How Hamat cut time-to-hire by 50% and brought hiring fully in-house with Testlify

$50,000 a year in agency fees. Two weeks per hire. And still, the bad hire coming through.

Hamat is one of Saudi Arabia’s leading real estate and retail operators, running a portfolio of premium shopping centers that require a workforce spanning technical disciplines and commercial functions. Hiring for a site engineer or retail operations manager at that level draws hundreds of applicants per role. Managing that volume while maintaining the technical and cultural standards Hamat’s environment demands was beyond what their existing process could handle.

The team was spending over $50,000 a year on third-party recruitment agencies with limited visibility into what that investment was producing. Candidate evaluations were inconsistent across roles. Assessments for technical positions like engineers and architects were unstructured, making it difficult to compare candidates objectively. There was no cultural or personality fit evaluation built into the process, and the attrition that followed, people who cleared the hiring bar but did not last, was a direct consequence of that gap.

Average time-to-hire was two weeks. With 80 to 100 roles filled each year, the cumulative drag on the HR team was significant. Reem Fahad, Senior HR Specialist at Hamat, put it plainly:

“We spend $50,000+ a year on third-party hiring. Time-to-hire is double due to manual processes. High attrition from poor culture and role fit.”

Reem Fahad
Senior HR Specialist, Hamat

The case for change was not about preference. It was about the cost of continuing the same way.

How Testlify was implemented

One platform integrated into the existing workflow, replacing agencies and manual screening entirely.

Hamat integrated Testlify directly into their ATS, which meant candidate invitations, assessments, tracking, and reporting all ran through the system the team already used. There was no parallel process to manage. From day one, applicants were evaluated through structured assessments before any recruiter time was spent on them.

For technical roles including engineers and architects, assessments covered domain skills and cognitive ability, giving hiring managers an objective basis for comparison that agency-sourced evaluations had never provided. 

For all roles, personality and cultural fit assessment was embedded into the screening process from the start, addressing the attrition problem at its source rather than after the hire was made.

Results

Hiring that cost 25x a year now costs a fraction of that. And it takes half the time.

Time-to-hire dropped from two weeks to one. Recruiter productivity quadrupled as manual coordination was replaced by automated workflows. External hiring spend fell 80%, generating roughly $40,000 in annual savings. Quality of hire improved 20 to 25%, measured by better role and culture match, with attrition declining as a result.

“Testlify has transformed our recruitment process, making it seamless, efficient, and easy to use for both recruiters and candidates. Bringing candidate evaluation in-house has reduced costs by around 80% while maintaining high-quality hiring.”

Reem Fahad, Senior HR Specialist, Hamat