What a week it’s been at Rectec HQ – a week of travels, new partnership announcements and an unforgettable experience at the world’s newest and most prestigious tech event.
This week, our Founder and Director, Rob Green, attended LEAP ‘23 – the world’s leading, global tech and innovation event, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This is where the world’s most forward-thinking inventors, investors and practitioners come together to discuss the future of everything tech.
This is the second-ever LEAP event, and this year’s speaker list was filled with luminaries from the business, sport and entertainment field including Thierry Henry, Stephen Bartlett, Baroness Karren Brady, Pekka Lundmark, James Caan, Will.i.am and many more.
So what did we learn from being a guest at LEAP ‘23?
The event beyond the event.
Away from the hustle of main speaker events and the sheer scale of the event (according to the press there were a reported 100,000+ attendees), we learned that the ground is being laid away from the western hemisphere for a new sort of digitally integrated world.
As one of the preeminent states in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia featured heavily as both a leading investor in the tech space, but also as one of the places tech companies are most heavily investing in – a staggering $3.5bn is being pledged by the kingdom to support technology companies to grow and develop, with many startups and scale-ups set to benefit from huge investment from internal and external investment.
It was also apparent this event was not, by any means, underwhelming – the event itself (and the ecosystem to support it) was running at full bore the entire time we were there – it was incredibly busy, with the post-event aura of Riyadh (the sheer architectural and technological scale of the city) taking my breath away.
Tech and the future of tech.
At the event itself, it was wonderful to meet and speak to some of the great and the good of the tech world within the Kingdom.
We finally put pen to paper and announced our new, strategic partnership with award-winning recruitment software, Elevatus (which you can read more about here), and managed to attend talks and speak to providers about the tech future in Saudi and beyond.
However, the biggest takeaway of the event was that many of the tech innovations we are beginning to take advantage of here in the UK – for example, ai powered cv screening or remote interviewing, are only just starting to make a significant impact in the ME and wider Arabic region.
The reasons for this, of course, are myriad – millions of socio-economic, technological, infrastructural, and even techno-cultural influences impact our use of tech and how we include it in our systems of work, career building and job growth.
However, from the talks and conversations we had it was clear the Kingdom and investors in the region are changing their tone, and rapidly scaling their company’s HR processes to incorporate tech where it can make the biggest impact.
Indeed, we’re seeing our new partnership with Elevatus as a sign that technical HR integration should never be limited by location or prior expectations. More connects us than separates us, and tech helps further erode the barriers to career and business growth. Sometimes it takes heading to the other side of the world to fully understand that!
A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.
At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.