Bayt.com’s latest poll reveals 49.2% of companies in the region plan to hire more local talent

48.5% of the respondents across the Middle East and North Africa said the company they work for adheres to a localisation hiring policy, while only 34.5% said “no” and 17% were unsure, according to the new online poll series on ‘Localisation Hiring Policies in the GCC’ conducted by the Middle East’s number one job site, Bayt.com.

When asked if their company’s localisation policy is audited by any government entity, 43% of the poll takers said yes, while 39% stated no and 18% seemed unsure.  Furthermore, 43.6% of respondents said between 0-5% of locals work for their company; another 13.3% claimed between 5-15%; 8.6% said between 16-25%; whereas 12% stated that between 26-50%; 9.7% said between 51-75% and 12.8% said between 76-100% of their colleagues within the same company were locals.

The respondents were then asked about ‘the average seniority of local citizens’ working with them. 20.3% said that most locals join in at an intermediate level and 21% stated at a senior level, while 23.7% said locals get hired at an entry level. However, 15.3% said that local employees were spread across all levels in their company, while only 19.7% were certain that there were no locals working within the same company.

The results of the ‘Localisation Hiring Policies in the GCC’ poll also showed that while a staggering 47.5% admitted their company had a hard time recruiting local talent, 49.2% stated their company plan to hire more local talent.

In terms of career trajectory, a good 43% of the poll takers claimed locals get promoted a lot faster than others, while 21% believed that to be untrue and stated both locals and non-locals had the same career trajectory. However, 36% surprisingly said locals got promoted a lot slower as compared to others in their company.

Amer Zureikat, VP Sales, Bayt.com, said, “Bayt.com is widely recognised as the number one job site in the Middle East, and we are devoted to studying and evaluating data that can help our community of both employees and employers. Localisation is a topic of much urgency in discourse currently in HR circles around the GCC, and we are pleased to have made great inroads with this survey in understanding the patterns and issues related to talent localisation and proud to provide the most effective, efficient and sophisticated channel for talent localisation activity in the GCC today across all industries, career levels and job roles.”

The online poll series partakers were then asked about the ways in which their company recruited local employees. Most respondents (41%) said recruitment was usually carried out online; 15.6% stated newspapers; 21.3% claimed it was done via traditional head-hunters; and only 1.6% said through universities. When asked what career level local talent is most in demand for in their company today, 36.5% said intermediate level; 25.8% stated senior level; 24.6% claimed entry level; 5.2% were not sure and 7.9% felt that local employees get hired evenly across all levels.

“The results of our most recent poll show that there is a high demand for local employees in the region; and while some companies maintain they still have a hard time finding local talent, the majority manages to recruit local talent online, which once again reaffirms Bayt.com’s leading positioning in the region as the number one job site offering employers in both the public and private sectors immediate and effective access to the largest pool of talent from across the region including highly relevant, highly qualified and highly competitive local talent from each of the GCC countries,” he concluded.