Why Qatar is a great international career start
Hello everyone! My name is Ruslan Sarvarov. My main expertise is hiring IT professionals and building remote-first teams. At the end of 2022 I joined QIC digital hub as Head of Talents. I will share with you the challenges we faced while growing the company from 50 to 120 people and what we did to create the best conditions for remote-first work. This article will be of interest to those who want to learn step by step how to build a recruitment, onboarding, benefits and evaluation system in a short period of time.
What is the IT industry in Qatar and how to get there?
The IT situation in Qatar is interesting. For a long time, there were no widely available online services with a user-friendly interface. Now, many tasks can be done without leaving home — ordering food delivery, getting a virtual bank card or buying car insurance.
Qatar has a population of around 3 million people, a significant proportion of whom live in Doha, the capital and host city for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. As Qatar is home to many expatriates from different countries, work processes are often similar to those in other countries. However, you will find yourself communicating more often in English — the primary language of expatriates in Qatar.
The majority of job vacancies in large local IT companies, such as mobile phone operators or banks, can be found on platforms such as LinkedIn or Bayt.com. One notable difference I’ve noticed is that employers often require office work. It also applies to outsourcing companies; for example, local branches of EPAM don’t offer remote options.
Switch to QIC. How to get a remote job at Qatar Insurance Company
One exception is our QIC digital hub division, where we hire developers, designers and marketers from different countries to work remotely. Currently, our nomads are based in over 18 different countries, from Europe to Asia and South America.
Our head office is in Doha, in the modern business district of West Bay. Established in 1964 as Qatar’s first insurance company, QIC is now a market leader in commercial and general insurance in the GCC region and the Middle East. For several consecutive years, QIC has been recognised for the best online digital products, such as the qic.online web portal and the qd Drive mobile application. These products have been developed by our QIC digital hub department.
By the way, you can check out our job vacancies and try your hand at interviewing here https://qicjob.huntflow.io/
Where we started
When I joined the department, basic HR processes had not yet been formed. To get me on the right track, I used the challenge-based strategy framework, where the action plan is determined by the challenge or problem facing the organization. This is my list of HR challenges and key actions:
Preparing to hire many times more and grow from a startup
One of the company’s goals was to transform QIC’s business development department into a digital hub capable of tackling any product or technology challenge. As a result, the hiring plan at the beginning of the year was set at 80 new employees.
A key part of this task was the selection of a candidate funnel management system. Several application tracking systems (ATSs) were considered, including Greenhouse (lacking necessary integrations with local job boards), BambooHR (limited CV parsing functionality), Friendwork (few customer interaction tools) and Huntflow.
We chose Huntflow as a service with a reasonable number of built-in tools. Our recruitment sources include:
1. Posting jobs on local job boards.
2. Direct sourcing, with LinkedIn.com being our primary source. To help candidates understand the projects we are launching in Qatar, we have created a dedicated page on LinkedIn. On this page we share employee stories and product updates.
3. Telegram channels focused on remote work (Remocate, CareerSpace, Geekjob).
4. Finally, this page acts as a response collection tool integrated with Huntflow CRM. This integration helps us to better manage employee referrals. Last month, 2 out of 8 positions were filled through the internal referral program.
Based on the job requirements, the recruiter decides whether to invite a candidate for an interview or send a rejection via the Huntflow interface. By the way, for recruiters reading this article, here are examples of good rejection email templates.
The number of stages in the recruitment process varies from company to company. In our case, there are usually three stages: a personal interview with the recruiter, a technical interview with the manager and a team introduction.
Following these stages, the recruiter prepares an offer detailing all the terms of employment, responsibilities and compensation.
The automation system itself will help you better understand what to look out for in the process:
These improvements to our recruitment processes enabled us to hire 42 candidates for technical and product roles without using external recruitment agencies. We’ve also successfully recruited 34 new team members to the Digital Hub, covering business, design and marketing roles. Achieving this while staying within recruitment costs was our primary objective.
Rethinking rewards: benefits, grades and salaries
Significant efforts have been made to create a comprehensive benefits package and to implement remote working policies that are convenient for employees. For example, the primary working time zone in Doha is GMT+3, and the standard working week runs from Sunday to Thursday, with Friday and Saturday as weekends. All public holidays follow the Qatari calendar, with the exception of New Year’s, when the customary break is usually taken in early January.
As there were no other established systems for holidays, policy development took place in several stages, resulting in the following system:
1. Vacation leave. Standard annual leave of 4 weeks, available after the first three months of the probationary period.
2. Sick leave. Simplified sick leave system without the need for supporting documentation, providing up to 10 days per year.
3. Extra days-off. Accrued for unforeseen tasks or situations.
4. Marriage Leave. A day off to celebrate a wedding.
5. Compassionate leave. Several days to help cope with a loss.
6. Unpaid leave. Unpaid time off when no other alternatives are available.
In addition, the first employee pulse surveys showed what benefits from the company were important to them. We selected and implemented the following, which took six months from idea to implementation:
1. Group English classes. Twice-weekly group English classes help employees make the transition from “I can’t speak a word” to “I can discuss work issues with colleagues”. These sessions also help to build team cohesion in a more informal setting. The teams are enthusiastic, with 75% of employees attending regularly.
2. Individual English language coaching. One-to-one English lessons are used for personalised coaching. For example, preparing to present the latest features in English during a business meeting or demo day.
3. Tax advice. Tax residency consultations are provided by an agency or in-house at QIC. Employees receive guidance on when and to whom taxes should be paid in their current country of residence.
4. Sports. Physical activity and maintaining high energy levels are essential, especially in a remote working environment. Almost 1/5 of QIC employees are passionate runners. To support them, we offer online coaching with training plans and performance insights from Garmin wristbands. Our running enthusiasts are part of the QIC Running Club on Strava.
5. Mental health. Recognising the challenges in the world and the increasing difficulty of predicting one’s life, we have established a partnership with an online therapy service. Employees can discuss their concerns with a psychologist at a 70% company discount. It’s gratifying to receive positive feedback on this new benefit, which will be introduced in 2023.
6. Training compensation. One of our goals was to provide opportunities for continuous skills development. We opted for corporate subscriptions to Coursera and Udemy for employees. We also paid for courses or online conferences such as Podlodka, JavaRush and others on request. We help colleagues find the right courses and balance their workload with their learning goals.
We see a significant field for experimentation, for example, testing insurance options for nomads (considering Genki or SafetyWing) or considering broader categories in sport. However, we are still in the early stages of working on these ideas. For inspiration and to understand the benefits that help FAANG companies recruit, you can read the Levels.fyi resource.
Some of the best practices for implementing levels have been borrowed from there. For example, the concept of levels and grades for IC (Individual Contributors) and M (Managers). At QIC, we currently have ten levels, ranging from L1 (“Intern”) to L10 (“Head”).
Grades help employees better understand where and how to grow, while allowing companies to hire candidates at fair market salaries. Each grade represents a salary range that the company is willing to pay. They cover everything from QA to product design or infrastructure engineering.
We have introduced a rating system: twice a year employees have the opportunity to move up in their grade, allowing them to express their training preferences, discuss salary adjustments or express a desire to try a different role.
First What, then Who, then How
In QIC digital hub, our goal is not only to create insurance services, but also to become Qatar’s first digital ecosystem with services for drivers and travellers, food delivery and virtual banking. Of course, people and their talents are the most important prerequisite for launching this extensive pool of tasks and projects. It all starts with people. That is why we follow a ‘first what, then who, then how’ approach.
In addition, my team’s approach to working with people is to treat each employee as a unique specialist, not as a resource. That’s why our department is not conventionally called Human Resources, which is no longer in line with global trends, but Talent Team, which includes recruiters, managers and coordinators.
We all prioritise increasing employee satisfaction through change as our key challenge. We measure this through the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). On a quarterly basis, we look at the responses to the question on a scale of 0 to 10, indicating how likely employees are to recommend QIC as a place to work.
For information processing, we implemented an HRIS solution — this system helps employees visualise the current organisational structure, learn more about each other’s interests, submit vacation requests or provide feedback on departmental changes. We chose between BambooHR and Zoho People. After testing Zoho People for the first few months and encountering problems with complex configurations and poor user experience, we switched to HiBob as our unified system.
We use this system to post regular news, such as new appointments, and to give kudos (recognition for achievements) to team members. Feedback and suggestions are collected anonymously. Following a quarterly eNPS survey, we may address some issues highlighted by employees within a few days, while others may require longer-term process changes, and that’s normal.
Kaizen, one of the philosophies of the department’s culture, emphasises continuous improvement through small steps, constantly refining processes. The challenge of increasing employee satisfaction is therefore always the most challenging, as people are different and tend to want different things. Some may prefer more offline communication, while others may not want regular meetings, even online. We look at pulse surveys as an indicator of the overall atmosphere in the department and suggest solutions to management.
I’ll give you an example of some of the changes our team has made this year.
February 2023. The eNPS was 8.3 out of 10. Over time, we addressed some communication issues and focused more on keeping the remote team informed of changes. We launched a series of digests that provided numerical and factual updates on the direction of QIC, and published updates on the main Slack channels. We added some new benefits and filled vacancies to create functional teams.
July 2023. The index has already risen to 8.6 points. I believe that the reorganisation of the teams played a role, where we divided the working groups based on business directions. They were able to work autonomously on tasks in verticals such as Motor, Travel, General and Ecosystem. My talent team tackled some of the issues around paying remote workers globally, even taking into account banking restrictions. This helped us hire 15+ people per month at peak, compared to a maximum of +3 people a year ago.
December 2023. New projects and initiatives from the Digital Hub required changes in organisational design. As a result, some teams were transformed and merged, leading to the elimination of some roles. This is a challenge faced by any organisation in a growth phase. Doubling in size requires an objective review of the organisational structure to ensure that it can efficiently address the business issues.
Yes, the departure of some members is always sad. It had an impact on employee satisfaction, where the overall index dropped to 7.7 eNPS, indicating that not everyone was prepared for the relatively abrupt changes in the organisation. Fortunately, the redundancy policy was established well in advance, and from the beginning of 2023 it was decided that all redundancies would be accompanied by a notice period for transitioning tasks or finding new employment.
So for me, this is just another challenge to come up with another action plan for next year. Balancing the interests of employees and business metrics is one of the most challenging tasks for any HR leader. It is therefore essential to rely not only on intuition, but also on numbers, facts, general trends and best practices.
This is what my Talent team is dedicated to, where our main goal is to unleash the potential and talents of employees to achieve ambitious goals for Qatar’s first digital ecosystem. To achieve this, we are building from the ground up and continuously improving all aspects of the company’s operations, from its culture and working conditions to its growth system and Total Rewards compensation policy. Definitely keep treating people with care. You can follow our successes and learn from our mistakes by subscribing to the QIC digital hub page on LinkedIn.
To build an international career and join the QIC digital hub team, as well as recommend former colleagues and friends, you can apply at https://qicjob.huntflow.io/.
