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Competition for Emirati talent is the highest it has ever been, according to recruitment giant Hays.
An update on the firm’s Middle East operations, released this morning, reveals that hiring of UAE nationals – as opposed to expatriates – has risen over the past few months, with increased demand in both the public and private sectors.
The growth is occurring against a backdrop of ‘Emiratisation’ in support of the ‘Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030’ plan across private organisations and industry sectors, with around 30,000 private sector jobs expected to be created for UAE nationals in 2019.
As a consequence, Hays says the competition for top Emirati talent is hotting up, with organisations having to assess their attraction and retention techniques to ensure that they have the most effective processes in place for securing talented employees. The three core ‘pull’ factors are learning and development opportunities and initiatives, organisation culture, and employer brand.
The hiring of UAE nationals differs from that of expatriates and has its own complexities and requirements. Hays underlines the importance of the onboarding process being managed as professionally and efficiently as possible. Otherwise, employers can lose candidates because the hiring process takes weeks or months longer than anticipated, resulting in a lack of trust in the organisation and loss of interest in the role.
Consequently, Hays calls on employers to manage candidates’ expectations, communicate on the status of their application regularly and enforce the value that they foresee in them. If in doubt about the process for hiring UAE nationals, employers should work with a trusted recruitment partner that can provide support.
While there are many Emirati candidates available for work in the local employment market, there is a skills shortage in technical engineering roles, digital marketing and communications, finance and HR.
The Department for Education has set up a panel of experts to develop new professional qualifications for teachers in England, to help them progress their careers.
The panel will advise on the scheme, which is to be introduced during the academic year 2020-2021.
The focus is on those who want to progress in non-leadership roles.
But unions said there was a lack of transparency about how the experts were recruited to the advisory panel.
The qualifications form part of the teacher recruitment and retention strategy in England, which was launched in January.
School standards minister Nick Gibb said the new qualifications would provide recognition for those teachers who want to develop their skills and progress their careers.
“Our ambition is for teachers to be able to do so without having to pursue traditional leadership routes, instead expanding their expertise in vital areas such as curriculum or behaviour management,” he said.
Richard Gill, chairman of the Teaching Schools Council, said: “There is a need to ensure that the current programme of qualifications meets the needs of the current educational landscape.
“These new bespoke qualifications will provide practitioners with an excellent opportunity to develop and progress their careers, building stronger and more effective classroom practice without the need for them to follow traditional leadership roles.”
But the announcement has drawn criticism from teaching unions.
Zero-hours and “gig economy” workers who have shifts cancelled at short notice could be paid compensation under new government plans.
The proposal is part of a package of measures aimed at improving the rights of low-paid flexible workers.
Under the proposals, they could receive the full value of the shift cancelled or three times the hourly minimum wage for each hour cancelled.
The government is canvassing views on the proposals over the next 12 weeks.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said one in six low-paid workers on flexible hours received no more than a day’s notice of a cancelled shift.
In addition, nearly 40% of all UK workers said their hours varied from week to week, with 1.7 million people saying they were very anxious that their working hours could change unexpectedly.
Business Secretary Greg Clark said new business models had opened up “a whole new world of working patterns and opportunities”.
He added: “It’s vital that workers’ rights keep pace with these changes, reflect the modern working environment and tackle the small number of firms that do not treat their staff fairly.”
The proposals are intended to build on an earlier set of reforms introduced in December last year.
Those were based on the findings of a review into modern working practices led by Matthew Taylor, a former aide to ex-PM Tony Blair and chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts.
As part of that process, the Low Pay Commission was asked to look into the issue of “one-sided flexibility”, and their ideas are at the heart of the latest consultation.
Bryan Sanderson, who chairs the commission, said it was “delighted” that the government was taking it further.
“The proposed changes, part of a package of policies we suggested, have the potential to improve work and life for hundreds of thousands of people,” he added.
But the TUC said the proposed changes did not go far enough.
General secretary Frances O’Grady said compensation would be “a step in the right direction”, but repeated the TUC’s call for zero-hours contracts to be banned.
Britain has witnessed a remarkable period of high employment, with the number of people in work at its highest since the 1970s.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the unemployment holding steady at 3.8%, its lowest rate on record.
Wages have also increased at their fastest rate in more than a decade, data published on Tuesday shows.
But the reality of Britain’s labour market is a lot less rosy and a lot more complex than some of the headline figures suggest.
Half of the past year’s employment growth has been in self-employment, which is typically far more insecure and often less well-paid than staff roles, according to the Resolution Foundation.
“One of the big changes in the job market over the past year has been the return of growing self-employment. The number of self-employed workers has increased by 167,000,” the think tank said.
It is part of a growing trend over the past decade, with increased numbers of young people employed in the gig economy and rising numbers of over-65s continuing to work on a freelance basis.
Lloyds Bank’s Business In Britain survey showed a rise in business confidence, but firms also said that it is getting harder and harder for them to find the staff they need to capitalise on it.
The bank reported that while confidence was at an 18 month high, challenges in hiring were at a ten year high.
A staggering 52 per cent of respondents said they struggled to recruit skilled staff in the last six months.
It should be stated at this point that this is no cynical attempt by Lloyds to garner a bit of cheap publicity. The Business in Britain report is in its 25th year and is put together from the views of 1,500 companies, mostly small and medium sized enterprises that are (as we keep being told) the engines of growth. As such, its findings are worthy of note.
Now, regular readers won’t be surprised to see me using this as yet more evidence of just how stupid, and damaging, the current Government’s approach to immigration is.
Making EU residents feel unwelcome, and pandering to racists, will cause real, and lasting economic damage to this country. They’ve already started to vote with their feet, exacerbating the nation’s yawning skills gap.
However, at the same time, it is also fair to ask whether businesses are doing enough to mitigate the problem themselves, and whether their approach to recruitment isn’t making the difficult situation they identify worse than it otherwise might be.
After all, we were talking about the skills gap before the EU referendum and it would likely have continued to cause problems even had David Cameron’s decision to call it not resulted in an outbreak of collective insanity.
Part of the reason why it continues to be an issue is that businesses are failing to exploit the talent that is under their noses.
For example, I constantly highlight the disability employment gap within these pages. Despite the labour shortages Lloyds references, skilled disabled people can’t find jobs.
According to disability charity Scope, the difference between the rate of employment among able bodied people when compared to that of disabled people currently stands at a staggering 31.3 percentage points.
But it isn’t just disabled people. Unemployment is also markedly higher among black and minority ethnic people, about twice the rate found among white Britons in fact.
Last year, I revealed the results of a TUC study that found that the disparity in incomes between BAME workers and their white workers actually increases the more qualifications they get.
Meanwhile, we constantly see reports highlighting poor treatment of female staff, and of LGBT staff.
What all this indicates is that UK businesses are failing to tap into some substantial pools of talented and skilled workers, failing to make the best of the workers from them when that they do hire them, failing to treat them well.
Part of the problem might be being caused by recruitment agencies. Many firms use them, and they may sub consciously, or even deliberately, exclude certain candidates from shortlists to minimise what they misguidedly perceive as “risk”, all with the aim of keeping their clients happy.
Half of firms expect to recruit staff next year, with smaller firms most confident, according to a new study.
A survey of almost 300 companies, employing one million workers, also found that most believed a diverse workforce was important to their future success.
The CBI said its research found that a shortage of skilled workers was the biggest worry for companies, with many worried about being able to attract overseas employees.
Half of the companies questioned said they were aiming to increase pay at least in line with inflation in the coming year, slightly fewer than this time a year ago.
Fewer than one in three said they would be able to absorb the costs of increases in the national living wage, with one in five planning to increase prices or restructure their business.
Neil Carberry, the CBI’s managing director for people policy, said: “Britain’s record on job creation is second to none, and this year’s survey shows that this is set to continue in 2018.
“But with softening economic growth matched with high employment, the survey again emphasises the vital need to make progress on the industrial strategy and secure a good Brexit deal to improve productivity, support job creation and boost pay growth.
“The survey also shows that firms are concerned about finding the right staff in the future and this is damaging the outlook for investment in the longer term.”
Tracy Evans of recruitment firm Pertemps, which helped with the survey, added: “Although there has been a lot of change in 2017, confidence is high among employers, with most expecting to expand on opportunities in the coming year.
“One of the big problems we face in recruitment at the moment is the skills gap and how to overcome it. Finding the right staff is obviously key in recruitment and we need to find a solution to this ever-growing problem.”
According to new research from Barclays, UK graduates spend an average of £550 attending job interviews before securing a job
The research which polled 1,000 graduates found that 48% of graduate jobseekers have to borrow money, take out credit cards or go into their overdrafts to fund expensive commuting fares to interviews, which makes finding a job inaccessible for many.
Jobseekers frequently spend £80 on buying appropriate clothing, £90 on travel and accommodation, £205 on resources to boost employability and £175 on software to enable upskilling – so the costs quickly rack up.
And, the survey revealed that 61% of prospective employers wouldn’t even cover the basic costs of an interview, while 54% have had to turn down interviews or not even applied (51%) because they know that they can’t afford to attend the interview.
So, to tackle this problem following results from the survey, Barclays are launching their Graduate Fund scheme to help student jobseekers access their careers more easily.
Graduates can apply for grants from the £20,000 pool of ‘free money’ to make attending interviews more affordable. And, this money can be used for anything from interview clothing, travel and accommodation to training and development resources and upskilling.
This grant is a one-off cash injection that doesn’t need to be paid back.
