Romania’s Labour Market during the pandemic

Most of the people who have lost their jobs during the pandemic have ages between 45 and 54, come from small towns or villages around Romania and have poor education, shows an IPSOS survey conducted over May 11th and 17th this year

Luiza Moldovan, 25.06.2020, 13:34

According
to the aforementioned survey, 19% of the respondents have lost their jobs, 16%
have been laid off as part of the technical unemployment schemes, 14% didn’t
have a job before the pandemic and aren’t working at present while 27% believe
that nothing has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many
jobs are being done from home now and most of those who have been doing home
working are from Bucharest and are people with higher education. This segment
is preponderantly made up of women, young people with ages between 18 and 34
and people with higher education. 22% of the interviewees have continued to go
to their offices. The most stable domains proved to be the IT, HR and marketing.

Here
is Dragos Gheban managing partner of the hipo.ro recruiting platform with more
on the present-day Romanian labour market. Employees from the
bookkeeping-financial domains, transports, tourism, call-centers are looking
for new jobs even outside their training field.

Dragos
Gheban: Following a survey on the career portal hipo.ro, the
sectors with the most jobs right now are the IT software, IT hardware, then
comes the financial sector, which includes banks and insurance companies and
third comes the PR, which includes assistance services, sales departments,
which have lately seen an upward trend, engineering, production, procurement,
logistics and human resources. Our prediction for the coming period is that the
opening of restaurants and hotels, the so-called HORECA sector will be offering
fresh job opportunities as many people have lost their jobs and the companies
operating in this field are going to need personnel in order to cope with the
new summer season, which we expect to be a very busy one. Sales are also likely
to see growth because companies are recovering and increasing their output.
These fields I mentioned last are the ones we expect to see growth.

Dragoș
Gheban announces the junior candidates that the hipo.ro platform is launching a
virtual job fair

Dragos
Gheban: There is good news for junior applicants as we are
going to launch a virtual job fair in which we have been trying to centralize a
large part of market opportunities targeting juniors and we have managed to
gather so far several hundred opportunities. A suggestion that we may have for
the junior applicants is that they invest more time in the recruitment process.
And we recommend that they apply for several programmes in order to be sure
they don’t miss this summer opportunity making the most of their career
training time.

The emotional aspect of this Covid crisis didn’t
have a constant evolution either. After the initial panic, people, particularly
women, started feeling worried. 40% of the respondents have declared themselves
optimistic while 38% have reported tension and stress. Men proved to be more
resilient, informed and pragmatic whereas women showed concern and reluctance
when it comes to drawing up a back-up plan. People working in output facilities
are more pragmatic and optimistic, whereas those from services are more anxious
and concerned although they had the feeling of being part of a more privileged
category of employees.

48% of
those who worked from home have expressed their strong desires to get back to
their offices while 18% say they don’t want to return to their working places
very soon. The most reluctant to return to their offices are people between 25
and 45 years old, the hard core of the active labour force, those with higher
education and Bucharest residents. 49%
of the home workers say they feel uncomfortable or very uncomfortable with
getting back to their offices or work places. 39% of the respondents say the
salary level is very important while 38% of them have described professional
training courses as of utmost importance.

Romania’s
labour market has been boosted through a series of measures taken by the
government through its Labour Ministry. The country’s Labour Minister Violeta
Alexandru has announced that assistance measures for the most affected
categories of employees have been maintained; the most affected by the
Coronavirus crisis are employees in the HORECA sector, in tourism and the
showbiz.

Violeta Alexandru: First, upon an initiative from the
Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, the government has agreed to maintain
assistance measures for various categories of personnel, such as those from the
companies whose activity has been restricted like restaurants, companies in the
showbiz involved in staging events with a large participation, over 500 people,
like theatres for instance, or those providing indoor playground facilities.
For all these categories as well as for those in maternity and childcare
leaves, those taking care of disabled children, assistance measures have been
prolonged and they will continue to benefit from compensations and other forms
of support.