Three quarters of financial employees (75%) are aware of their company’s strategy to recruit nationals respective to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, and two thirds (66%) can see evidence that the recruitment effort is working.
One of the latest priorities of the National Agenda of the UAE is emiratisation. The country’s government want to increase private sector targets by ten times. A new research has analyzed this practice of localization in the United Arab Emirates. The survey is called Localization of the Workforce and it was conducted by eFinancialCareers. It gives an interesting insight into the rising tendency of recruiting locals. In addition, the research does not focus only on the United Arab Emirates, but on the financial sector in entire GCC region.
The result of the survey are mixed. About 57% of employees believe that their company’s practice to hire locals is closely connected to its goals. Nevertheless, more than 40% of the respondents state that their company continues to have troubles meeting its quota.
Also, employees are not really sure whether the emiratisation strategy is effective. Nearly half of the people who participated in the survey do not think it will improve a business’ value. Despite this, respondents did agree that hiring local employees can sometimes increase a company’s value. That was particularly the case with front office employees (66%). In contrast, barely 14% believed that back office staff should also be localized.
However, most GCC employees are aware of their company’s localization strategy. The report has found that around 75% of all employees in the region know that financial services are now looking for local workforce.
According to 53% of the people who took part in the survey, the recruiting of local workforce happens gradually. However, that creates a number of difficulties for financial institutions. This is because they need to make sure that companies continue to follow the localization strategy.
In the UAE, emiratization is among the main goals of governmental institutions. For instance, many banks in the country are adopting this recruitment policy. Moreover, they are even making it central in their workforce strategy. Nevertheless, the report reveals that localization can be challenging for recruiters. The reason is that the amount of well-trained UAE nationals with sufficient experience is highly limited. As a result, this may hinder the country’s emiratization strategy.
