Monday, August 14 2006 10:40 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: India is likely to benefit from the ongoing boom in the Middle East job market, especially in sectors that demand highly specialised skills, says Arun Tadanki, President and Managing Director of global online recruitment service monster.com.

"The Gulf region has emerged as one of the major markets for the recruitment industry and Monster has decided to make a foray in this market with an exclusive site, www.monstergulf.com, for it," Tadanki told sources in an interview.

"The site would cover eight countries in this region: the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Lebanon," he added.

The region has 6.2 million Internet users representing 14.3 percent of the region's population.

"Apart from a large number of expatriates already working in the Middle East, high mobility of domestic job seekers within the region also present a unique opportunity," Tadanki said.

"The Middle East countries have a diverse workforce and the talent pool required for high-skill jobs is diversified. Job portals are increasingly being used by corporate groups and industry in this region to hire talent from abroad as it is a very cost-effective method of recruitment," he added.

"The site can cater to these demands on the basis of its global database covering jobseekers in Europe, the US, India, China and other regions," Tadanki said.

Monster has a worldwide database of 55 million resumes, including eight million resumes from India, he added. With the launch of this new website, Monster now claims to have presence in 25 countries with 28 websites.

"We intend to draw heavily on our existing database to provide a list of highly skilled jobseekers who can be hired by companies in the Middle East," Tadanki said.

Monster is expecting to become a traffic leader in this region in the next 12 to 18 months.

"There are no immediate plans of any major acquisitions in the region. The strategy is to grow on our own," Tadanki said.

"In different regions we adopt different strategies. For example, in Mexico we entered the market through acquisition. In India we preferred to grow on our own initially and later acquired job portal jobsahead.com," Tadanki said.

He also indicated that the company was planning to enter several new regions with an aggressive strategy.