Majority of UAE job recruiters saw an increase in hiring in 2018

Recruitment confidence is strong with candidates demanding higher than average salaries, according to LinkedIn survey

Álvaro Sanmartí / The National

More than half of UAE recruiters saw an increase in hiring from April to December 2018 compared to the same period in 2017, according to a new survey from LinkedIn.

Fifty-six per cent of recruiters said that candidates demanded higher than average salaries during that period, and 84 per cent of recruiters and HR professionals said they felt 'extremely' or 'very' confident about their ability to hire the right talent, the LinkedIn Recruiter Sentiment survey found.

"We suspect the market is picking up, so that companies now, rather than retrenching staff and cutting back are now starting to reinvest back in their businesses with good people - and there's a lot of good people on the marketplace," David Mackenzie, the managing director of the GCC recruitment consultancy Mackenzie Jones, told The National.

"We've seen an increase last quarter by about 30 per cent in terms of the [open] jobs being rung in to us by clients," Mr Mackenzie said. "But if we analyse those jobs, they're not new jobs. They're jobs that should have been filled 18 months ago, but during the last 18 months they've been kept on hold until the market conditions improved."

The survey, commissioned for the first time by LinkedIn and carried out by Coleman Parkes Research, based on the responses of 300 in-house HR professionals and agency recruiters in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah.

The top reasons given for the increase in hiring were: business growth (63 per cent), availability of more suitable candidates (52 per cent) and access to relevant talent insights (51 per cent).

Two-thirds of respondents said that analytics tools that provide insight on job candidates, like LinkedIn Talent Insights, which surfaces data from the social media platform's more than 590 million LinkedIn members and 30 million companies, are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ important for recruiters to do their jobs competitively.

“The need for the most qualified candidates is greater than ever before, so naturally, HR professionals are turning to workforce analytics tools to make smarter, data-driven business decisions,” said Ghassan Talhouk, head of LinkedIn Talent Solutions for LinkedIn UAE.

There seems to be no shortage of qualified job seekers, as the majority of recruiters (55 per cent) saw a greater supply of candidates than available roles.

“We are in a job shortage and a candidate glut. For every job, we’ve probably got 10 to 15 candidates chasing the job, minimum,” Mr Mackenzie said.

The most in-demand roles were tax and finance executives and IT specialists, the survey said. Hiring rates increased in the IT, food & beverage and hospitality industries. The most challenging sectors to find job candidates were transport, public administration and design.

The survey also looked at the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. While 51 per cent of recruiters agree that AI will grow employment opportunities in the UAE, 46 per cent expect fewer entry to mid-level jobs due to increased automation of work processes. Jobs in finance, health care and transport/storage industries will be the most affected, according to 68 per cent of recruiters.

Amid increased awareness of the benefits of workplace diversity and inclusion, 68 per cent of respondents think that sourcing and hiring candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds is a priority.