Last Updated on April 10, 2024 by Jamie Marshall
Job vacancies in Dubai are advertised in a number of key sites: general recruitment sites and major business sites.
General Recruitment Sites
Bayt.com is great site for job seekers and has a significant amount of job information in English, Arabic and French. It is an international site based in Jordan, but as I write, it is offering 3.6K jobs in the UAE, so it is definitely worth perusing. Like Gulf Talent below, you do not get far without logging in, but if you are job hunting, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so.
This is a very flexible website. If you click browse companies, you then get to choose country, and in the case of the UAE, emirate, and finally type of employment. This can all be done without logging in. There is also a place where the number of new jobs posted that day is being constantly updated. This gives users confidence that this is an actively managed site. Make sure to upload your CV for maximum exposure.
Gulf Talent is one of the top internet sites to go to when looking for job vacancies.
As you would expect from its name, it advertises jobs for the whole Gulf region. So you can see what is available in any emirate in the UAE, and also what Qatar or Kuwait has to offer in comparison. There are usually about 2.5K jobs on offer in the UAE at any one time from this site alone.
This site also tells you about specific companies that you might be interested in and what they have on offer, for example they list Hyder Consulting, an international engineering company separately. By clicking on the name, you get a list of what is available and where the vacancy is located. Generally, they are looking for surveyors and engineers for positions in the UAE and Saudi Arabia (KSA).
There is a lot of information on the homepage and various different pages you can link to. However, if you want more than just basic indicators of what they have on offer, such as types of jobs and numbers looked for, you need to sign in. Once that is done, you can go deeper and get much more information. You can post your CV as well.
Major Business Sites
A lot of major businesses in the UAE have their own recruitment sites. One such is the Al Tayer Group.
The Al Tayer group has such a variety of businesses that they are always looking to recruit new people. Car sales and services are part of the group including Ford, Range Rover, Ferrari and Maserati. And there are also other luxury goods. For example, the fashion outlets handle brands such as Armani at the top end and the more every day Banana Republic. Jewelry, notably Bvlgari is an Al Tayer business; Harvey Nichols in Dubai is owned and operated by Al Tayer, so this covers a wealth of brands in a luxury department store. There are also travel agencies and commercial real estate offices.
Clearly, massive business groups like Al Tayer need their own career portal. The career portal offers information on jobs, projections for the future and information on top current employees.
The Alshaya Group has a very informative website that offers information about the group as well as job opportunities.
Again, this is a massive conglomeration of businesses. Alshaya has such businesses as fashion outlets, Boots the well-known pharmacy, optics outlets, and food outlets to name a few. They also have the ever popular Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids home furnishing outlets. Mothercare, Debenhams and H&M are owned and operated by Alshaya.
The careers section of the website lists jobs by nationality and by type of work offered. It also shows where the position is as not all jobs are in Dubai or even the UAE. There is plenty of information about how the recruiting process works including the fact that HR officers conduct recruitment drives around the world. Often, it is possible to be interviewed in your country of origin.
Majid Al Futtaim is another huge group in the UAE.
However, their website is not as user friendly as the others and offers less information. Despite being a huge company that owns malls such as Dubai City Center, there are few jobs actually advertised on the website. However, some jobs are also advertised on Bayt.com discussed above.
Then there is the Al-Futtaim Group, part of the same family but different. I think these two groups are run by two brothers.
This is a much better website with a lot of vacancies and different companies. One major company is Toyota. I think a glance at the streets in Dubai will show that Toyota is the top selling car brand in the UAE. Their sales and service departments are state-of-the-art and busy; therefore, they need people. They also have businesses in property, retail, entertainment and insurance.
The job search part of the website works well. It requires you to type in what you are looking for and then you can avoid those vacancies that are not for you.
So the job market is alive and well as Dubai climbs out of the decline it went into in 2008. Persistence will find you a vacancy that suits your needs. If you speak Arabic as well as English, you have an advantage. Also, some companies tend to favor people from certain countries. Others automatically categorize people from certain countries as being more suitable for lower paid jobs, but this is changing. There was a time when anyone from the UK was highly desirable, more so than an equally skilled person from South Africa. That is not so obvious now. Generally speaking, women are less well paid than men.
Linkedin is a very popular site in the UAE; if you are serious about working in Dubai, do join. One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of jobs in the UAE go to people on the basis of who they know. Linkedin can help you to make contacts before you arrive and once you are here. Networking is very important as it is in most places in the world.
The vacancies are there, it is up to you to apply.