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The Financial Times recently looked to JBS Associates to help explain the recruitment market in the Middle East. The following article appeared in the Financial Times, February 5, 2009.

The Gulf Cooperation Council states, buoyed by oil and investment income over the recent six-year petrodollar boom, are better placed to ride out the global economic downturn. Indeed, for many of those losing their jobs in developed economies, the Gulf can seem like the only place on earth still recruiting.

Exec-Appointments, an online recruitment website belonging to Pearson, which also owns the FT, says the number of Middle East-based jobs posted on its site has increased significantly since the global downturn deepened in September. Saudi Arabia, the region's largest economy, is a particularly strong source of recruitment. "I am spending 70 per cent of my time on Saudi," says Dubai-based Susie Hingston of JBS Associates, headhunters focused on emerging markets. While the kingdom's economy is weakening because of the oil price slump, the impact of the credit crunch has been less marked on the financial sector in Saudi Arabia than in Dubai, where investment banks and fund managers have launched regional operations over the past couple of years. Widespread redundancies at the global financial companies based at the Dubai International Financial Centre are helping regional competitors pick up highly-skilled overseas workers. Most senior executives are finding it easy to find other jobs in the region, says Ms Hingston, but they are increasingly having to look further a field, to "hardship" postings such as Saudi Arabia, or less glitzy Doha, whose economy is set to take off this year, while the rest of the world is threatened by recession.

Abu Dhabi's oil and investment wealth, combined with its serious diversification drive into renewable energy, media and education, has generated jobs, but also led many workers into a fruitless search for accommodation and school places. Moreover, the fluid regional labour market is bad news for those from outside the Middle East seeking to ride out the credit crunch in a tax-free haven. Given exorbitant housing and living costs in the region's hot spots, many employers have been shunning some international applicants, preferring to source employees from the deeper pool of executives who have congregated in the region since the turn of the century. Until a year ago, bankers and other professionals were still arriving in the gulf on spec, and many were also managing to secure decent jobs, say recruiters.

Now, however, unless someone can offer a strong specialism or demonstrate deep knowledge of the Gulf, it is hard to break into the region, given the rising redundancy toll. The scale of the slowdown in Dubai has been worse than most imagined. In the weeks after the cataclysmic events in global financial markets in September, officials were still predicting that the emirate would emerge from the global financial crisis unscathed. Since then, banks and real estate companies have been shedding staff at an unprecedented rate. Even during the last downturn, when oil prices crashed in 1998, the economy was still so modest and its international profile so low that the effect was fairly muted. Now, the reverberations are spreading through the rest of the economy, with hospitality, media and advertising jobs, tourism positions and even retail posts under threat. However, while wounded, the employment market is not dead in Dubai. Employers have been holding off on hiring decisions, but now some are coming back into the market.

This is an abridged version of the article. For the full article please go to:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/835e4d88-f325-11dd-abe6-0000779fd2ac.html