Chief Administrative Officer In UAE: What They Do and How to Hire

As small companies in the UAE make it bigger in less time than in many other countries, the need to explore what types of leadership roles would best suit their success plans gets started at an early stage. Many businesses start earning their million dollars even with fewer than 100 employees. Some technology companies start hiring C-suite executives as they launch their business. One of the positions that have many opinions going about it is the position of a Chief Administrative Officer. Before going for a CAO recruitment or contracting a CAO recruiter, here’s a blog you could go through for making better decisions.

Introduction

Are you considering hiring a chief administrative officer, and is this the first time for your company?

Hiring a Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) for the first time could be pretty complex, confusing, effort-consuming, and challenging if you want to do it right. You would have to juggle time, money, travel, languages, presentations, conferences, and a whole lot more. At the same time, it could be a brilliant experience when you have the right CAO recruitment agency to partner with you.

What is this position about, and why would you need one if you already have an administrative director or a vice president of operations overseeing everything about administrative functions?

Let’s understand some key facts about what the position of Chief Administrative Officer is all about. It is equally important to understand CAO manpower requirements, that is, the staffing requirements for the CAO office.

Chief Administrative Officer – How Does This Position Differ From A Chief Operating Officer?

The Chief Administrative Officer is a top-tier executive position. A C-Suite executive, the CAO, takes control of the day-to-day operations of a company, as in he or she would be the topmost position holder when it comes to supervising the operations of an organization.

Does that sound more like a Chief Operating Officer position? It would, as, from a general perspective, there appear to be many similarities between what a CAO and a COO does.

A Chief Operating Officer (COO), however, is a top-tier executive who focuses on the overall performance of a company, while the Chief Administrative Officer takes on the responsibilities for daily operations, monitoring different departments and facilitating the smooth functioning of their daily operations.

A COO is more often seen in manufacturing companies or those with a wide range of operations spanning many business lines. A CAO is often seen in IT companies and organizations which provide a wide range of services involving quite a lot of daily interactions with customers or clients. A COO and a CAO can both be present in a huge corporation, and you will find both positions reporting to the CEO.

One of the duties of a CAO would be, for example, ensuring that an inter-departmental project gets done in the most seamless way possible from an operations perspective – required hardware, software, platforms, manpower, managerial staff, process chain and methodologies, quality assurance resources, etc. The client should find nothing to worry about how the operations are conducted.

One of the duties of a COO would be, for example, ensuring that implementation of a strategic move to increase operational efficiencies enterprise-wide is perfectly done.

That gives you a general idea of what a CAO position entails. Let’s move on to understand the specific duties of a CAO. This will also give you a good understanding of what kind of staff a CAO would need so that you invest in the right CAO manpower resources.

What Does A CAO Do?

1) Takes Your Administrative Activities Management to the Next Level

A CAO is responsible for the administrative management of a company. CAOs oversee how certain departments with customer-facing interactions or influencing tasks related to core functions like sales, finance, human resources, customer service, business, and office administration are performing.

Many UAE companies considering CAO recruitment are looking for professionals with a degree in management and administration and experience in implementing operational efficiency initiatives.

If your UAE company is seeking a CAO for its business unit or subsidiary company in the UK or in the North Americas, you would ideally seek candidates who are chartered secretaries from institutions such as Chartered Governance Institute or who are certified/chartered accountants, or others with equivalent experience.

An experienced CAO recruiter would be able to guide you through the process related to framing the roles, duties, and responsibilities.

2) Plays an Important Role in Enhancing Operational Efficiency

The CAO becomes the topmost authority overseeing how the processes across departments are managed. Are the right standards, policies, process flows, and procedures being followed? What is the gap between the expected levels of operations efficiency and the current levels? These are the questions that the CAO would have to answer to the board of directors or the top management.

To get a clearer picture, here’s an example. The CAO would not be worrying his or her head about whether sales teams are fulfilling their targets. The CAO, for example, would be overseeing whether the entire order management and sales processes management is done super efficiently and how the entire processes can be optimized for speed and accuracy.

3) Helps Align All Human Resource Policies And Internal Reporting Standards with Business Goals

The CAO position acts as the head of the HR department, guiding HR directors and managers about achieving the highest level of efficiency in managing the operational side of the human resources departmental functions.

Right from the technical and technology aspects to talent management operations, and tracking, tracing, and monitoring of all internal employee management activities, the CAO would serve as the facilitator, supervisor, and top leader.

The CAO’s staff acts as a strategic head, eyes, and ears for their leader. You would want a good CAO manpower agency to recruit the right staff to assist the leader in managing the HR, administrative, and other responsibilities.

4) Ensures Maintenance of Fair Practices – Audits, Protocols, Etc

A CAO is responsible for ensuring the maintenance of fair practices within the organization and avoiding any risks which can impact the standards of business negatively.

If your company follows ISO standards and other international standards, and has implemented particular methodologies for fair and compliant work practices, the CAO would be the one in the C-Suite who would supervise the perfect implementation of all necessary policies and procedures.

To get a very concise picture, it is best to consult with a CAO recruiter with a great deal of experience in your industry.

5) Sets the Standards and Framework To Ensure All Compliance Work is Managed Correctly

This is one of the crucial responsibilities of a chief administrative officer. A CAO approves the right framework for managing administrative tasks that ensure compliance with all required standards and policies.

The CAO evaluates corporate policies and directives within regulatory and internal policy requirements, leads internal inspection programs such as annual reviews, and ensures audit completion across the departments he supervises.

But these kinds of responsibilities are pretty fluid and vary from one type of business to another. So, you would need an expert CAO recruiter to help you understand all the roles that a CAO can play in your company in various capacities.

6) Spearheads Various Business Transformation Programs

Business transformations involve an overhaul of processes managed by different departments. That means the CAO has a major role to play in supervising everything related to new process chain development and process optimization.

For matters that influence administration and processes, the CAO would be among the key decision-makers, and in other matters like risk management, technology investments, etc., the CAO might not be playing the same role.

7) Plays a Lead Role in Ensuring Operations Stick to Budget

A Chief Administrative Officer not only provides strategic guidance but also facilitates maintenance of the annual budget by ensuring that operations stick to the budget.

CAOs participate in budget development, budgeting, fiscal audits, and operational cost management. Here the CAOs have more of a participatory role rather than a decision-maker role. Their inputs, assistance, and supervision are crucial to ensuring that the operational costs of the departments under their supervision are managed as per the budgets.

8) Prevents and Resolves Interdepartmental Conflicts For Resources, Multi-Division Teams, etc.

No organization is a work powerhouse of happy, contented individuals; there are always a number of hidden, explicit, recognized, unrecognized, cold, upfront confrontations, differences, and conflicts going on all the time between and within teams and departments.

The CAO is often the C-Suite member who intervenes to handle these conflicts and workplace issues in the most efficient manner.

If you are a people-centric organization, you would need a CAO recruiter who finds you a leadership champion for a CAO. If you are an organization with a huge focus on authority and discipline, you would need a CAO with even more powerful people skills and diplomatic skills.

Hire a CAO Through Alliance Recruitment Agency

How will you find a CAO who understands your business, operations, the pain points, the main specific market-related challenges, the customer segments, and their expectations, and other such key matters? How would you go about the hiring process?

There are many stages of CAO recruitment, and you would need to get everything perfect at every stage to find the best-matched, ideal candidates for the CAO. That is why most companies work with a CAO recruiter firm.

Alliance Recruitment Agency is your best choice among CAO recruiters in the UAE.

1) Superior and Niche Knowledge and Experience

The best CAO recruiter is the one who understands the kind of CAO talent that is being hired by your competitors and the best-performing CAOs in your markets. Their industry and market insights into CAO recruitment help you frame profiles and job descriptions that are most relevant to your operations and business goals.

Our C-Suite executive search and recruitment experts have completed thousands of hiring projects and gained a deeper knowledge of assessing, screening and identifying the benchmark candidates for your organization. We work in all ways you need our services – as a CAO recruitment consultant, executive search Dubai, competitive research and market talent mapping partner, etc.

2) Superior Talent Outreach

Once you have covered the first phase and created the ideal candidate profile and job description, understood and outlined all roles and the specific skills, knowledge, experience, and abilities needed to carry out each of the roles, the more challenging phase comes up – finding the benchmark candidates.

Our CAO recruiters are among the most competent in attracting the right candidates to your company. We already have connected with tens of thousands of CAO professionals. Our CAO recruiters already have a good knowledge of their track records and performance levels.

We also have a strong team of passive candidate engagement experts. Your chances of meeting with outstanding candidates for the CAO position in your company increase many times through the services of such experts.

3) Reduce Recruitment Time

In a majority of cases, companies who undertake CAO recruitment on their own take a long time to close the position. It has taken many companies 8-10 months to complete their CAO recruitment process. So much time goes into the process that the cost associated often stays hidden or unaccounted for.

With an expert CAO recruiter, you could easily bring down your recruitment time and costs by up to 50%.

4) Give Your Business a Competitive Edge

Our agency, with its wide chain of networks and resources, helps you map the best talent. We also align our talent search criteria with your business goals and unique position-based requirements, offering you the benefits of the most customized CAO recruitment process. You will be able to find CAO candidates with outstanding track records.

Alliance Recruitment Agency-UAE

Alliance Recruitment Agency in the UAE is a global manpower agency among the best recruitment agencies in the Emirates offering companies across industry sectors the most competitive executive search services and recruitment support. We have assisted with more than 1,000 C-Suite recruitment, and our services have been rated as “outstanding” by over 90% of our clients.

If you are considering CAO recruitment, get the best assistance. Connect with us!