Do employment contracts in Saudi Arabia have to be in Arabic?

Article 9 of the Labour Law makes Arabic the language used for data, records, files, employment contracts and the instructions an employer issues to workers. A bilingual contract is allowed. Where the employer uses a foreign language alongside Arabic, the Arabic text prevails.

Does the job advert have to be in Arabic?

The Labour Law fixes the language of contracts, records and employer instructions. Recruitment marketing sits outside that, so the advert language is a commercial decision. Article 3 does apply to advertising: the right to work is equal without discrimination on the basis of gender, disability or age, at the time of employment and at the time of advertising.

Why do Arabic CVs get filtered out by screening software?

Three mechanical reasons recur: the same Arabic name transliterates several ways into Latin script, job titles in Arabic do not match an English keyword list, and right-to-left PDF text often extracts in the wrong order. A system scoring keyword overlap against an English job description will score those applications low regardless of the candidate's ability.

Which language should interviews be conducted in?

The one the job is actually done in. If the team writes its documentation in English and speaks Arabic with customers, test both, and test them separately. Assessing English fluency in a role where English is only occasionally used narrows the pool for a skill the job does not need.

Should we publish two versions of each job page?

Publish each job once per language on its own page. Google's job posting guidelines require a single job posting on a dedicated page for the structured data to be eligible, so two languages sharing one URL, or one job split across several pages, both cause problems.

F · Gulf hiring operations

Hiring in Arabic and English: one process, two languages

Arabic is the language of record for contracts in Saudi Arabia and prevails in a dispute. Everything upstream is your choice, and it decides who applies.

XUnframedOctober 7, 20266 min

Arabic is the language of record. Article 9 of the Saudi Labour Law makes it the language used for data, records, files, employment contracts and the instructions an employer issues to workers, and where a foreign language is used alongside it, the Arabic text prevails. A November 2025 summary of employment compliance puts the same point plainly: every employee needs a written contract in Arabic, even where a bilingual version exists.

Everything before the contract is your decision. The advert, the application form, the screening logic and the interview all sit outside Article 9, and each one quietly decides who ends up in your pipeline.

What the law fixes

Two articles do most of the work. Article 9 sets the language of record. Article 52 lists what the model contract has to carry, including the worker's name and nationality, proof of identity, place of residence, the agreed wage with benefits and allowances, type and location of work, date of employment, and the duration where the contract is fixed.

The part employers miss is the clause about instructions. Article 9 covers what you tell workers, not only what you sign with them. A policy handbook issued only in English is not on the right side of it.

Article 3 reaches back into recruitment. The right to work is equal without discrimination on the basis of gender, disability, age, or any other form of discrimination, expressly including at the time of advertising. Your job advert is in scope.

Where bilingual hiring breaks

The failures are mechanical, and they happen before a human reads anything.

Names transliterate several ways. Mohammed, Muhammad, Mohamed and Mohammad are the same name in Arabic. So are Ahmed and Ahmad. A duplicate check or a candidate lookup keyed on exact string match will treat one person as four, or fail to find the person a colleague already spoke to.

Job titles do not survive a keyword list. An Arabic CV describing someone as a site engineer uses Arabic words, and a scoring engine comparing it against an English job description finds no overlap. The candidate scores near zero on a role they have done for six years.

Right-to-left text extracts badly. A CV exported to PDF from an Arabic word processor frequently comes out of a text extractor with the characters in visual rather than logical order, or with the Latin fragments inside an Arabic line reversed. What the parser stores is not what the candidate wrote.

Dates arrive in two calendars. Article 10 makes the Hijri calendar the default for periods under the Labour Law unless the contract says otherwise, and candidates write graduation years the same way. A date field that assumes Gregorian input reads a Hijri graduation year as a date centuries in the past, or rejects the field outright.

Each of those is a reason a qualified national candidate never reaches a recruiter. We describe the general mechanism in [why your ATS rejects qualified candidates](/spaces/why-ats-rejects-qualified-candidates), and the scoring problem specifically in [keyword matching versus skills ranking](/spaces/keyword-matching-vs-skills-ranking).

Writing the advert in two languages

Translating an English advert into Arabic word for word produces an advert that reads as a translation. Write the Arabic version for the person who will read it, and keep the facts identical across both: the same wage range, the same location, the same qualifications. Article 25 requires those facts to go to the labour office within 15 days of the vacancy anyway, so there is one authoritative set of them already.

Decide which language requirement is real. Writing "fluent English essential" on a role where English appears in a weekly status update removes a large part of the national talent pool for a skill the job barely uses. Where English genuinely matters, say what for.

An operating model that holds

Surface	Language	Reason
Job advert and careers page	Both, on separate pages per language	Reach, and one posting per page for search eligibility
Application form	Both, with the same fields	Accept either script in free-text answers
CV intake	Either	Store the original file alongside the extracted text
Screening and ranking	Language-agnostic, on evidence	Keyword overlap across scripts scores ability at random
Interview	The language the job is done in	Test each language separately if both are used
Offer and contract	Arabic, bilingual if useful	Article 9 makes the Arabic text prevail
Policies and instructions to workers	Arabic	Article 9 covers employer instructions

Screening without a language penalty

The practical fix is to stop scoring text similarity and start scoring evidence. A candidate who ran a payroll cycle end to end, or signed off a structural drawing, has done something checkable, and the checking does not depend on which script they described it in.

That means capturing structured fields at application rather than mining them out of a document: years in the relevant occupation, the occupational code from the ministry's unified classification, credentials with issuing body, and a short written answer about a piece of work they own. Rank on those. Keep the CV for context, not for scoring.

The compliance benefit is the same as the hiring benefit. Nationals who write in Arabic stay in the pool, and the occupational code you needed for the contract is already captured. [Choosing a hiring platform for Saudi labour law](/spaces/hiring-platform-saudi-labor-law) covers what to ask a vendor about this.

Two checks to run this week

Take ten Arabic-language CVs from your existing pipeline and push them through your current screening step. Read what the parser stored against what the candidate wrote, and note every field that came out wrong.

Then search your own candidate database for one common name in three transliterations. If you get three different result sets, your duplicate detection is inventing candidates and losing others.

Both tests take an afternoon and tell you how much of your national pipeline is being lost to string matching. The careers page half of the same problem is in [your careers page is a conversion problem](/spaces/careers-page-conversion-problem).

Frequently asked questions

Do employment contracts in Saudi Arabia have to be in Arabic?: Article 9 of the Labour Law makes Arabic the language used for data, records, files, employment contracts and the instructions an employer issues to workers. A bilingual contract is allowed. Where the employer uses a foreign language alongside Arabic, the Arabic text prevails.
Does the job advert have to be in Arabic?: The Labour Law fixes the language of contracts, records and employer instructions. Recruitment marketing sits outside that, so the advert language is a commercial decision. Article 3 does apply to advertising: the right to work is equal without discrimination on the basis of gender, disability or age, at the time of employment and at the time of advertising.
Why do Arabic CVs get filtered out by screening software?: Three mechanical reasons recur: the same Arabic name transliterates several ways into Latin script, job titles in Arabic do not match an English keyword list, and right-to-left PDF text often extracts in the wrong order. A system scoring keyword overlap against an English job description will score those applications low regardless of the candidate's ability.
Which language should interviews be conducted in?: The one the job is actually done in. If the team writes its documentation in English and speaks Arabic with customers, test both, and test them separately. Assessing English fluency in a role where English is only occasionally used narrows the pool for a skill the job does not need.
Should we publish two versions of each job page?: Publish each job once per language on its own page. Google's job posting guidelines require a single job posting on a dedicated page for the structured data to be eligible, so two languages sharing one URL, or one job split across several pages, both cause problems.

Sources

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