UAE job market: More jobs, still more candidates…

Even though the job market in the country has improved over the course of the past year, applicants are still in far greater number than slots available to be filled according to experts in the field.

According to Emirates24|7 calculations, there are roughly 400 registered jobseekers for every single job advertised on Bayt.com, a jobs portal.

The number of people applying for each job vacancy in the country still puts employers in the driving seat and candidates are struggling to get even an interview call leave alone a letter of offer.

James Nathan, an expat living in Dubai, recalls the number of times he has gone to different recruitment companies in the UAE.

“I’m employed, but want to change my job because of the lack of growth options in my current company. Recruitment companies say I have potential and there are many positions that have opened up. But even after five months of active search, nobody has been able to come back to me with a single offer or even a real interview call,” he said.

The numbers speak for themselves. Let’s take a look at the huge gap between the number of registered vacancies on popular job portal Bayt.com and registered jobseekers on the site.

“[We] currently have more than 3,965 vacancies advertised online in the UAE, with more than 1,690 job posts in Dubai alone. To these are added hundreds, if not thousands, of unadvertised positions that employers prefer filling by browsing our database of CVs. And with more than 11 million jobseekers registered on Bayt.com today, 1,584,000 are from the UAE,” VP Sales, Suhail Masri, Bayt.com told Emirates 24|7.

That’s 400 registered candidates for every single advertised vacancy.

To be fair, a good percentage of the registered jobseekers might not be actively looking for a job and might just have passive interest in browsing for vacancies. Additionally, since registration on jobs portals is free for the jobseekers, this may not necessarily be an accurate gauge of jobseekers vs. vacancies. Still, it does provide a broad indication of the jobs market.

But it’s not to say that every job advertised gets 400 or so applicants. While some sought-after companies and jobs will get inundated with applications, there will be firms and jobs that not many will be willing to accept.

Jobs with reputed companies in the UAE usually tend to see a rush of applications. For example, a vacancy posted on LinkedIn for the communications department head of Etisalat, one of the UAE’s two telecom companies, has hundreds of people applying for it, setting it ‘on fire’. This is one such case telling the state of the market.

An HR manager in a multi-national bank in Dubai, who did not wish to be quoted, said he receives many CVs in one given day. “I get so many job e-mails on a daily basis and many of them are very generic, requesting us to just put their CVs in our database,” he said.

Recruitment agencies, on the other hand, talk of far more jobs available in the market as the country’s economy improves. So, where exactly are all the jobs and to whom do they go?

There is no doubt that the number of jobs advertised in the market have gone up but so have the applicants. “Many people are looking at Dubai once again after the crises of 2008. The applications that we receive are not only from the UAE but from outside as well. We have so many people writing to us from the UK, Spain and other Western European economies,” added the Bank HR manager.

And then there are many candidates like Nathan who want to change jobs, simply adding to the scramble for jobs that is going on amongst the unemployed or those fresh out of college.

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