“We’d better work instead of sitting and watching the negative news. That’s what I did during the crisis, I worked to build something, I developed projects even though the market was going down,” said George Copos, owner of Ana Holding, which operates in tourism, milling and bakery, real estate and electrical engine interests. Copos also started to recruit people for his hotels in mountain resorts and in Bucharest. “After the investments we’ve made, we are now hiring.”
As the business world stopped waiting for a way out of the crisis to come ‘from above,’ the economy stopped its decline and started to rebound slowly. The good news is that there is a disconnection between the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels.
Whereas President Basescu urges Romanians to pray because the European crisis is coming, there is an entrepreneur, a company, somewhere in this country, creating jobs, buying one more piece of equipment, finding a store to sell their products, before going to the church and praying together with the president.
Therefore, something that is more important than the statistical data about macroeconomic indicators or news about a potential default of Greece is the news coming straight from companies, which started hiring.
In Brasov for instance, an automotive component manufacturer (Preh), which has recently won a contract from BMW, says it will hire 200 people to be able to boost production. A small construction company in Alba County (Transylvania) has already hired 100 people and is looking for more, an IT business in Cluj plans to hire 350 people, while giants such as IBM, Oracle and Ericsson have put Romania on their list of options for opening centers employing thousands of people.
A survey by human resource company Manpower reveals that one in five companies will continue to hire in the last three months of the year. The forecasts of the over 760 employers that participated in the survey are much more optimistic than in the previous year, when they said they would fire more people than they planned to hire.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu; Editing by Radu Bostan)