September 11 (SeeNews) - Employers in Romania report the strongest fourth-quarter hiring intentions in 10 years and the most optimistic ones in Europe, on a par with Slovenia, recruitment company ManpowerGroup said on Tuesday.
About 24% of Romanian employers intend to increase staff numbers in the fourth quarter of 2018, ManpowerGroup said in its fourth-quarter Employment Outlook Survey.
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With only 9% of employers foreseeing a decrease in staffing levels and 66% anticipating no change, Romania's seasonally adjusted net employment outlook (NEO) for the fourth quarter stands at +19%. The outlook weakened slightly by 4 percentage points on the quarter, and by 6 percentage points on the year.
The NEO is derived by taking the percentage of employers anticipating an increase in hiring activity and subtracting from it the percentage of employers expecting to see a decrease.
Hiring intentions are also positive by varying degrees across all eight regions and ten industry sectors analyzed, the data showed.
Employers in the southern regions are the country’s most optimistic, reporting a NEO of +28%, the strongest in more than 10 years. The most considerable year-on-year improvement is reported by employers in the southwestern region, where the +24% NEO is 25 percentage points stronger than last year.
Also, employers in Romania northeast report a year-on-year improvement of 24 percentage points, with a NEO of +23%. The outlook also stands at +23% in the southeast, where employer optimism is at its highest since the third quarter of 2008. Though still favourable, perspectives in the Bucharest and Ilfov regions are the least bright in the country, with employers reporting a +13% NEO, which declines quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year, respectively by 2 and 4 percentage points. A similar quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year decline is reported in the western region, where the outlook stands at 17%.
Workforce gains are forecast in all of the 10 industry sectors analyzed, most notably in the construction sector, where the +36% NEO is the strongest in more than 10 years.
The weakest employment perspectives are reported in the mining and quarrying sector, with a +4% NEO. Nevertheless, the NEO improved both over the month and over the year, by 13 and 3 percentage points, respectively.
Hiring perspectives are positive across all sizes of organization. While large employers are slightly less enthusiastic than in the previous quarter or last year, reporting a +26% outlook, employers in medium-sized organizations are at their most optimistic in the past ten years, with a NEO of +26%. As usual, employees in micro-organizations are the least enthusiastic, reporting a NEO of +4%.
The ManpowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey was first made in 1962 and is now polling over 59,000 employers in 44 countries and territories to measure their intentions to increase or decrease the number of employees in their workforce during the next quarter.
In Romania, the present survey was conducted by InfoCorp Ltd. between July 18 and August 31 on a representative sample of 627 employers. The margin of error for all national, regional and global data is not greater than +/- 3.9%.