Unemployment in Italy for instance stood at nearly 12% at the beginning of 2013, while in Spain it was higher than 26%, according to Eurostat data. Romania’s jobless rate, however, was only 6.6% and the country has always had jobs available for programmers, whose salaries went up even during the crisis.
“There are still some programmers who want to go abroad but there are fewer of them now because the salary gap between Romania and developed countries in this industry has significantly narrowed. We are now getting CVs from programmers in Spain and Italy, many of whom have working experience in this field,” said Elvis Popovici, recruitment manager with antivirus solutions vendor Bitdefender, on ZF Live on Wednesday.
“We are even in talks to hire a programmer from Mexico. Therefore, if a candidate has the necessary technical knowledge and can be integrated somewhere where Romanian language is not a mandatory requirement, nationality of a job applicant does not matter to us.”
Despite the high number of applications from Spanish and Italian programmers, Bitdefender (which has 650 employees worldwide) has not hired any such applicant yet because Romanian language is still required for many projects the company’s employees are working on.
Popovici says the IT market has been flat since the beginning of 2013; the company has hired almost 15 people so far and is advertising 20 job openings this month. The candidates looking for a junior position who have some working experience in an IT company can start from some EUR700 in net amount per month, as offered across the industry, Popovici says.
Bitdefender ended 2011 with EUR32 million in revenue and net profit of more than EUR1 million, according to ZF’s calculations based on the Finance Ministry data.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)