Monday, April 02, 2007

107 Saudi firms banned from recruiting

Yet again the government have had to get heavy to enforce the regulations encouraging employment opportunities for the National population. Hiring foreigners has been frozen for selected firms who have deemed to have abused their obligation to recruit Saudi nationals. Of course hiring is hard in Saudi at the best of times, and I'm sure these firms have been trying,
but it will be interesting to see how it impacts the growth and success of those firms.
See ArabNews website for more details.

There will be a few reactions to this, and I imagine outsource firms have a great future in KSA as outplacement of non-nationals could be a great way to increase the ratios of Saudi nationals that a company 'employ'. This of course isn't restricted to Saudi, and certainly there has been a rise in the number of banks who have contracted out their call centre and retail banking support centres to external service providers.

The productivity has probably risen because all of a sudden they're using an outside firm that has to be paid a fee (all good), but the effect on Nationalisation quotas must also be driving this trend I imagine. Is that increasing the number of Nationals employed in a bank though - or just reducing direct employment of non-nationals whilst reducing the employee size overall??

Not sure, but this topic only seems to get more interesting.

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