The retailer held by South Africa’s Naspers group plans to hire more for a team of twenty people to work in a space next to the showroom it opened in the city three years ago.
The decision comes to confirm the potential of Craiova for the IT industry, which few companies have sensed so far. The only well-known IT companies operating in Craiova are iQuest, Siveco and Ubisoft.
“When we started looking for people we did not imagine we would end up opening a hub in another city, but the recruitment firms we worked with sent us many CVs of people who did not live in Bucharest. We tried to persuade them to relocate and when we saw they were reluctant, we decided to go to them,” says Tudor Manea, IT&Software Development Director with eMag, which currently has about 500 employees.
“Since Craiova (south of the country, west of the capital city i.e.) is closer to Bucharest than Iasi and Cluj, the decision came naturally.”
eMag decided to hire more programmers because of its growing needs for people to manage its software platform and develop software so as to allow its services to diversify.
It did not have trouble finding the skills it needed because Craiova is a quite powerful university center and the potential candidates there were as good as those in Bucharest, Irina Mincinopschi, human resources manager of eMag said.
The team in Craiova currently reports to only one manager and will take care of the marketplace platform of the retailer. eMag has six marketplace corporate customers and wants to boost the number of vendors using it to several hundred.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)