Wael S. Al-Ebrahim Wael S. Al-Ebrahim Wael S. Al-Ebrahim

The pandemic has caused companies to focus on social issues such as inclusion, diversity, and equality. How does Kuwait Investment Co. infuse this culture into the overall environment at the workplace? 

The pandemic has created clear challenges for organizations in most countries such as the United States and Europe with regards to diversity, inclusion, and equality. On the contrary, our culture at KIC to the overall environment and workplace has always been with inclusive workplace and diverse workforce. Here at Kuwait Investment Company, we are committed to providing our employees with the best working environment to help them escalate their career, managerial, and business skills.

As our culture is based on an environment integrated with our values, mission, and vision in addition the company philosophy focuses on creating a corporate culture that will attract, develop and retain the best manpower which contributes to make KIC the best place to work.

Our research points that finding the right talent was a concern during the pandemic. Did your organization face a similar challenge? If yes, what was your course of action? 

Finding the right talent for certain positions has been always a challenge for many organizations, with the pandemic this issue became even more serious due to the associated economic disruption and uncertainty. Kuwait Investment Co. approach to the matter was through a mix of internal hiring and external talent acquisition.  

The crises impacted the means for talent acquisition and recruiting process such as the switch from traditional to virtual hiring which we believe will become increasingly standard due to the associated cost and time savings.

How can technology help advance the HR function? Can the HR function have a digital future? Your thoughts?

Well used technology makes HR practices and operations more productive and efficient; it helps make decisions based on the data presented and improve response time to queries and operational disruptions. We at Kuwait investment Company had adapted technology to most of our HR functions and will continue our path of digital transformation approach throughout all company's functions.

As Kuwait opens up after the lockdown, do you think there will be a shift in the recruitment pattern, especially in the financial service industry? 

As a result of the COVID-19 lockdown, layoffs and closures had occurred in Kuwait especially in small businesses due to financial fragility and uncertainty of the long-term impact of the pandemic. With more people getting vaccinated and Coronavirus cases dropping down, many businesses began to gradually go back to normal operations.

The pandemic had imposed a shift in the recruitment pattern across all sectors such as remote working and virtual hiring, we believe some of these changes will continue in the post-pandemic period.