With the UAE’s population growing by around 1,000 people every day, you’d think hiring would be easy, but in reality it’s becoming more and more difficult.

The companies we are now partnering with look quite different to two years ago. There has been a shift in our business from predominantly MNCs to locally headquartered businesses, and semi-government companies.

Historically, none of our clients asked us for Russian speakers, but now at any one time, we have several Russian-speaking roles available.

Offshoring staff: Nowadays, with the global economic downturn, there are many multinational companies cutting back on local hires. They are moving roles overseas to more affordable countries. South Africa and Poland seem to be popular options for setting up shared service centres for English speaking countries, and Egypt for bilingual Arabic/English.

Salaries are a challenge: Candidates with legacy roles offering high salaries including schooling are quite surprised when they find themselves unexpectedly in the market, having to lower their salary expectations by 20-50%.   There is an oversupply of candidates and employers are making the most of this. Hiring people who have just landed in the UAE can certainly keep costs down, but for how long? Once they realise their market worth, their stint in a business can be short-lived.

The sheer volume of applicants is overwhelming: Many don’t have the right skills or experience. Most haven’t read the job description before clicking ‘Easy Apply’. They see a job title and decide to give it a go.

So, what’s the solution? You need to go beyond job adverts and instead, proactively target the right people. But who has time for that on top of a busy day job?

Here are a couple of stories from our recent conversations:

• One company we’ve just started working with had decided to stop advertising altogether. Their senior team was bombarded with InMails and CVs that weren’t even close to being relevant. Important business messages were getting lost in the noise. They’ve now adopted a ‘recruitment agency only’ policy – which, of course, we’re very happy about!
• Another was an HR Manager we reached out to after seeing a role they’d been advertising. They told us that they’d been trying to fill the position for six months without success. Just a week before our call, they’d finally made a hire, their words? “I wish we’d heard from you sooner.”
• One of our clients just spent all weekend battling through 800 applicants for a low level urgent role - he called 150 people and still did not find the right candidate.

If you’ve advertised recently, you may have experienced difficulty in finding a quality candidate.

If finding the right person quickly is critical, don’t lose valuable time trying to do it all yourself. You could be wasting weeks.

Our recruiters are well-established with niche networks - We have specialist recruiters in the following areas:

• Finance, Accounting, Banking, Fintech, Data Analytics
• IT, Tech
• Legal, Compliance, Risk
• Business Support / Admin
• Sales
• Marketing
• Events
• Supply Chain, Procurement, Shipping, Logistics

If you’re struggling to fill a job vacancy, we’d love to work with you again – please get in touch.

Let us do what we do best – so you can focus on what you do best.

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