91.2% of the employers who participated in the latest survey carried out by eJobs Romania stated that they plan to hire by the end of the year. 5.4% say they have blocked all hiring, while 3.4% do not know exactly what the course of events will be until the end of the year. Of those who still have open positions, 44.4% estimate that the number of new colleagues they will add to their teams in the next 3 months will not exceed 5. 20.4% have a plan of 6-10 hires new, 18.5% estimate that the number of recruitments will be between 11 and 50. 7.3% of employers have opened between 51 and 100 positions, 5.4% between 101 and 250 and 1.3% between 251 – 500. 2.6% say they are in the middle of a massive recruitment drive and want to hire over 500 people by the end of the year.
When asked what are the assets they think they have that can help them attract candidates, 50.3% put the salaries and bonuses offered first. 40.1% also mention constant and transparent communication, 37.2% also included the flexibility of the schedule and managers in a top 3 key differentiator they have from the competition. Other aspects scored were the extra-salary benefits, the team and the work environment, the possibility to grow in the career, remote work or the balance between personal and professional life.
“Employers are aware that a good salary can help them find the right people faster for the jobs they have open. But I also know that other things are starting to matter because more and more candidates are looking for the “full package” when they want to change jobs. That’s exactly why, it’s already been several years since companies invested considerable sums in the employer brand and in the image they build in the relationship with candidates and employees”, claims Bogdan Badea, CEO of eJobs, the largest online recruitment platform from Romania.
According to the cited study, 45.1% of respondents believe they are in a company with a strong employer brand. 35.6% are still working on this and are at the beginning of employer branding actions, and 19.3% declare that they do not have an employer brand. “Although 6 out of 10 employers say that the lack of a strong employer brand becomes an impediment in the recruitment process, a third of respondents believe that this can be avoided if the lack of an employer brand is compensated by salary and benefits, while 13 .6% say that their recruitment processes have not been influenced so far by the fact that they do not have an independent employer brand”, explains Bogdan Badea.
In this regard, 48.8% of the companies participating in the survey declared that, for this year, the employer branding budget represented 1% of the turnover. 20.2% invest for this purpose between 1% and 2%, 16.7% between 2% and 5%, 10.5% between 5% and 10% and 3.9% allocate more than 10% of the figure of employer branding budget business.
“Although it seems small, in absolute numbers we are talking about sums that can even exceed 1 million euros per year, in the case of very large companies, which employ massively every year and especially which operate in industries that face a high level of fluctuation of staff. However, it should also be mentioned that 28% of the respondents mentioned that, in 2023, they completely renounced the employer branding budget”, emphasizes Bogdan Badea.
The survey was conducted in September of this year, on a sample of 494 companies, represented by HR managers, HR specialists, team managers, CEOs and entrepreneurs.