Employment & HR
Hiring your first employee
Six steps in a fixed order, and the one people skip is the first. A signed offer letter before the quota exists is how a start date slips by six weeks.
The entitlement
What the law gives, regardless of contract.
Hiring in the UAE is a sequence, not a set of parallel tasks. The company needs an establishment card and an open immigration file. It needs visa quota, which follows the leased premises. Then, per employee: a MOHRE-standard job offer signed before the work permit is issued, the work permit itself, an entry permit or status change, the medical fitness test, Emirates ID biometrics, residence stamping, contract registration, and enrolment in WPS and the unemployment insurance scheme.
Each step gates the next and none of them can be run early. The consequence is that a realistic first hire takes four to eight weeks from decision to start date, and the single most common failure is making an offer before establishing that the quota exists. A company on a flexi-desk package with a two-visa allocation, one of which is the founder's, has room for exactly one employee — and expanding that means a property decision, a new lease and a quota application, none of which is fast. Candidates who have resigned elsewhere do not wait patiently through it.
The numbers
- Establishment card
- Required before any visa can be issued
- Quota
- Follows leased area; a flexi-desk typically supports 1–3
- Job offer
- MOHRE standard form, signed before the work permit
- Contract
- Fixed term of up to 3 years, renewable; registered with MOHRE
- WPS
- Salary paid through the Wage Protection System from month one
- Realistic timeline
- 4–8 weeks from decision to start date
What it costs
In practice
How this is actually administered.
- Confirm the quota before anything elseIt follows the leased area. Discovering you have none after making an offer means a property decision, not a paperwork one.
- Issue the MOHRE-standard job offerSigned by the candidate before the work permit is applied for, and matching the contract that follows. A discrepancy between the two is a live problem later.
- Apply for the work permit and entry permitOr a status change where the candidate is already in the country on another visa.
- Run medical, Emirates ID and stampingIn order. Each gates the next and none can be accelerated by paying more than the express fee.
- Register the contract and enrol in WPS and ILOESalary through WPS from the first month, and the employee subscribes to unemployment insurance.
Related
Questions
Four to eight weeks from decision to start date, assuming quota already exists. Longer if the role requires attested qualifications.
No. Quota follows the leased premises and must exist before the work permit can be issued.
Not without transferring them. Employment requires the employer's own work permit, and a transfer is its own process.
The employer. Visa and permit costs cannot be deducted from wages.
One question
How many people are on the payroll?
Then the order matters. Establishment card, then quota, then work permit, then entry permit, then medical, Emirates ID and contract registration. Skipping ahead to a signed offer letter before the quota exists is the usual way a start date slips by six weeks.
The first hire, in orderOr just ask usThis is the size where informal arrangements start costing money — salaries paid partly outside WPS, leave that was never tracked, gratuity nobody has accrued for. None of it is hard to fix now and all of it is expensive to fix at a MOHRE hearing.
What you are accruing without knowingOr just ask usThen Emiratisation quotas, WPS timing, ILOE subscriptions and health insurance renewals are running on separate calendars, and the penalty for each is levied per employee. Consolidating those dates is usually worth more than any single piece of advice.
What gets inspectedOr just ask us