For Job Seekers

How Are We Different?

We're different than other job boards because:

1. We are a no-nonsense job hunting portal: The Talent Ocean isn't trying to be another social network. It won't have you doom scrolling looking for that job posting and in the interim seeing the same advertisements and self-serving posts by "influencers".
2. We are data-driven: Our approach is to bring together recruiters and job seekers using detailed data to match a candidate to a job and create an in-depth database of skillsets that recruiters can look for.
3. We manage expectations: Every time you search for a job, we calculate the fit score which is a combination of your skills, education, experience, work preferences, location, etc. When you apply for a job, you have an idea what that fit is. Recruiters will probably only look at those where there is a fit score relative to other applicants.
4. Easily apply for all roles: With The Talent Ocean, you find jobs quickly, you click on apply, add a custom message to your application, and you're done! Recruiters have access to your skills, so there isn't any need to ask questions at the application stage.
5. We can give you advice: Once The Talent Ocean is fully created, we will be able to give you advice as to how you might improve your chances of being hired. Are you asking for too little money? Too much? Are there skills you could train for that would help your chances?

If you're interested learning more, check out the links in the footer for more information.

For Recruiters

Current Pain Points

We believe that recruiting is broken, and we believe we are part of the cure (and, of course, so are you!). Here are the issues we see with recruiting right now:

1. Manual Effort in Shortlisting Candidates: Recruiters are inundated with too many candidates who simply do not meet the requirements of the job, and they must be manually rejected.
2. Messaging Overload: Recruiters get a barrage of messages from contacts and would-be contacts trying to out-position each other to get an advantage in their job search, most of which results in wasted effort, and all of it overwhelming the recruiters.
3. Lots of Time Needed to Qualify Candidates: Even when you get a candidate shortlist, there are still a lot of questions that a recruiter needs to ask to ensure the candidates skills, experiences, education and work preferences all align with the job description.
4. Large Job Posting Budgets: LinkedIn charges to you to post a job. They charge you by every click on a job. They charge you a fee to access recruiter tools. With all of these fees, it's hard to plan a proper budget for a role.
5. Unfilled Jobs: A certain percent of jobs do not get filled and keep getting reposted time and time again. This is very often because of a lack of candidates that exist (or are willing to change jobs) given the job description and working conditions. Without having hard data on the market conditions, it's all hearsay, and clients often won't bend their requirements without facts to back it up.

How The Talent Ocean Helps

We do things differently. For example:

1. Fit Scores: Recruiters can immediately filter out candidates based on an overall fit for the role based on their education, skills, experience and work preferences. This can be done both for publicly posted jobs but also for unpublished jobs where the recruiter is trying to get a sense of what is on the market to estimate the likely number of candidates.
2. Smart Messaging: When an applicant applies for a role, they can add something to "set themselves apart", but other than that, most messaging is initiated by the recruiter in the context of communicating with a job seeker about given role.
3. Detailed Information from both Recruiter and Job Seeker: The time to qualify candidates is drastically reduced because you have most of the answers available on the job applicant's profile (and have likely filtered out those where they answers aren't aligned with your own).
4. Cost Control: With The Talent Ocean, the full experience is available to a job seeker for free. We charge an amount similar to LinkedIn for the Recruiter tool, but we don't have any other charges: No per job click, no job posting fee.
5. Better Client Conversations and Better Outcomes: Having hard numbers about the numbers of candidates in the job market suitable to a given job posting makes it easier to talk to your clients with potential changes to get the roles filled. For example, if a client has high expectations yet pays average or below average, you can demonstrate that all qualified candidates for the role want thousands more than what's on offer, so either the expectations have to lower or the salary has to increase. The other option is to hope you get that desperate candidate who'll take a pay cut, but they don't come along that often.

For Policy Makers

The Challenges

1. Reactive Compliance: Currently, labour market information is manually collected from different sources and is reviewed and published at a high level. This means that issues are only seen when it becomes prevalent in a larger context. The implications of this are that Emiratization compliance and diverse hiring practices (and issues) are only topics that can be seen and actioned on a periodic basis.
2. Emirati Skill Readiness: How many UAE Nationals in the workforce have been trained in AI? What skills should they be focusing on to be able to take on greater roles within a company? Answering these questions takes a lot of work.
3. Foreign Skill Inventory: What skills are requireed in the market that UAE Nationals and existing expats lack? Should they be looking outside the UAE to bring in talent? Should there be programs created within companies to upskill existing workers?

How The Talent Ocean Helps

By becoming part of The Talent Ocean, you get access to real-time data on which skills are in demand for both UAE Nationals and expats and which skills are currently available on the market. As well, you also get an idea as to what salaries are being paid and to what degree employers are compliant with their Emiratization targets.