Mentis & Ajyal HR: Identifying and Retaining Local Talent in Oman
Mentis EditorAttracting and retaining local talent is a key aspect for thriving organizations. For almost a decade, Mentis and Ajyal HR have been working together to help clients in Oman identify and retain skilled personnel. This successful relationship has since improved the service both companies offer to organizations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region and beyond.
Through a combination of exceptional knowledge, tools, and mutual values, Mentis and Ajyal are uniquely placed to guide clients through Oman’s changing commercial landscape. Businesses that join the Mentis Network Partners program can unlock the same results by gaining access to Mentis’ continually growing bank of expertise and talent technology.
This article celebrates the bond between these companies and explores how they are making a difference with identifying and retaining local talent in Oman.
Discovering Opportunity in Oman
The working relationship between Mentis and Ajyal might be ten years in the making, but it’s arguably more valuable now than ever before. While the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, Oman faces changes of its own.
The esteemed Sultan Haitham became the nation’s new leader after the passing of His Majesty, Qaboos bin Said, who was Sultan from 1970 to 2020. Since then, the country has remained in a state of economic transition. This has brought many opportunities due to the restructuring of government departments and new incentives across the fishing, tourism, mining, and logistics sectors.
Oman is also well-placed to become an international trade hub from its position on the Indian Ocean. This provides safer economic, social, and organizational changes – including new roles in the economy – but organizations still face significant challenges.
For instance, companies are tasked with meeting ‘Omanization’ targets as the country seeks to provide new employment prospects to locals. Beyond this, firms also need to effectively manage employee succession, engagement, policy creation, and organizational development. In a country that’s built around the values of hard work and hospitality, there is a strong pull to accomplish great things.
According to Ajyal’s Chief Executive Mr. Faiz Al Maskiry, a successful approach starts with talent identification:
“There’s no shortage of talent in Oman. The challenge with most companies is their selection process. With the support of Mentis, we’re driving localization in a very big way – using psychometrics and leadership assessments to help our clients tap into domestic talent.”
New Tools for Changing Times: Network Centrality®
As Oman’s internal market evolves, Mentis and Ajyal are also leading the way with innovative talent technology solutions that support organizational change. Both partners understand the need to become more efficient and have launched a new tool to help their clients do just that.
Network Centrality is an organizational development tool that helps professionals to understand how teams and systems operate within the workplace. By mapping out connections and visualizing the social fabric of an organization, it stands to improve restructuring efforts and identify barriers to collaboration.
Commenting on the deployment of Network Centrality to Ajyal’s clients, Mentis’ Chief Executive Andrew Salisbury said:
“Clients in Oman already understand the importance of a 360 degree approach. They run employee engagement programs and Ajyal administers our leading talent identification tests, but it can be hard to understand and manage team performance and even inter-team performance. There’s a real need to zoom in on the social parts of an organization, and that’s exactly what Network Centrality does.”
By accurately measuring how employees interact, the tool is ideally suited to helping Omani organizations bring about radical change that optimizes the use of their resources. It also pairs perfectly with the policy and HR support offered by Ajyal and Mentis. The result is an effective package of services that can help organizations to understand and deal with change.
Case Study – Finding and Retaining Talented Staff
The partnership between Mentis and Ajyal has seen them assist Oman-based clients with targeted HR consultancy services and training. There are plenty of examples that demonstrate the value that their collaboration offers, including their work for one of Oman’s leading utilities providers.
The Mentis and Ajyal team provided assessor training while also designing and implementing an assessment center for succession management using a standardized methodology. The goal was to help the client identify, develop, and retain key talent in the organization.
The client was facing a key challenge to not only retain existing capability, but also to ensure a seamless leadership pipeline. The current market situation had been characterized by turnover in key positions, and organizations are challenged with not only identifying talent but also ensuring a future generation of business leaders.
By combining their services and expertise into a single package, Mentis and Ajyal helped the utilities provider to see their candidates’ core competencies in action. Coupled with the results of the world-class Hogan personality assessments, the partners provided participants with detailed feedback that helped them to formulate effective plans for personal development.
With this plan, the client was left with an interactive & engaging Assessment and Development Program providing greater insight into the competencies of their internal talent. Participants themselves gained more awareness of their strengths and shortcomings. This meant that the organization was equipped to make more informed key talent development decisions and build their leadership pipeline. Participants could then easily accept their newfound self-awareness.
A Thriving Partnership
Mentis and Ajyal HR complement one another perfectly to enhance talent identification and retention in Oman. Ajyal’s extensive expertise in talent sourcing, assessment, HR consulting, and business development is strengthened by new thinking and the latest in leadership assessments from Mentis.
The organizations share common values and both focus on providing a professional and trustworthy service that delivers consistently high-quality results for clients. Their collaboration over the years has seen them cross-refer projects, provide collaborative training in the US, and even host a 2013 London summit.
It’s this winning formula that has seen the partners establish themselves as the go-to team for employee engagement, development, and retention. For Andrew Salisbury, the synergies between the businesses are a major factor in their success:
“Having operated in the GCC since 2005, we are privileged to experience the welcoming nature of Omani culture. Our partnership with Ajyal HR continues to improve both our work and theirs, and we’ve been able to really differentiate our service as a result.
By combining our tools and project experience, we assist clients with all our strengths put together.”
Partnerships Driving Change in Global People Networks
A great many challenges in the business world can be addressed through successful collaboration. By recruiting top local talent and helping teams to work together, Omani organizations can make the best of their restructuring and emerge altogether stronger.
Through their own collaboration, Mentis and Ajyal HR are helping businesses across Oman to manage change. Pairing deep expertise with Network Centrality, they can find new, more effective ways of working that maximize the impact of economic investment.
The success achieved by the two companies is a testament to the power of collaboration. The Mentis Network Partners program provides affiliates with access to acclaimed organizational development and talent management solutions, professional growth and development support, and administrative assistance.
