GCC employers pivot to local talent pools amid regional uncertainty

Labor markets in the GCC are shifting around once again, as the regional conflict set off a reordering of how talent is hired, where it’s hired from, and on what terms. While it’s far from an across-the-board collapse, our sources indicate there’s a sharpening hierarchy, with several fault lines emerging all at once. While real estate keeps booming, for example, tourism and hospitality have been gutted. And even within resilient industries, employers are increasingly leaning towards in-country hiring, rather than importing talent from abroad. Those shifting priorities have also seeped into broader policies, including visa scrutiny.

That dynamic is already visible in how employers are sourcing talent. “If there was a redirection since the conflict began, it was to hire people from within the country. So, that could have been expats or nationals, but it certainly was, ‘Let’s not try and take people from a thousand or ten thousand miles away and try and bring them here.’ It was, ‘Let’s look for what we need in-country,’” Cooper Fitch CEO Trefor Murphy tells EnterpriseAM.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia still have no trouble attracting high-quality talent — “the top 20%,” as Murphy puts it — because they continue to offer safety, lifestyle, the tax-free element and opportunity. “The bit that we need to figure out is how do we get back to attracting the top 1% and top 5%. That’s the bit that’s a [little] unclear. That’s the bit that needs a strong, permanent ceasefire to maintain [the region’s] position as a true global hub for talent,” Murphy says.

Major changes are also expected in business strategies for the post-conflict world, which will be shaped in turn by how economic activity, alliances, and industrial priorities change at the national level, Zilla Capital Managing Partner Omar Shenety tells us. Altogether, what’s unfolding is what he calls a “paradigm shift” and is expected to be as significant as changes made after disruptions such as the 1991 Gulf War and covid-19.

A sharp shock and a fast (albeit uneven) rebound

This reshaping comes as the conflict causes real and concentrated economic contraction. The IMF lowered its GCC growth forecast by 2.3 percentage points to 2.0% in April. The pain was distributed unevenly, largely according to each state’s exposure to the Strait of Hormuz and its oil reserves: Qatar was the hardest hit at an expected 8.6% contraction, while Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are all projected to hold onto growth of more than 3% despite the revisions/

The labor market told a similar story of shock and snap-back. Cooper and Fitch’s April GulfEmployment Index contracted 12% in March, the month of peak military activity, before rebounding 13% in April as the ceasefire took hold and projects and hiring pipelines resumed. April’s job growth came in level with the same month a year earlier — short of expected market momentum, but a sign that “the employment base held in a period that could have produced a significant contraction.” The year had opened with 3.5% growth in January and 1.5% in February.

Beneath those aggregate numbers sits a stark divergence, as employment in anything tied to discretionary spending flatlined across the GCC. “Anything that’s heavily laced into tourism, passenger movement, hospitality, and the niceties of life have been slowed down or stopped completely still. Those numbers are not even measuring anything; there’s not a heartbeat in some of those sectors at the moment,” Murphy says.

Sales and marketing saw the sharpest decline in April — particularly in tourism, hospitality and retail — after a relatively strong first quarter. Tourism and hospitality has been hit hardest of all, with redundancies and temporary unpaid leave orders imposed to ease the financial burden. Some hotels are weighing temporary shutdowns to refurbish while occupancy stays low.

Real estate, by contrast, posted the strongest y-o-y hiring growth, driven by continued project delivery and commercial activity in large-scale developments, with hiring focused on delivery, project management and commercial roles. “Real estate in 1H 2025 was booming. It’s booming now, it’s just booming a little bit faster in April,” Murphy tells us.

Finance, energy, the public sector, technology, supply chain, and legal and investments also grew. “Banking was tragic in 1Q 2026 because they stopped lending money and stopped doing business,” Murphy notes. CEO and strategy roles held flat y-o-y, while manufacturing dipped slightly as employers prioritised execution over expansion.

The human cost falls on the exposed

For workers in the wrong sector, there’s already a financial toll. One professional at a domestic tour agency — a business that depends on group packages — disclosed that their salary had recently been slashed by half, while several colleagues were laid off entirely. Another professional working at a mid-tier consulting agency based in Dubai recounted a similar situation, with several employees laid off and many others placed on indefinite unpaid leave.

The squeeze is also reaching people who have not even started yet, as the friction in key sectors trickles down into corporate onboarding pipelines. A mid-career Egyptian consultant accepted a position at Visa Inc. in Dubai, but their work visa application was rejected three times — a hurdle increasingly common as administrative scrutiny tightens. A mobility agent advised them to pause for a few months before reapplying, citing a sudden spike in identical rejections in recent weeks. Despite the administrative snags, the company has maintained its employment offer, the would-be employee stresses.

Some withdrawals are harder to read. “We would have a percentage of people that would just pull out naturally anyway. And we’ve had a percentage out there that just pulled out because of this particular instance,” Murphy says, though whether the war has measurably accelerated that trend remains unclear.

The reordering may not treat all nationalities the same. Gulf countries may introduce more stringent entry and residency conditions, dynamically adjusting immigration policy based on real-time assessments of bilateral relations shaped by the war, Shenety suggests. Whether that reshuffle will produce a direct, sector-wide cooling effect on hiring from specific countries remains to be seen.

What the war is unlikely to do, our sources say, is hand the squeeze to nationalization agendas. The UAE’s young (and very highly educated) national workforce does not threaten foreign talent, because nationals remain a minority of the labor force. “I see no correlation between a squeeze in certain sectors and [the advancement of] nationalization,” Shenety adds.

Caution everywhere — but not collapse

For now, uncertainty cuts across every front, but the caution shows up most predominantly in investment decisions. Preliminary indicators suggest expats’ willingness to buy property is set to decline, Shenety says. “If I had just bought a brand new hotel in Dubai and gone from 100% capacity to 20% or 40% capacity, and I was planning to build a second one, I probably wouldn’t build the second one just yet,” Murphy says.

How quickly any of these trends reverse will depend on who is making the call. “Multinationals or international organizations are going to be a bit slower to trust. They’ll have a whole series of things that they’ll want to see happening before they really start re-engaging again, whereas the local players and local businesses could move very quickly into growing quickly again,” Murphy says.

And the recovery, when it comes, could come fast. “When there’s a permanent ceasefire — and it’s only a ‘when’ thing, it’s never an ‘if’ thing — and tourists start coming back, there will be a massive flex back up, a spike back up in that market. It’s a lot of short-term pain. Sometimes people will lose their jobs, but there will be opportunities here for people again,” Murphy says.