David Mackenzie, 48, is the managing director of Mackenzie Jones Middle East, a recruitment agency that, as well as covering general recruitment, has four distinct arms – Mums@work (a platform for working mums), Simply Digital (for digital recruits), Think Tech (for IT experts) and Mena Solutions, which finds recruits for project outsourcing.
5.30am
My alarm clock never goes off, I just spring out of bed, probably because of my dad’s army background. He was in the Omani army, and I grew up in Muscat. I’m training for the Ironman 70.3 in Turkey in October, providing I don’t expire before that, so I go for a run in my Arabian Ranches neighbourhood.
7am
I feed our dog and three cats while watching the Sky News headlines. My sons, who are 17 and 15, are now at boarding school in the UK, so it’s quiet in our house apart from the noisy pets. I eat muesli with chia seeds, blueberries and pomegranate seeds with a cup of lemon tea on the way out the door.
7.45am
I drive to our office in JLT and have a coffee with my group financial director. We’ve got this new business, Think Tech, aimed purely at IT recruitment, as there’s a massive shortage of IT specialists in Dubai. We look at how we’re optimising the website and our social media presence – we’ve just had photographs of the Think Tech team taken for that.
8.30am
I try to do my candidate interviews in the morning. I see senior HR people, but it’s not necessarily about them finding a job, it might be just to talk about what’s going on in the marketplace and how their career is going. We do a lot of career coaching. My own career has changed a lot in the last couple of years. I used to be a consultant, but now I focus on clients, candidates and consultants – how we engage with our clients, and in terms of candidates, who is out in the market and who needs guidance.
11am
A Saudi client, the head of HR for a large government company, flies in for an update. The first half of our two-hour discussion is purely personal – how my kids are, that sort of thing. We then talk about the huge infrastructure project which we’re doing all the recruitment for, as part of Mena Solutions. He’s a very bright man – he is the future of Saudi Arabia.
1pm
I often have lunch with a candidate or client. Today I’m at Zuma, with a lady I just placed as a head of HR for a leading healthcare company.
2.30pm
I go through our new social media strategy with my group marketing manager. Our strategy now is all about engagement with our audience. We’re sponsoring a massive conference for the UX (user experience) community, which is costing us a fair amount, but we’ll have close to 1,000 UX specialists there.
3pm
We take a look at the new website we’re launching aimed at getting people to work for us internally. We tempt people not by saying “join a big blue chip recruitment company to get a great career”, instead we talk about the sports challenges we’re offering and our “clean the beaches” initiative. We’re already starting to see the market go up – we’ve just had our busiest quarter for the last year. In our industry, we’re the first to get hit, and the first to recover.
4pm
One of our consultants comes in with her new baby, so we give her flowers. We encourage our mothers to return to work for us on a part-time basis. We tend to find that mums are brilliant. Our Mums@work team of six consultants work harder per hour than our other consultants. When people realise how valuable the untapped workforce of mums is, they’ll be keen to hire them.
4.15pm
I take one of my 40 consultants for a coffee to ask them what the market is doing, how they’re feeling about working for us, and what clients and candidates are saying. We’ve got some of our best ideas from that, which works out cheap, at Dh15 a coffee. The idea for our intern programme came from our most junior consultant, and he’s now helping us to make that happen.
5.15pm
I drive to Dubai Marina for my guest slot on the Career Connect radio show with Alex and Tim on Dubai Eye, which I do every fortnight. It’s a light-hearted phone-in show about anything to do with careers, and I love doing it.
6.30pm
I have a dinner out with people from LinkedIn. If I don’t have a client dinner, I might be attending a charity event as we do a lot of charity sponsorships.
9pm
I run, swim or cycle for an hour-and-a-half, then I chill out with my wife and try to talk to my boys at least twice a week on Skype. They’re teenagers so they’re usually playing rugby, or out with friends. I really miss them actually, so I try to work in the UK as much as I can. I’m in bed by midnight.
business@thenational.ae
