About 84% of the human resources leaders said LinkedIn is the top recruiting channel used in Egypt, followed by Wuzzuf as 48% of the participants stated that they use it. These figures came in a survey conducted by NowPay, a financial-wellness platform for employees in emerging markets, which surveyed the state of the human resources (HR) in Egypt in 2021, with the participation of over 273 organizations covering more than 10 industries.

In this survey, Egyptian HR leaders spoke about their current efforts, challenges they face, and their outlook on the future of the HR field in Egypt. According to the survey, 53% of the participants said the employee’s productivity is the most important metric, while 33% of them said the employee’s happiness and satisfaction.

The COVID-19 was the major challenge for the HR leaders as it caused a drop in sales, followed by managing daily operations and managing employee stress. The survey showed that 79% of the respondents noted that their organizations either partially shifted or totally shifted to work from home, while 21% pointed out that their workplaces did not shift to working from home.

Another challenge for HR professionals is finding talent as 25% of the respondents face this problem currently, followed by building corporate culture and engaging employees, the survey revealed. Regarding the annual performance assessment, 51% of the surveyed HR professionals said they assess the employees’ performance annually.

The survey uncovered that there are no scheduled training plans for the employees. In this regard, about 66% of the participants stated that the training programs depend on the employees’ requirements. In addition, 72% of the surveyed HR leaders pointed out that their employees are being trained inside the companies. As for their investment plans this year, about 60% of the HR leaders are planning to invest in their employees’ training and development, while half of them are planning to invest in employee engagement.  Nearly 40% are planning to invest in employee benefits.

Concerning the popular employee benefits in Egypt, medical insurance topped the benefits as 87% of the companies offer medical insurance for their employees. About 65% of the companies offer phone allowance and 56% offer life insurance. The survey revealed that 34% of the HR professionals agreed that remote work is the most important benefit this year. The survey mentioned that the employees’ dissatisfaction with their compensation is the most common reason for their turnover in their work, according to nearly 31% of the HR departments, followed by the employees’ dissatisfaction with their managers according to 20% of the departments.

It showed that the employees are not fully engaged at work this year with a rate of 3.4 out of 5, according to the respondents. Less than half of the HR leaders (45%) stated that the coronavirus crisis negatively impacted their employees’ pay in 2020, however, surprisingly only 20% of the companies curtailed their workforce in 2020 because of the pandemic.

Top HR Emerging Trends for 2022

The survey set three emerging trends related to the HR field in 2022, first is the hybrid workforce. Due to the coronavirus, about 59% of the participants expected that the remote work will be used at their organizations making what is called ‘Hybrid workforce’ emerge.

The second trend is the positive workplace. About half of the respondents (47%) stressed the importance of employee wellbeing and inclusion to create resilient and inclusive workplaces in the coming years. While the third one is people analytics. About 46% of the participants predicted that the decision-making process at their organizations will increasingly rely on people analytics rather than the traditional methods.

It is worth mentioning that the Cairo-based fintech launched in 2019 a financial wellness platform to enable corporates to offer salary advances to their employees as the employees can request their salary (or a part of it) at any time of the month through its mobile app