The financial world didn’t freak out when the conflict in the Middle East got much worse earlier this year. It told us more when it stopped talking. Permissions to hire people stopped in London’s Square Mile and Dubai‘s DIFC. The interviews were pushed back. Senior duties were quietly put on hold. The “freeze,” as people in the recruitment world started calling it, wasn’t a big deal. For people in the middle of the process, it was frustrating that it was so slow. After six weeks, the stillness is starting to break apart, but not in a straight line or without problems.
In Dubai, the problems showed up quickly and were easy to see. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup all gave employees in the UAE the option to temporarily move. Citibank shut down branches and told workers they could work from home. Standard Chartered did the same thing. For years, the city had worked to become known as the most reliable place for professionals to live in the Gulf, a place where a finance career could really grow outside of New York or London. These operational retreats were important for more than just logistics. What they said made no one in the DIFC want to say out loud: Is Dubai still the safe place it used to be? When you talk to people in the market, you get the sense that the answer is still yes, but there are more asterisks than before.
Because the government has taken steps to make the economy more resilient, the UAE banking sector has stayed liquid and mostly stable. Private credit in the GCC is still growing, and over the next five years it is expected to grow by 15 to 30 percent each year. As of 2026, the top 120 family offices in the DIFC were in charge of more than $1.2 trillion. This is a huge amount of money that doesn’t go away because of short-term changes. Even when the sirens went off, Dubai’s goal of becoming a financial hub didn’t go away. But the candidate calculations changed. People who were going to move stopped. People who were thinking about moving but hadn’t made up their minds yet rethought whether they really wanted to live in a city where missile interceptions were becoming somewhat common news stories.
The shape of the talent pool is what’s changed the most. International candidates, like the finance professionals who moved around the world and helped Dubai hire a lot of people after the pandemic, are being more careful. That puts professionals who live in the area in an unexpectedly good position. Because employers value certainty over ambition, people who are already in the UAE and feel at home are being hired faster than usual.
In London, things are different, but still very complicated. Wealth managers have talked about “safe-haven capital flows” from the Gulf, which are wealthy people looking for stability in markets with stronger legal protections and longer institutional memory. That means that there are more clients working at private banking desks. This has led to more jobs being posted, but not yet. Some economists said that the job market as a whole was already in a “low-hire, low-fire” mode going into 2026. That wasn’t caused by the geopolitical shock. It made it deeper.
It’s clear what London is looking for when it comes to hiring: energy finance, commodity trading, fixed income, macro desks, compliance, and operational resilience. When you think of defensive roles, these aren’t them. In those places, the disruption itself makes work. A price for oil that changes a lot opens up trading opportunities. Companies that do business in the Gulf need to make sure their risk frameworks have been put through stress tests. When markets are uncertain, compliance functions don’t slow down; in fact, they speed up.
It’s still not clear how long this phase will last. It’s possible for geopolitical uncertainty to go away faster than expected or last longer than any model predicted. History shows that the freeze doesn’t last forever. This is true whether you look at 2008, the early months of the pandemic, or the shock in Ukraine in 2022. Things tend to move quickly when confidence comes back. Employers who took the time during the slow period to build relationships with senior employees will have a big advantage going forward.
For candidates who aren’t sure what to do right now, the truth is that the silence isn’t personal. While institutions are cautious, they are not uninterested. Now, the roles that matter the most—risk, energy, compliance, and private credit—show that the market is moving faster than the news says.
