The human touch

Drake & Scull International PJSC chief corporate affairs officer Zeina Tabari
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Admin burden

This imposes a particular burden on the company’s administration department as “HR identifies the talent that needs to be moved, while admin deals with the visas, for example. HR steers, but admin has to be strong enough – if visas and medicals are delayed – then people become demotivated and are unproductive as a result. It is very challenging. Being a construction company, you have workers on-site in remote areas, and they do not really interact much with the rest,” says Tabari.

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In order to address this issue, DSI has established an admin centre in all of these remote locations, where employees can check their records or update their leave and pay status accordingly, without having to take time off in order to visit the head office in order to be able to do so. In terms of recruiting for IWP, the skills set is completely different. They have to be innovative, because it is all about reducing client costs in a more technically advanced way. Civil contracting, on the other hand, is quite straightforward.

Tabari says DSI has acquired a proprietary software program from the UK called Talent that allows it to monitor all applications and CVs centrally. “All our recruitment is done through the corporate head office. Our recruitment department interviews people every day, regardless of whether we have a position or not. So we always have additional CVs on hand and a good candidate selection.”

In terms of the Talent program, as soon as you apply on the careers section on the DSI Web site, you get a reference number that you can use to follow up on your application. The system also sends you an e-mail every six months asking you to update your profile, and whether you are interested to continue to be on the DSI database. It also monitors your progress – how many times you came in, how many stages of the interview process you have progressed through.”

Such investment in company infrastructure seems to be transforming DSI into a benchmark for the construction industry as a whole. “We have always invested in people; when we did our IPO, we gave gifted shares to our key employees. At the time a lot of people did not know what an IPO was, so we had to ensure employees and managers understood why we were doing this, why we were becoming a public company, why do we want to get scrutinised by everybody?”