The Romanian market had an external recruitment rate of 13.5%, a 13 percentage increase to last year’s rate (which was 11.9%), according to the PwC Saratoga 2015 benchmark analytics of human capital effectiveness. The majority of external recruiting was aimed at replacing departed employees (10.3%), while only 2.2% targeted filling new positions.

“This shows, on the one side, that there is an increase of the labour market dynamics in light of a more favourable macro-economic context, which allowed for a larger workforce migration. On the other side, the small number of external recruitments for filling new positions can indicate the fact that Romanian companies are still cautious when it comes to creating new jobs within the existing organizational parameters,” stated Horaţiu Cocheci, Senior Manager, Leader of Human Resources Consultancy Team at PwC Romania.

The external recruitment rate varies for different types of jobs: there is an increase of external recruiting for administrative/support positions, while for experts and blue-collar workers positions the rate is largely unchanged from the previous year. Although, for management positions, the rate of external recruiting is significantly lower than the general market average (5.1%), there is an increase in employments on new positions (1.3% compared to 0.7% in 2014).

At industry level, retail remains the field with a considerably higher external recruitment rate than the market average (52.1%). The sectors which have a lower recruitment rate than the market average are industrial production (10.3%) and pharmaceuticals (12.6%).

The costs of employee recruitment have remained at last year’s levels, continuing to vary between 65 Euro per employee recruited in retail and 1000 Euro per employee, in the pharmaceutical sector.

“The costs of recruiting an employee are directly linked to their qualification level. As such, in areas such as retail, where we see large fluctuations of personnel and seasonal activity, coupled with a basic level of training of most employees (in particular those on operational positions), the costs are lower, while in sectors which require rare specialized knowledge and expertize, the recruitment costs are significantly higher,” explains Horaţiu Cocheci.

The rate of termination of employment contracts is similar to last year’s; however, there is a slight increase of voluntary departures /resignations (from 9.6% to 10.3%), together with a notable decrease of involuntary departures (from 4.6% to 2.7%).

“The decrease of involuntary termination of employment contracts shows that employees have largely overcome the stage of massive personnel restructuring. The only sector where there is an increase of involuntary termination rates is the industrial production, where it is likely that processes for operational efficiency are still ongoing (through the technologization or modernization of production lines), this generally leading to a decrease of the number of employees,” showed Nicoleta Dumitru, Manager, Consultancy Services for Human Resources, PwC Romania.

At sectorial level, retail continues to be the field characterized by the highest fluctuation in personnel, where more than half of the employees (56.6%) leave their organization in the course of a year. At the opposite end, we find the pharmaceutical sector with 10.2% and the industrial production, with 13.5%.

The PwC Saratoga Romania 2015 study presents exhaustive data on human capital markers based on information collected from 64 companies from five economic sectors (pharmaceuticals, industrial production, retail, banking and financial leasing).

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