To recruit direct migrant employees, OilCo relies on employment agencies that are scattered around the world. However, the firm avoids dealing with agents in the Arab world and countries that have unstable political relations with Saudi Arabia, such as Thailand and Iran, and does not deal with agents in countries where it is difficult to find English-speaking workers, such as China and Taiwan. The process of recruiting migrants starts with an internal recruitment request from a VP of a function to the recruitment section. The recruitment section provides an employment agency with the requirements for labour. The role of the agency is to select the best matching candidates and send their Curriculum Vitae (CV) to OilCo for assessment. The candidates whose CVs are nominated by the firm are contacted
by the agents to prepare for the interview with OilCo representatives. In the early days of OilCo, the firm formed a recruitment panel that consisted of HR and technical specialists who travel abroad to conduct interviews; the recruitment panel typically let a hotel or a conference hall for a couple of days for this event. However, since the firm has filled most of its job vacancies, it recently started to consider one-to-one online interviews through applications such as Skype. Alternatively, in the case of recruiting several workers from East and South Asia, candidates are asked to travel to Dubai to attend the interviews, with all travel and accommodation expenses paid. Candidates of clerical positions are required to conduct a presentation on a specific topic in front of a small recruitment panel.
Considering that the Kafala system prohibits the migrants from changing their sponsor (known by Kafeel), when the recruited migrants arrive at OilCo, they either accept the work or return home during their first six months. For example, in 2015 and 2016, there were dozens of migrants, especially those from the west, chose to go back home after spending just a few weeks at OilCo. The employee relations representative attributed these occurrences to the difficulty some foreigners experience coping with the Saudi lifestyle outside OilCo. However, a Pakistani HR specialist raised the issue of the lack of guidance for migrants in their early days at OilCo. He said:
There was no accommodation available for me when I arrived. They allocated a container for me to stay in for five days. I got no guidance on how to find accommodation.
The interview with this Pakistani worker and interviews with other westerners from the HR department revealed that the firm hires non-Saudis for HR jobs that, according to the Saudisation policies, should be occupied only by Saudis. None of those HR specialists occupies a senior managerial position, but there are four of them who are supervisors. What the firm does in issuing work visas to those foreign HR specialists is to recruit them as if they were technical workers. For example, the work permit for a migrant HR specialist states ‘engineer,’ ‘programmer,’ or ‘technician,’ none of which has anything to do with the migrant's actual job and specialty. Many migrants work as HR specialists, although they are still a minority. An interview with an HR manager revealed that those migrants exist because the firm needs their expertise, which can hardly be found among Saudis. However, the firm’s necessity to recruit skilled HR specialists comes under the cost of breaking a legal requirement set by the Ministry of Labour. What is known from the interview with the HR
manager is that OilCo, like the other state-owned firms, has a special relationship with the Ministry of Labour. Nevertheless, it is not revealed whether the Ministry of Labour is aware of the recruitment of the HR specialists because some of those migrants experienced unusual long delays in receiving their work visas. A migrant HR specialist said that:
All of those who work here are on different visas. They put a different occupation on the visa. I have a visa which is completely different from my profession. It is a technical visa. I came to know that my visa was rejected twice because I do not have a technical qualification, but I was not informed about it. In fact, when the visa came after nine months, I had almost lost interest and did not want to come. All foreign workers are hired under an employment contract of undefined duration. This type of contracting allows both parties, the firm, and the worker, to give a sixty days’ notice in advance at any time of the year to terminate the contract. OilCo uses this type of contracting rather than the annual employment contracting, since, in the case of dismissal, the latter implies paying the salaries for the workers for the full period until the end of the contract. A Saudi HR manager stated:
We test the workers during the first six months to see whether they fit with our firm or not. If, after this period, we feel that we do not want them here anymore, we give sixty days’ notice, which is what the law states. By the way, we are not obliged to make them stay for these sixty days; we can dismiss them straight away by just paying the salary for the sixty days and send them back home.
Having this type of less binding employment contract in place, expatriates are constantly aware that their career in the firm is always at stake. However, the firm takes into account the expense and difficulty involved in recruiting non-Saudis. Moreover, although OilCo has every legal right to easily fire and deport a migrant worker with 60 days’ notice, this is mitigated by the fact that skilled migrant workers are not easy to replace. One quote from a Saudi HR manager summarises this point:
We face some difficulties with certain expats, but we manage them through being very transparent with them. We tell expats from day one that they are here not to live and settle, but to train and work. However, in some cases, when we have issues with expats, we cannot easily fire them because we need their expertise.
It would appear that expatriate personnel at OilCo have almost no job security compared to their Saudi colleagues, but the firm does not work on a ‘hire and fire’ basis with them. There
are two indications that OilCo focuses on the stable employment of experienced expatriates. Firstly, the annual turnover rate for the firm staff has been around 5% since 2011. Secondly, interviews with both Saudis and non-Saudis revealed that the threat of being laid off was not a whip used by the management against migrant workers. It was also confirmed by some interviewees that they had heard about very few expatriates being laid off during the last few years.
On the contrary, the non-Saudis interviewed openly stated that their time in Saudi Arabia would definitely come to an end. They were aware that it was almost impossible for them to become Saudi citizens, or to enjoy the property rights given to Saudis. The Western expatriates, who complained the most about the working environment at OilCo, were less interested than their Indian counterparts in remaining in the firm for a long period. One American clerical worker stated that he was prepared to spend just another two years working for OilCo (he spent one year in OilCo), while another claimed that he was willing to stay for another five years at most (he spent three years in OilCo).
A noteworthy element in the recruitment of Western expatriates is the fact that the vast majority proved to be in their late 40s and 50s. While the recruitment manager confirmed that headhunting for experienced expatriates is very costly, the recruitment of older personnel, with less bargaining power in terms of salary, acts as a mechanism for minimising total employment costs. Moreover, ensuring the presence of expatriates who already have tenure in the firm will mean that knowledge is transmitted to Saudi employees, thus avoiding a knowledge monopoly. A HR manager provides further reasons for hiring older expatriates:
When I bring in experienced Americans or Europeans, I hire them as managers and specialists. These people are expensive, but very professional workers and have excellent skills. When we work with them, we draw from their experience. However, they know that they are not going to stay here for long. We recruit Americans and Europeans who are over 50 years old, so that they are already close to retirement age and cannot stay here for long. Also, when they are nearer retirement age, we can recruit them on a lower salary, and they accept it.
This technique for headhunting skilled expatriate workers is used to secure the required expertise at the lowest wages possible. It also serves the aim of being able to eventually replace non-Saudis with Saudis, since senior expatriates are typically required to mentor four or five Saudis. OilCo’s localisation strategy involves recruiting skilled expatriates, in order
to be able to replace them with competent Saudis as soon as they are ready. Mentorship has been the main strategy for transferring knowledge from expatriates to Saudis, especially in supervisory positions. However, despite the fact that the firm is working towards localising its jobs, it is not under any pressure to meet the Saudisation quota (known by Nitaqat), because it has state support. According to one Saudi HR manager:
Some would say that we need to have enough Saudisation to get work visas to recruit migrants. No, this does not concern us at all, because when we need visas, we send a letter to the Ministry of Labour and they give us all the visas we need. In the petrochemical sector, we have a very good level of flexibility and support from the state. The state says do proper work and do not be bothered with Saudisation.
Regardless of whether the above statement is true or not, OilCo does not need to recruit more ‘direct’ migrants, which would affect its Saudisation rate, because it already hires most of its workforce through outsourcing. The following section presents further detail on this category of labour.