A Career is More Than a Job

Many people have used the two terms “career” and “job” so interchangeably in their daily lives that the two concepts have blended into one absolute notion that only means “work”. In fact, a career is so much more than a job. A job is a means to achieve the end of a satisfying and intellectually stimulating career. In light of this, we should even change our understanding of what a job seeker is and what a career seeker should be. A job seeker looks for the temporary, the next stepping-stone, whereas a career seeker is a true seeker of future prospects, growth and professional recognition.

All that being said, it is of course much harder to find the right career, and some people take years looking for one, changing from one to another before they are finally set in their path, if ever. The first and most important factor in finding a career is to find something that truly makes you happy. The best way to do that is to find a job that you would wake up every morning to do even if you weren’t being paid. Not that money isn’t an important issue of course; it’s an essential factor to consider because it rules our practical lives. However, a true career is one that runs in parallel to financial compensation and is not determined by it. Salary is a critical component of any job, because it is the only way to monetize people’s appreciation of our work and it is the means to build a better life. Therefore it may be one of the most important factors to consider, but it is by no means the only factor to consider. Don’t make the mistake of allocating greater weight than necessary to short-term financial gain, because you may be missing out on long-term professional and financial success.

This means that you would need to look at other issues in addition to salary when looking for a career. One of the most important things to realize is that on your first job interview with a specific company, it is not only you who is being interviewed; the company is as well. Let the interviewer ask you all the questions they want, but if you initially like the company and want to work there, don’t forget to ask the interviewer lots of questions too. Questions about the company culture, promotion and career prospects, atmosphere and even seeing the desk you would work at are all good examples. Remember that the company may be interviewing you for a job, but you are interviewing them for a career. And when interviewing a company for a career, you need to know where that company is going and where it will take you. You need to know things like your boss’ management style and how that fits in with how you like to be managed. And after all that, it is also helpful to talk to and ask your future co-workers about the company.

Akhtaboot is trying to bring all this information to you before the interview. Video interviews with companies, open and free communities with relevant and user-generated content, the opportunity to network and connect with other career seekers are all tools that are literally at your fingertips when you become a member of Akhtaboot.

Now all this is great, but there is one big problem in all this, what if you don’t know what you want? It’s not such a simple problem to solve, because most people end up working in a lot of jobs that they end up hating, and all that they get out of the experience is the knowledge of what they don’t want rather than what they do want. That knowledge is invaluable, however, career seekers need more than that. They need to be able to recognize the right career and jump right into it, in addition to identifying the wrong job. Luckily, the Myers-Briggs® Type Indicator (or MBTI for short) is the global standard test for personality analysis in a career context. The MBTI has been around for more than sixty years. It is a tried and true indicator of your personality type. That is not to say that the MBTI will explain every single aspect of your personality, but it will certainly explain a lot about who you are.

One of the main principles behind the MBTI is that you are born a certain type. Therefore, the more you are put in situations that allow you to be who you are, the better you will feel and the more productive you will be. MBTI is about how you feel most energized, how you perceive information, how you make decisions, and how you deal with the outside world. It is about preferences, preferences you are born with.

You can take the MBTI for free on Akhtaboot (www.akhtaboot.com) when you upload your CV. After taking the test, your MBTI results will be a personality type composed of four letters. The combination of these letters will tell you quite a bit about your personality and your preferences. This can be an important weapon in your quest to finding the right career and the best company and environment to work in.

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What can Akhtaboot do for you as An Employer?

In 2020, the MENA region will be faced with the challenge of creating 100 million jobs . This is indeed a daunting challenge for the MENA region, more so with the absence of an effective platform that links job seekers with employers and vice versa. Recognizing this missing link between employers and job seekers, Akhtaboot stepped up to fill this gap. Their approach was to first identify employer’s most common recruitment aches and pains, whether through online or traditional recruitment. After approximately a month and a half of research and interviews, Akhtaboot was able to narrow down those recruitment problems into 4 distinct areas:

1. Filtering and sorting CVs takes a lot of time and effort.
2. Irrelevant candidates always end up applying to advertised job openings.
3. Candidates end up not fitting in with the company culture.
4. Receiving applicants is easy; receiving qualified applicants is always a challenge.

After recognizing these most common recruitment problems, Akhtaboot went to work. Ten months later, Akhtaboot can provide employers with the following value added proposition:

Easy Filters Save Time

We all know that time is money. Finding the right candidate is more than just having access to a database, it’s about being able to filter through that database to find the perfect match. Akhtaboot allows employers to narrow down their search in a matter of seconds. Now, that sounds like a great feature! But how was Akhtaboot able to accomplish that better than any other recruitment website? The answer is simple: by adopting the web 2.0 mentality and introducing cutting edge technologies such as AJAX. AJAX allows employers to filter candidates without experiencing those annoying page refreshes, making the website appear like a desktop application. In addition to those filters, Akhtaboot adopted Google-like free text search that actually searches within uploaded CVs. So all you have to do is type the qualifications you are looking for in one simple text box, and Akhtaboot does the rest.

Receive Relevant Applicants

Akhtaboot is built upon a community-based model. Communities are sections within Akhtaboot grouped according to job function that attract people with similar career interests. Job seekers must join at least one community and at most three, which forces them to make choices and express their preferences. When companies post jobs, they post them onto specific communities, which means that they are able the target an interested, attentive and relevant audience. This community-based model also allows companies to filter out irrelevant applicants and serial appliers with the click of a button.

Increase Your Exposure

Almost every company has a corporate website these days. Their corporate website targets potential clients, with nothing more than a “careers” button for potential employees, if anything at all. Akhtaboot allows companies to build a comprehensive corporate profile that goes way beyond any other recruitment website. In addition to the standard company profile and company logo, Akhtaboot allows companies to put in other information such as hours of work, weekends, lunch breaks, their location on a map and even a video of an office tour or an interview with a key person at the company. By allowing this information to be out there, companies can start attracting the right talent to their corporation, and can even cater interview questions for potential candidates to make sure that they have taken their time to explore the company culture and that they actually subscribe to it.

A Feedback Loop and a True Career Network

Since Akhtaboot allows users to connect to each other and to connect to companies, they are building a professional network and actually taking “Word of Mouth” into the 21st Century. Companies can have a network of their employees and people that they trust, and those people can have their own network. Building upon the premise that good people know other good people, Akhtaboot uses the power of networking when companies post their jobs by spreading the “word” about their vacancy through the company’s network. Not only that, Akhtaboot’s technology actually tells you how you know that person, just in case you wanted to get a referral before interviewing or hiring them.

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What can Akhtaboot do for You as a Job Seeker?

There are many job recruiting websites out there; some big, some small, but for the most part all the same. Akhtaboot is different because of the fact that the company’s founders actually saw and researched what was out there and said to themselves, “let’s build something different.”

Akhtaboot went beyond the basic functionality of allowing users to search for and apply to relevant jobs; they grasped the concepts of Web 2.0 (the next generation of the web) early on in the development of the website. They understood that an easy and user-friendly experience was key to the success of any website. They also wanted to build a website that was catering to the market that they were serving, and what better way to serve a recruitment market that is heavily reliant on word-of-mouth than by building “the career network”?

A True Career Network

Put in its simplest form, Akhtaboot allows regular users (or job seekers) to connect to one another. Much like other popular networks like Facebook, Akhtaboot remembers these personal links and helps users build their professional network of contacts. Other networks are used for social and entertainment purposes; however, Akhtaboot’s network is purely professional. This means that your network on Akhtaboot is used for spreading and receiving job announcements through viral word-of-mouth. The larger your network of contacts is, the more likely you are to hear about job opportunities that are posted by companies on Akhtaboot, and when you apply to these “word-of-mouth” jobs, you are applying through what can only be described as a digital “recommendation”!

The best thing about the networking feature for job seekers is that you don’t have to be looking for a job to use the networking functionality. All you would need to do is sign up (which literally takes less than a minute). Akhtaboot also allows you to set your status, and Akhtaboot has one status called “here to network” that makes sure that no company can see your CV and you are left to network without being contacted by potential employers.

Akhtaboot is Built Upon 20 Communities

Communities are sections within Akhtaboot grouped according to job function, and registered users have the option to join up to 3 communities. Joining communities that reflect your fields of interest allows you to receive relevant job recommendations from Akhtaboot, read relevant articles, watch locally-relevant videos, grow your knowledge, and network with fellow users that share similar career aspirations. So even if you are not currently looking for a job, you can benefit from Akhtaboot’s community model!

User Friendly Interface

Let’s say you are looking for a senior, full time job in Jordan in the Marketing and Communications community. Selecting the before mentioned filters on Akhtaboot literally takes less time than it took writing the actual sentence!

Incorporating only the cutting-edge of technology, Akhtaboot is bringing a true web application to the Middle East. When you use Akhtaboot’s filters, your results update on the spot without you having to wait for the page to refresh. This technology, called AJAX, is also used in other places on the website and it makes the user’s experience truly friendly.

Akhtaboot has also spent a lot of time and effort into placing just the right amount of tabs and links so that the website is simple to understand right from the start. No piece of information is more than a couple of clicks away, and users are able to find what they want faster and more efficiently.

Uploading your CV

Unlike other job recruitment websites, Akhtaboot allows job seekers to actually upload their CV. If you have spent a lot of time and effort on your CV, just upload it on your profile and you are ready to apply to any job on the website. Has your CV been updated recently? No problem. Just upload the new one to replace the older one that you already have on Akhtaboot.

Akhtaboot also allows users that don’t have a CV to build one on the website. In a soon to be released feature, Akhtaboot will also allow users that built their CV on the website to export it as a beautifully formatted PDF document for their own use.

The Myers-Briggs© Type Indicator (MBTI)

Recognizing the importance of placing the right person in the right job, Akhtaboot is the only career site in the Middle East that is qualified as a Myers-Briggs© (MBTI) provider. The MBTI is recognized as a global leader in personality tests with over 70 years of extensive research. It is used by Fortune 500 companies worldwide both for hiring and human resource development purposes.

Akhtaboot plans to make this test available online to its users within the next few months. Job seekers will have the opportunity to take this test and receive their results online. The MBTI provides a reliable and valid analysis of a job seeker’s strengths and areas for development in a career context. It also includes suggestions on how the job seeker can capitalize on his/her strengths and compensate for his/her blind spots.

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Introducing Akhtaboot

An unconventional name for an unconventional company. Akhtaboot is taking on the online recruitment market with all 8 tentacles. With an edgy brand and a friendly mascot to go with it (the Akhtaboot even has a Facebook profile like any normal user, he’s called “Akhtaboot Jobs”), Akhtaboot is bringing the dot com culture to the Middle East. You just need to take one look at the design and functionality of the website (www.akhtaboot.com) to know that Akhtaboot is set on raising the bar.

Established in 2007, Akhtaboot is an online career network that is committed to providing a user-friendly way of linking the right person to the right career opportunity. Akhtaboot is the only recruitment website that allows companies and users to establish connections with one another and build a professional network. Built and headquartered in Amman, Akhtaboot.com is initially set up to serve the Jordanian market, however Akhtaboot plans to serve as a career network for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Akhtaboot is a young revolution in the online space. The company was soft-launched on June 17 2007 and officially inaugurated by the Minister of Labor, His Excellency Mr. Bassem El Salem, on July 7 2007. It has been exponential growth since then, and Akhtaboot is seeing a phenomenal increase in traffic and users with every passing day.

Essentially, Akhtaboot is designed to operate as a community of people who share professional and career interests. Offering web 2.0 functionality, Akhtaboot provides an interactive and dynamic interface for its users. In addition to traditional job postings, it also offers “word of mouth” postings that mimic how people hear about jobs in their daily life. The filtration tools on Akhtaboot are highly advanced and efficient, and the content is locally and culturally relevant.

Recognizing the importance of placing the right person in the right job, Akhtaboot is the only career site in the Middle East that is qualified as a Myers-Briggs© (MBTI) provider. The MBTI is recognized as a global leader in personality tests with over 70 years of extensive research. It is used by Fortune 500 companies worldwide both for hiring and human resource development purposes.

Akhtaboot’s added-value and benefits serve two entities: career seekers and employers. Career seekers can benefit from Akhtaboot whether they are actively searching for a job or simply interested in building a professional network of business contacts.

The services provided to career seekers include: free job application and search functionality, receiving “word of mouth” job announcements, and the opportunity to take the MBTI personality test. The MBTI provides a reliable and valid analysis of the career seeker’s strengths and areas for development in a career context. It also includes suggestions on how the career seeker can capitalize on his/her strengths and compensate for his/her blind spots.

For users who are simply interested in professional networking, Akhtaboot’s services include: the ability to build an extensive network of professional contacts, the opportunity to hear about potentially interesting career prospects from your network’s “word of mouth”, and the functionality to add personal notes related to their list of professional contacts. Professional networkers also have the opportunity to take the MBTI.

Akhtaboot is built upon 20 professional communities. Communities are sections within Akhtaboot grouped according to job function that attract people of similar career interests. Every job seeker must express interest in at least one and at most three communities. Career seekers can join communities so that they can network with fellow community members, grow their knowledge in a specific field and, of course, look for and apply to relevant jobs.

Akhtaboot’s community based model also allows companies to see only relevant candidates. Companies can either post jobs to certain communities to target a relevant audience or can search within members of certain communities. In general, the services provided to employers include: posting employment opportunities onto specific job function communities in order to receive relevant applicants, efficient CV browsing through user-friendly filtration tools, and the ability to create a comprehensive company profile.

Akhtaboot’s services are based on extensive research, and their approach was a solution-based approach in that companies were asked what recruitment pains they had and then the website was built to help solve these pains. Akhtaboot was built by its users and for its users, and they encourage everyone (employers and career seekers alike) to continuously provide their feedback, as they plan to incorporate their ideas to help make Akhtaboot even better. Akhtaboot is committed to putting users first and is focused on providing only the best service.

In addition, Akhtaboot is also committed to attracting the passive job seeker and high quality candidates. The Akhtaboot brand, the locally-relevant information in communities, the professional networking functionality and, of course, providing job seekers with the ability to simply upload their CV are all efforts in making Akhtaboot the leading destination for the highest quality talent.

The young management team at Akhtaboot is dedicated to keeping Akhtaboot on the cutting-edge of technology, continuously researching and implementing new Internet trends that cater to the needs of career seekers and employers alike. As it expands its network, Akhtaboot is expected to spread its tentacles in the MENA region.

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