News
Taking a Dip in the Eastern European Talent Pool
The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been an attractive talent pool for companies operating in global markets for several years. The high qualifications of the region’s university graduates, along with their competitive salary requirements, particularly in technical fields, have attracted many investors. Many companies have re-located sophisticated manufacturing operations previously located in Western Europe to the Czech Republic and created their own development and technological centres. Among them, for instance, well-known names such as Honeywell, IBM, DHL or Red Hat. And others are soon to come.
By increasing efforts in Eastern European recruiting, promising qualified employees are being recruited by companies from other countries. Professionals from Eastern and Central Europe are interested in their offerings and willing to make the move for them. Understandably, cultural and linguistic affinities are involved – yet the predominant factor is the financial attractiveness and the quality of the jobs on offer.
And there is another new trend in the globalising job market - the coordination and centralisation of recruitment in many firms. The company IDC CEMA - active in the ICT market – clearly displays the tendency. Recruitment within the entire region of Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa is managed by the regional office in Prague, Czech Republic. The IDC Human Resources Manager for this region, Svetlana Šaštinská, in cooperation with the country managers of individual branch offices, is currently seeking candidates for twenty-five posts in Belgrade, Prague, Moscow, Istanbul, Warsaw.
These new impulses in the labour market have led the operators of several leading local job sites to create a network that would allow their clients efficient and rapid e-recruiting across the entire region. In 2004, a partnership between the leading job sites in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic started. The Online Recruitment Accelerator (ONREA) became the basis of the current service ONREA Multiposting. Later, it added job boards in Bulgaria, Romania, the Ukraine and all 3 Baltic states. Clients can now post ads to several countries at once, and process the applications of candidates through the LMC G2 system, an application similar to the systems used in western Europe. There is definitely interest in the service – since its start, the number of advertisements have increased tenfold.
Also IDC CEMA uses the ONREA Multiposting. According to Svetlana Šaštinská, it has had good results. Among the companies not based in the region but seeking through ONREA Multiposting technically trained employees is the British communications group KeTech, providing consultancy, software, systems engineering and maintenance services to the transport, defence and industrial sectors. KeTech's Group CEO, John Kearney, says that the response and the quality of the candidates is very good.
How does ONREA Multiposting work in practice? From one point and one mouse click, the client can easily cover a territory of several countries with a single ad. In about one day, the posting appears on the job sites of the requested country. Automatically you can post job ads in these countries which is also common in local e-recruitment. Recruitment managers place and edit job ads themselves, thanks to a very good ASP systems now in use. Even the free-of-charge basic module of the application LMC G2, an example of complex software for massive yet sophisticated talent relationship management, is linked to leading job sites for Eastern European recruitment, and it also allows the client to post an ad in all countries at once. Currently, the service covers the ten countries mentioned.
23.04.2007