‘Indian talent is number 1 in the world’: Burj Khalifa builder Mohamed Alabbar on why Indians top his hiring list

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build something as iconic as the Burj Khalifa?

According to Mohamed Alabbar, the man behind it all, the secret isn’t just in the architecture. It’s in who picks up the phone at 1:00 am.

At the “Make it in the Emirates” summit on Tuesday, Alabbar got candid about his hiring strategy. He told the room that if you want to win globally, you need Indian talent.

Alabbar didn’t hold back. He famously favours professionals from the Indian subcontinent because of a work ethic he ranks as “number one in the world.”

His logic is simple. While the rest of the world might be clocked out, Indian talent is the one that will actually answer the phone at one o’clock in the morning.

“The harder you work, the luckier you will get,” he told the Abu Dhabi crowd.

Survival via ‘positive paranoia’

He touched on something he calls “positive paranoia.” It’s this idea of being constantly, disciplinedly worried about risk and execution. Looking back at how Emaar survived the 2008 crash and the pandemic, he pointed to three traits he sees in the Indian workforce that make them perfect for this:

They can handle high-pressure cycles without cracking, an obsession with “checking the work” and managing risk every single day, and the high IQ needed to learn new tech on the fly.

He even got personal, saying, “My IQ is average, but my hard work is the best.”

More than just talk: The recruitment pipeline

Alabbar is putting his money where his mouth is. Emaar has teamed up with Raffles University in Rajasthan. Every year, they are cherry-picking the top 20 students (plus five from the Alabbar School of Management) and shipping them off to work in Dubai, Europe, and Asia. It’s a direct “campus-to-global-career” pipeline.

When asked why he’s so bullish on the region, he put it bluntly: “Is there anything better, bigger, more stable, and that keeps growing than India? There is nothing.”