118,000 Jordanians vie for jobs in Qatar

AMMAN — A total of 118,000 Jordanians have applied for jobs in Qatar through the Jordanian-Qatari job website: www.jqpee.jo by Saturday morning, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.

Earlier in June, Qatar pledged to offer 10,000 jobs to Jordanians and to provide $500 million in investment projects to support the Kingdom’s infrastructure and development projects. 

Qatar has agreed to make available the first 1,000 jobs within two months, it was announced in July. 

Ministry of Labour’s Spokesperson Mohammad Khatib said that every Jordanian with a national number can apply, noting that the number of visitors to the website has reached half-a-million since it was launched on Wednesday.

Khatib said that this number does not indicate that all of the applicants are in Jordan, unemployed or that there are half-a-million applicants, as one person can try entry tens of times, knowing that the website is under a high-traffic load.

The Labour Ministry said Wednesday that around 180,000 Jordanians visited the website in the first 30 minutes after it was launched. 

The spokesperson said that the pressure on the website is decreasing gradually, stressing that it is not a first-come-first-served process.

The selection of employees, he explained, will be administered by Qatar’s Ministry of Administrative Development Labour and Social Affairs.

The Qatari ministry will soon start processing data in coordination with the public and private sectors for recruitment purposes, the ministry said. 

Khatib added that the mechanism of applying and employing is very simple, transparent and exclusively done through by the Jordanian Labour Ministry and its Qatari counterpart, in order to prevent any intrusion by a third party that might take advantage of the situation.    

Last month, the Qatari embassy in Amman warned that some news websites and social media accounts had been promoting fake links to apply for vacancies in Qatar, stressing that such links are irrelevant and unauthorised to receive job applications.

Jordanian expats in Qatar are estimated at 40,000, while there are around 200,000 in the UAE and more than 350,000 in Saudi Arabia. 

According to World Bank data, estimated expats’ remittances in Jordan amounted to $4.418 billion in 2017, more than 10 per cent of GDP.