Preparing a demand for Nepali workers: what employers actually have to assemble

Employers usually come to us with a number — twelve welders, forty cleaners, two hundred kitchen staff — and a date they would like them by. The number is the easy part. What decides whether that date is realistic is a small set of documents, each of which has to be signed by the right person, stamped by the right body, and consistent with every other document in the set.

This is a plain description of that set: what each paper does, where the country checklists diverge, and which parts of the timeline are ours to control and which are not. It is written from the official attestation checklists we publish on each destination page, so you can check every claim in it against the spreadsheet itself.

The demand set

Nearly every destination asks for the same core bundle, attested together and treated as one document. In Bahrain's checklist it is named explicitly as five items: demand letter, power of attorney, guarantee letter, service agreement and employment contract. Kuwait's names the same five, with an agency agreement in place of the service agreement. The others say "demand letter set" and mean the same thing.

• The demand letter states what you are asking for: the trades, the number of workers in each, the wage, and the terms. Everything downstream — the Department's approval, the newspaper advertisement, the contract a worker signs — is derived from it, so an error here is expensive to correct later.
• The power of attorney authorises a Nepali recruiting agency to act for you. Without it we cannot file anything on your behalf.
• The guarantee letter is your undertaking on the conditions of employment. The UAE checklist additionally requires a separate guarantee letter for the deployment of women workers.
• The employment contract is the terms as the worker will sign them. It has to agree with the demand letter line for line; a wage that differs between the two will stop the file.
• The service or agency agreement sets out the commercial relationship between your company and ours.

Attestation: who has to stamp it

Attestation is where the country checklists genuinely differ, and it is worth reading yours rather than assuming. Qatar attests the demand set at the Chamber of Commerce. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman require both the Chamber of Commerce and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bahrain routes it through the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The UAE attests the set at the Chamber of Commerce and, separately, wants a tenancy contract in the file.

Your company registration certificate is treated the same way, and again the requirement varies: Qatar, Bahrain and Oman ask for it translated into English and attested by MOFA; Kuwait asks for translation plus attestation by both the Ministry of Justice and MOFA. Saudi Arabia's checklist additionally requires a waqala — a delegation — paid against the Saudi Embassy in Kathmandu.

Saudi Arabia's checklist publishes a fee of SAR 940 for a demand of 1 to 25 workers and leaves the two larger bands blank. We have reproduced that blank rather than guessing at it; ask us and we will confirm the current figure with the embassy before you budget for it. The Qatar, Kuwait and Oman checklists do not publish a band table at all.

The paper that proves you may hire at all

Separately from the demand set, most destinations want evidence that your company is entitled to bring in foreign workers in the first place. It is easy to overlook, because it usually lives with a different department inside your own organisation.

• Kuwait and the UAE: your quota. The UAE checklist adds that a company not registered with MOHRE must supply an Immigration visa declaration instead.
• Oman: the original visa or manpower clearance — the Mazunia.
• Bahrain: the Bahrainization calculator, showing your national-to-expatriate ratio.
• Qatar: the visa approval details, quoted as a VP number.

The system account, and why the small fields matter

Every checklist opens with the same unglamorous block: a request letter for an authorised user on your company letterhead, a login email address, a company phone number, and identification, a contact number and an email for both the owner and the manager. Several checklists specify that the email must be on your company's own domain, and Saudi Arabia's asks for a landline as the company number.

Kuwait's checklist adds a note worth repeating for every destination: the contact number and email of the company, the owner and the manager should each be different. Three roles sharing one mailbox is the situation that note exists to prevent.

Most destinations also ask for details of the Nepali workers already on your payroll — Oman wants three months of salary details with them — and every checklist provides a separate attachment to use if you currently employ none. Having no Nepali staff is not an obstacle; it just uses a different form.

What happens once the file reaches Nepal

With the attested set in hand, we file for pre-approval at the Department of Foreign Employment. The Department examines the demand and approves it as a lot, and that approval carries the numbers you will see on the published advertisement — a pre-approval date, a chalani number and a lot number. Only then can the vacancy be advertised, and the advertisement has to carry a cost-bearing table stating, line by line, whether the worker or the employer pays for each part of the process.

It is worth knowing what that table commits you to before you sign the demand letter, because the answers are not negotiable at the advertising stage. On the notices we currently have published, the employer carries the air ticket, the visa fee, the visa stamping fee, the medical examination abroad, and the insurance during employment together with its premium. If your budget for a hire stops at the wage, it is short.

The advertisement then names an interview date. That date is a real deadline: once it has passed the notice is closed, and filling the remaining seats means re-advertising the same approved demand. It happens — two of the three notices currently on our site are re-advertisements — but it costs a cycle.

Timelines, and why we will not give you a number

Two stages dominate the calendar and neither belongs to us: your embassy's attestation queue, and the Department's processing time when your file reaches the front of it. Both move. A confident figure for either would be an average from an earlier quarter presented as a forecast, and you would plan against it.

What we will tell you is where your file actually is at each stage, and what is blocking it if something is. The parts of the calendar an employer can genuinely compress are all at the front: getting the demand set internally consistent before it is stamped, having the quota or clearance in hand rather than in progress, and giving three genuinely distinct sets of contact details the first time.