“The market is heavily focused on outsourcing at the moment, so revenue is directly proportional to the number of employees companies have,” explained Alexandra Bayer, human resources manager of Fortech, a Romanian software outsourcing provider with more than 430 employees.
“We, too, have been forced to turn down outsourcing projects in the past two years of market growth because we did not have enough manpower for them.”
Bayer was one of the speakers at the HR Insider debate organized by ZF Corporate, the professional business news service of Ziarul Financiar, in Cluj on Tuesday. The topic of the debate was the strong and weak points of the labor market in Cluj and how companies in the city can attract and keep the best employees in the country.
Andrei Kelemen, chief executive of Cluj IT Cluster organization, says that about 15,000 employees are currently working in the IT sector companies registered in Cluj out of a total of 200,000 employees in the county, according to National Statistics Institute data. However, the need for skills is greater than universities can provide for.
“If we look at estimates, there is a 2,000 people deficit in the IT sector, and the companies in the Cluster (30) alone need 1,000. It’s a difficult situation, we often hear company officials tell us: ‘The growth of our revenue is conditioned by the number of employees, we get demand for projects, but have no one to do them with.’” Andrei Kelemen says.
The colleges offering undergraduate degrees in computer science in Cluj turn out about 400 graduates every year.
The development of the IT industry in the Cluj area also shows in the rise in the demand for employee training, as many IT sector employees are sent to training programs to develop competencies.
“With the IT sector growing so fast, people are quickly promoted to management positions and all of sudden find themselves having to supervise people,” says Lucia Man, consultant and regional coordinator for Cluj with training company Ascendis.
Ascendis is seeing greater demand for training programs that develop leadership skills, skills that help managers motivate their teams, Lucia Man added.
Still, many programmers have no intention of becoming managers, because it would jeopardize their ‘technical excellence’ explained Ana Maria Soaita, human resources manager of Yardi, a provider of software solutions for the real estate market.
On the other hand, employers in Cluj have been noticing a drop in the quality of training students receive in college, complemented by higher salary expectations on their part as show in job interviews.
“We really have trouble choosing freshly graduated junior programmers or even candidates for internship positions,” said Bianca Geomolean, HR director of Yardi, which has more than 500 employees in Cluj.
“We have more than 200 candidates for 10 internship positions and have trouble finding the suitable ones. I think there’s a lack of interest in studying, in improving oneself, the self-taught concept is gone.”
In her turn, Cristina Ilinca, operations manager with IT company Spyhce, says young people’s salary demands do not match their training.
“More and more people fresh out of college come with very high salary expectations and are confident their technical skills are at a certain level. But this turns out not to be true when you subject them to an interview on technical issues.”
As for the state of the manufacturing labor market in Cluj, Paul Patrascu, who has been HR senior manager Eastern Europe with automotive component manufacturer Fujikura Automotive, says things are better in Cluj (NW Romania) than in the west of the country.
“Coming to Cluj, I get the feeling I turned back in time five or six years and I even say to my coworkers: ‘You haven’t seen hell yet’. What does hell mean on the labor market? It means to have people more educated and leaving,” Paul Patrascu said.
“We develop simple people, we teach them about values, about how to work in a plant, teach them foreign language words, they become good and leave to go to Germany, to France… And they don’t just leave to do agriculture jobs, because Romanian immigrants are highly rated. There is no such trend in Cluj, because I can still hire engineers when I want to. It’s not how it is in Timisoara. My concern is that we as a country do not have a strategy to stop this migration.”
Before joining Fujikura, Patrascu had worked as regional HR manager for Romania and Ukraine of US automotive component manufacturer Delphi Packard for seven years. Fujikura Automotive is the second largest employer in Cluj, with about 5,700 employees.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)