2022 marks strong recovery for Romanian labor market

Companies big and small, established brands or recently opened firms, have offered a record number of jobs this year, leading to a strong recovery in the Romanian job market following years of pandemic-borne slump.

Startups alone accounted for 100,000 jobs that were made available between January and August of this year. The figure is similar to the 2019 one, and roughly 20% higher than the ones for the previous two years.

Most of the startup jobs came from the service industry, followed by retail, transportation/logistics, import/export, and tourism. June was the most important month in terms of hiring for this segment of companies, but it is expected that the number of offers for candidates will increase again in autumn.

Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, and Iasi were the cities with the most startups that sought to increase their staff.

“Overall, one in three jobs made available since the beginning of this year have, so far, originated in the sector of small businesses with a maximum of 50 employees. There were over 10,000 such companies that made hires. We’re talking about either newly-established businesses or businesses that resumed activity at normal levels this year. Some even accelerated it,” Roxana Drăghici, head of sales for recruitment platform eJobs, said in a press release.

“It is very interesting that, if in 2020 and 2021, for this category of employers, we had a high percentage of remote jobs, we now see a marginal share of the total available jobs – about 8%,” she added.

Some job seekers still drifted towards large employers, seeing them as islands of stability. An increasing portion of them, however, also applied to smaller employees. Nearly 2,5 million job applications, out of a total of 7 million, were sent to small businesses in the first 8 months of 2022. The figure is lower than the one from a year before but represents a 25% uptick relative to 2019.

Overall, the most wanted jobs were in retail, services, IT, telecom and advertising, marketing, PR, and call centers. The first four sectors account for half of the total number of applications.

At the other end of the spectrum is transportation, the third largest in terms of employees but last in attracting applications.

(Photo source: Fizkes | Dreamstime.com)