UAE employers urged to look beyond salary as hiring becomes more selective

Employers across the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are heading into 2027 with a more selective approach to hiring, as talent shortages, artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and changing employee expectations reshape workforce strategies.

The emerging shift is less about whether companies will hire more people and more about where they need talent, which capabilities they need and how jobs should be redesigned.

Nishant Mahajan, Partner, People and Investments, Marsh Middle East and Africa, said employers will increasingly need to look beyond salary and benefits, with job security, wellbeing, career development and flexibility becoming important parts of the employee proposition.

This reflects a broader change in the UAE labour market. Organisations are balancing pressure to control costs and improve productivity with competition for specialised skills, creating a situation where overall hiring can remain cautious even as demand for certain capabilities remains strong.

Talent scarcity is becoming a skills problem

Marsh’s Global Talent Trends 2026 research found that 62 per cent of Middle East business leaders identified talent scarcity as a concern, compared with 54 per cent globally.

But the challenge is increasingly about finding the right capabilities rather than simply finding more people.

Organisations are prioritising workforce investment in areas such as organisational transformation, technology use and governance, risk management, skills development and innovation.

This helps explain why a cautious hiring environment can coexist with talent shortages. Companies may limit general headcount growth while competing aggressively for people with specialised skills.

For employers, this puts greater emphasis on skills-based workforce planning and on identifying whether a capability gap should be addressed through recruitment, reskilling or redeployment.

Pay alone may not be enough to retain talent

Employee expectations are also changing the traditional equation between compensation and retention. According to Marsh's Middle East findings, 64 per cent of employees said they would trade a 10 per cent pay rise for opportunities to develop AI and digital skills. 

Meanwhile, 74 per cent of HR leaders identified employee experience and the employee value proposition as a top priority.

The findings were collected before the regional conflict and should therefore be viewed as a baseline of workplace pressures and expectations that were already emerging before the uncertainty of 2026.

For employers, the implication is that the employee value proposition is becoming broader. Competitive pay remains important, but employees may increasingly assess an employer based on whether the organisation provides opportunities to remain relevant as jobs change, develop new skills and build longer-term career security.

Clear communication will also become more important as organisations make changes to roles and workforce structures.

“Clear communication and an honest attempt to bring your employees with you on this change journey, will play a significant part in separating the winners from the losers in the medium-term,” Mahajan said.

AI is changing how jobs are designed

AI is likely to accelerate this shift in 2027, but its impact will not simply be about replacing individual jobs.

A more immediate question for employers is which parts of a job should be automated, augmented or retained as human work.

In customer service, AI can support initial triage, summarise customer histories and suggest responses, while employees handle complex cases and relationship management.

In finance, automation can take on parts of reconciliation, reporting and analysis, allowing professionals to focus more on judgement and decision support.

In HR, AI can support workforce analytics, skills matching and administrative processes, while sensitive talent and managerial decisions continue to require human oversight.

This means AI adoption is likely to create as much demand for job redesign and governance as for technology skills.

Marsh's research captures the mixed employee response. While 83 per cent of Middle East employees said AI makes them more productive and 74 per cent expected it to improve jobs, 43 per cent also expressed concerns about job loss.

Mahajan said it remains too early to determine the full impact of AI on job creation and destruction, given the pace at which the technology is advancing. However, he expects its impact on work and employment to be widespread.

AI fluency moves beyond the technology function

One of the bigger workforce changes could be the normalisation of AI fluency across functions.

Rather than treating AI as a specialist capability limited to technology teams, employers may increasingly expect professionals in HR, finance, customer service, operations and other functions to understand how to work effectively with AI.

The most valuable employee profile could therefore combine domain expertise, AI fluency and human judgement.

As routine and analytical tasks become increasingly technology-assisted, capabilities such as judgement, creativity, empathy, accountability and risk management could become more important.

“AI fluency should increasingly be viewed less as a specialist technology skill and more as a capability that cuts across functions,” Mahajan said.

For UAE employers, the workforce question for 2027 is therefore becoming broader than how many people to hire. It is increasingly about what work needs to be done, what skills are required, which capabilities can be developed internally and where AI can change the way jobs are structured.