What 17,941 Saudi job listings say about hiring right now

At a glance

• 17,941 job listings in 30 days (99.9% of the 17,959 Tanqeeb reported)
• 35.5% in Riyadh, and 47% of the listings that name a city
• 95% come from four boards: LinkedIn, Bayt, Naukri Gulf and Sabbar
• 7.3% show a salary; 0 of LinkedIn's 7,319 do
• 1 in 8 listings is from a hotel brand

This is day one of a series: one MENA country a day, built on the same data source so the countries can be compared. Saudi Arabia goes first.

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How the data was collected

Tanqeeb is a job aggregator with a site per country. It shows at most 10,000 results per search, and Saudi Arabia had 17,959 listings in the last 30 days, so a single search can't reach them all. I built a scraper (an Apify Actor) that splits the collection into 53 smaller searches, by region and by category, then removes duplicates by listing ID. That reached 17,941 listings, 99.9% of the total.

Tanqeeb's terms don't prohibit this, its robots.txt allows the pages used, and no personal data was kept: some listing cards include recruiter names, emails or phone numbers, and the scraper skips those fields.

1. Riyadh carries a third of the market

Region	Listings	Share
Riyadh	6,366	35.5%
Jeddah	2,684	15.0%
Al Ahsa	985	5.5%
Makkah	935	5.2%
Medina	923	5.1%
Eastern Province	407	2.3%
Al Damam	260	1.4%
No city given	4,522	25.2%

A quarter of listings say only "Saudi Arabia". Among those that name a city, Riyadh has 47%, almost one in two. Riyadh and Jeddah together hold half of all listings.

2. Four boards supply 95% of listings

LinkedIn is the source of 40.8% of the listings, Bayt 23.2%, Naukri Gulf 17.6% and Sabbar 13.3%. Jadarat, the government's national employment platform, is only 1.8% of this sample, so this data says little about hiring that goes through Jadarat directly.

For anyone building job tools for the Gulf, this is the practical takeaway: an aggregator that covers those four boards sees almost everything that gets posted publicly in English.

3. The salary gap

Only 1,302 listings (7.3%) include a salary. The difference between boards is stark:

Board	Listings	With a salary	Share
Sabbar	2,395	711	29.7%
Bayt	4,155	254	6.1%
Naukri Gulf	3,166	147	4.6%
LinkedIn	7,319	0	0%

Among the 1,013 listings with a salary in Saudi riyals, the median advertised midpoint is SAR 5,000 (mostly monthly). 10% are below SAR 3,000 and 10% above SAR 10,500. Treat that number carefully: most of these salaries come from small employers on Sabbar, so it is not a market median.

4. Hotels are hiring at scale

By company name as published on Tanqeeb, the biggest poster was Marriott International (280 listings), ahead of Almarai (254), The Ritz-Carlton (233), Saudi Aramco (227) and Hilton (216). Counting hotel brands by company name (Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, Sheraton, St. Regis, Accor, Rosewood and others) gives 2,107 listings, 11.7%: about one in every eight.

Giga-project companies (Qiddiya, Red Sea Global, AMAALA, NEOM, ROSHN) posted another 449.

5. What the jobs look like

Category	Listings	Share
Engineering	2,289	12.8%
Information Technology	2,223	12.4%
Sales	1,747	9.7%
Hospitality & Tourism	1,332	7.4%
Administration	1,038	5.8%
Accounting, Finance & Banking	994	5.5%
Other	942	5.3%
Human Resources	886	4.9%

• 97.3% full-time and 97.1% on-site. Only 2.8% are remote or hybrid.
• 99.4% of job titles are in English.
• Only 97 listings (0.5%) say "Saudis only" explicitly. That doesn't mean Saudization isn't happening, only that ads rarely state it.
• The most common titles: Accountant, Sales Representative, Guest Experience Expert, Project Manager, Marketing Specialist.

6. When listings appear

Tuesday is the busiest day for new listings (869 on average), followed by Wednesday (819). Saturday, the second day of the Saudi weekend, is the quietest (219), four times lower than Tuesday.

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What this data does not show

• These are listings on one aggregator, not every job in Saudi Arabia, and not hires.
• About 10% look like repeats: the same title, company and city posted more than once.
• One listing can cover several positions.
• A missing salary does not mean a job is unpaid; the employer just didn't publish it.
• Region and category are Tanqeeb's labels, kept as published.