A majority (60.09 per cent) of UAE nationals believe that their current workplace has effective localization policies, with 37.09 per cent believing that the policies are very effective, a report said.

Less than one out of 10 respondents believe that localization policies at their place of work are not effective at all. 40.09 per cent of respondents said that leading job sites, followed by career fairs (16.82 per cent) are the main avenues for companies to recruit local talent, according to the ‘Nationalization in the GCC’ poll, recently conducted by Bayt.com, a leading career site in the Middle East.

However, an overwhelming majority (87.23 per cent) still believe that the UAE relies more on expatriates to take on specialized knowledge-based jobs (in fields such as IT, health services and engineering, among others).

A majority of the respondents (64.78 per cent) believe that the unemployment rate among local talent in the UAE is low, while over one third (35.22 per cent) conversely believe that unemployment rates are high. However, almost half of the respondents believe that finding and hiring local talent is extremely easy, while two out of 10 believe the opposite is true.

A large majority of those polled (72.26 per cent) believe that local talent enjoys better pay and benefits than expatriates. Fewer than one out of 10 respondents believe that local talent gets paid less. Only 20.26 per cent believe that pay is based entirely on merit.

Overall, 61.86 per cent think that local talent gets promoted faster than international talent, while 27.19 per cent believe that promotions are based entirely on merit. One out of 10 (10.95 per cent) believe that the career trajectory of expatriate talent gets promoted faster than national employees.

The percentage of local talent working in UAE companies is varied according to respondents. 25.18 per cent think that less than 5 per cent of the employees in their organization comprise of UAE nationals; 22.63 per cent believe that the number is somewhere between 6-20 per cent of the employees; and 23.36 per cent of respondents believe that 21-50 per cent of their company is comprised of local talent.

Those who believe that between 51-75 per cent and over 75 per cent of employees are comprised of UAE nationals is around 14 per cent respectively.

Almost half (43.09 per cent) of those polled say that the average seniority of national talent working at their company is comprised of senior management. 26.73 per cent believe the average Emirati talent is mid-career, while 14.52 per cent think that local talent comprises junior staff. Interestingly, 46 per cent of respondents didn’t know, or couldn’t say whether their company plans to hire more local talent next year, 38.25 per cent said yes, while 15.67 per cent said that there were no plans to hire local talent in the next year.

More than half of the respondents believe that better educational and vocational training facilities for nationals will help improve the hiring of national talent in the UAE the most. Contributing factors also include better incentives for private sector nationals hiring from government (18.89 per cent), better coordination between educational institutes and companies (14.98 per cent) and encouraging entrepreneurship (9.22 per cent).

Suhail Masri, VP of Sales, Bayt.com said: “Nationalization is at the forefront of the UAE’s employment initiatives, with nationalization in the private sector having a pivotal role.  At Bayt.com, we have been working with organizations large and small to assist them in hiring top Emirati talent since we started in the year 2000.”

“Obviously, our hard work has paid off, with 40 per cent of respondents saying that the most effective way to recruit national talent is through leading job sites like Bayt.com. It is also interesting to see that the second most effective way cited is career fairs.

“These fairs offer both the employer and potential employee the chance to meet face-to-face and exchange information. Private sector employers need to attend more career fairs, such as Careers UAE, in order to saturate their employee pool with a UAE national employee quota,” he added.

“At Bayt.com, our aim is empower employers through the insights that we accumulate in order to show them what the population is thinking when it comes to hiring national talent, and retaining their talent pool,” Masri continued.

“We encourage nationals to engage with employers on Bayt.com through platforms such as Bayt.com Specialties where they can take part in industry related discussions. Private sector employers are also advised to attend more career fairs in order to augment their UAE employee talent pool as a complement to their holistic online recruitment activities.

“Bayt.com has a proprietary virtual job fair platform which is ideal for this purpose and offers a custom outreach for clients interested in creating their own job fair environment easily online. In addition, our teams are also engaged in key physical career events locally around the year.”

Although the majority of respondents in the GCC believe that unemployment of nationals in their country of residence is low, considerable percentages do believes that unemployment is high. Forty-eight per cent of respondents in Saudi Arabia claimed that unemployment of Saudi nationals is high.

The majority of respondents in the GCC believe that local talent get better pay and benefits when compared to expatriates, with a further quarter believing that pay depends entirely on merit. Only one in 10 believes that local talent gets paid less.

Localization policies in the GCC appear to be effective, with 58 per cent of respondents saying so, and with only 13.3 per cent of respondents saying that their companies do not plan on hiring more local talent in the next calendar year. – TradeArabia News Service