Talent Scraping

What I refer to as talent scraping, or a squeeze, is becoming very noticeable today in Dubai and other leading GCC economies.

If you look in the job papers around the region you'll notice a couple of things. Firstly the volume of new recruitment firms each week is astonishing. Even if this is not new, it hasn't been running at this rate since 1999/2000. A lot of consultants are going out on their own, and the market will consolidate again once the boom slows down a little in 2009.

Secondly there are adverts for people living here to go work in developed economies such as the USA. What's interesting is that they are tapping up and trying to directly attract the skilled workers who have migrated here from MENA traditional (under-developed) sourcing markets such as India and the Philippines.

Add to this the growth in India's own economy and their efforts to attract non-resident Indians back to India - and you add a third level to the talent crunch. I wouldn't expect to see much movement back to the Philippines of their overseas workers, as they represent a massive part of the Filipino GDP (2 largest contributor I believe is remittances from overseas workers).

So with fast developing economies such as Dubai's now starting to feel inflation, and starting to lose knowledge workers, the need to develop local resources is more important than ever. The problem for Dubai is that the local population is so small that it can not meet the demand. All of this means we face a continual recruitment cycle where we're bringing a dozen people each month in the front door; whilst ten leave through the fire escape.

Qatar is facing the same pressures, with similar demographics and economic growth; whereas Saudi does at least have a large enough population to eventually stop the merry-go-round.

Companies are going to have to get their heads around the concepts of talent warehouses, just-in-time recruitment pipelines & robust talent retention strategies if they want to be stable between now and 2010.