2023 was the year in which the desire of candidates to find a new job was strongly felt on the labor market, while, for employers, a tempering of efforts to expand their teams set in. This after, in 2022, a record level of the number of new jobs appeared in the market was marked. With 350,000 jobs posted year-to-date, the market is down 10% from 2022. In contrast, the number of applications is almost 10% higher and has reached 10.2 million.
“It was a year in which both employers and candidates were very sensitive to all signals coming from outside, especially those of an economic nature. The state of uncertainty that hovered throughout the year made employers recruit more sparingly, and candidates to constantly keep an eye on the market, apply more often or even cause inactive candidates to reactivate. Beyond that, the number of new candidates appearing on the platform also increased by 10%. In other words, we are talking about 260,000 people who did not have an account until this year and who entered the recruiters’ radar”, says Bogdan Badea, CEO of eJobs online recruitment platform.
In total, 500,000 Romanians have applied for at least one job since January until now. Most are from the entry-level (0-2 years of experience) and mid-level (2-5 years of experience) segments. The breakdown by age range looks like this: 3.9 million applications come from candidates aged 25 to 35, 3 million applications are from 18 to 24 year olds, nearly 2 million applications from 36 – 45 years old, 1.2 from those who are over 45 years old and 75,000 applications from very young candidates who are less than 18 years old.
Retail continued this year to be the field with the most attracted applications – over 3.2 million. 1.3 million went to services and the same number went to call center / BPO jobs. The IT / Telecom field received 1.2 million applications, and financial – banking employers 1.1 million. The following domains in the ranking were tourism, transport / logistics, food industry, advertising / marketing / PR and construction.
“More than ever in the last four years, we have seen a high interest in remote jobs. Of the 10.2 million applications, 1.5 went to jobs that can be done from home, even though employers were more reluctant to offer this option than in years past. Only 20,000 remote opportunities existed in 2023. It was expected that employers would want employees to return to offices, but it was surprising to everyone that the latter wanted to work from home more than in 2021 or 2022″, explains Bogdan Bathe.
Retail is not only the field that had the most applications, but also the most new jobs, respectively 90,000. The next most active employers were those in the service sector, followed by those in the food industry, tourism, transport / logistics, manufacturing, call – center / BPO, construction and IT / Telecom. About 40% of job ads posted in 2023 had salary listed.
According to Salario, the salary comparator of the eJobs brand, which has a base of 650,000 salaries entered by candidates, the fields in which the best earnings this year were IT, with an average of 6,500 lei per month, research – development (6,000 lei per month), oil / gas (5,000 lei per month), construction (5,000 lei), audit / consultancy (4,900 lei) and engineering (4,800 lei per month). Salaries represent net national averages for all positions and experience levels in the respective industry.