in step 4)
- Technical Test/Interview.
The second level of assessment is more accurate in testing the candidates’ basic technical skills that are crucial for the job.
If it is a translator role, we prepare a project-specific type of test to examine the candidate’s translation skills and make sure that it matches our client’s particular needs.
If it is a developer role, we hold a technical interview in which specific web-development tools are used to evaluate the candidate’s programming skills and performance.
And so on and so forth!
For technical skills are not the only necessary requirements for a perfect job candidate, we hold another interview to take a deeper look at the interviewees’ characters, adaptability to work in a different culture, language skills, communication skills, etc. We also check their backgrounds and references for a better view of their suitability for the position.
These interviews are usually held in the presence of the client who has the last word on who to stay and who to leave.
After choosing the successful candidate/s who pass the multi-level assessment process, we send them the job offer and the contract with all the clear details.
And by this stage, we succeed in linking the right talent to the appropriate job opportunity.
Nevertheless, our job is not done yet!
The talents that we hire for our clients are still considered our responsibility. Whether they are a team or individuals, we manage their workflow with the client, check their performance and progress, solve their problems, and pay their salaries.
“Working with MENA Alliances has been super effective to our company. The team is very helpful and supportive and they go the extra mile to support your mission.”
To recap, what makes us a trustworthy hiring partner for many of our clients is our constant efforts and passion to bring them the most fitting talent from the best of the best of the MENA’s untapped talent pool and ensure they are satisfied even after the hiring.
About Us:
MENA Alliances is a nearshoring company – for-profit with a social mission- that aims to provide a high-quality remote workforce on-demand. It desires to solve the problem of a local talent shortage for automation while creating economic opportunities for women and young people in the MENA region. Our teams have the ability to scale in a short time and handle small to large projects.
We are on a mission to alleviate poverty and injustice in the MENA region by creating jobs for women and young people in this region. So far, we have trained more than 3000 women and young people and created 700+ job opportunities for disadvantaged people by connecting them with jobs from Europe, the USA (such as Silicon Valley), and the Gulf region.
Are you looking for new talents to work on your diverse projects on your own terms?
Contact us:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +970 59-938-8102
Whatsapp: +44 7380 980791
Figure Eight
Huda Wajeh Matrabie is an example of how MENA Alliances developed success in an individual. Huda recently had the opportunity to work on a year-long data-labeling project. Her technical and people skills shined through as she learned the skills of freelancing remote jobs. 
