As anyone with half an eye on the news will appreciate, the Gulf region is one of the worlds up and coming business locations – with Dubai, in fact, currently the world’s fastest growing economy with the largest flow of migrant workers. Digby Morgan’s director responsible for the region, Dona Battat, reports back from her recent trip to Dubai having just established a dedicated team focussed on serving clients and candidates in the territory.

Dubai is hugely impressive on every count. There is a fantastically positive, ‘can do’ feeling in the air and the incredible growth of the business community and the building and infrastructure work that’s going on to support it is unparalled. And, of course, whenever there is commercial growth on that scale it calls for a significant injection of professional and talented HR expertise.

For many companies relatively new to the region, it would seem that a lot of the HR input has also been of a ‘set up and build’ fashion with a high demand for recruitment, policy and procedure and generalist HR activity for companies in high growth mode. But things are moving quickly and there’s definitely a sense from the businesses we met across a range of sectors that the time is right to ensure that their HR is ready and able to meet the demands from their rapidly developing commercial needs.

Companies appreciate that they need more added value from their HR and are looking to bring in more expertise in terms of really good HRDs, HR business partners with genuine commercial acumen, professional development and so on. Candidates will need to have a flexible, ‘go with the flow’ attitude, be open to change, new ideas and new ways of doing things and be able to work in a fast paced, constantly changing environment. Of course, anyone with previous Gulf experience is at an especial premium!

In short, there are plenty of opportunities in the Gulf region (and that’s not just in Dubai but also includes Abu Dhabi, the whole of UAE, plus Doha and Bahrain) and the issue is now one of identifying, attracting and retaining the best talent – both from within the Gulf area itself but, more significantly, from all around the globe. And, of course, this is where Digby Morgan fits in. Though we’ve been filling roles in the region for sometime, I’m now running a dedicated team of internationally based HR recruitment specialists focused purely on supplying Gulf-based clients and potential candidates with a quality service. We’re certainly in a great position to service all of our client and candidate demands in the Gulf region from around the globe.

top