Even though the number and percentage of college graduates without a job has gone down from 2009-2010, when 50,000 such people were looking for work, the labor market still has trouble absorbing those whose degree should have helped them find employment.
Although showing signs of rebound, the labor market has not ‘thawed up’ yet, and the reasons include the employee profile in demand and the fact that companies are mostly hiring to replace people, believes Daniela Necefor, managing partner of executive search firm Total Business Solutions (TBS).
“I am convinced that the jobless college graduates are mostly young people, who have no work experience and whom companies do not hire precisely because of this or are older than 45 years and considered overqualified or too expensive,” Daniela Necefor said.
“I know of people who had a 25-year experience and the salary offered was EUR500 per month. Under the circumstances, such a person prefers to keep looking because you can’t manage with EUR500 if you have loans to repay or a family to provide for.”
Therefore, even though the labor market has recovered somewhat, it is still suffering in terms of salaries, because employers are offering lower packages than they used to a few years ago (except for the those industries that grew during the crisis, as well, such as the IT industry).
Oana Datki, managing partner for SE Europe of recruitment and human resources consulting firm Consulteam, says the growth pace of the business sector has not been enough to absorb the number of fresh graduates leaving colleges every year, largely because most job openings advertised are intended to find replacements, not newly created.
“The economic development does not happen as fast in companies as to generate enough jobs for college graduates ever year. There are areas where new jobs are created but they are very specialized. People familiar with certain programming languages (Java and C++) are in demand and I think those with a degree in finance will not have too much of problem this year,” Datki added.
TBS’ Daniela Necefor says the too slow recovery of the labor market is also because of the development of the business sector. This means that few of the positions advertised in companies in the past year were newly created, so certain levels in the hierarchy of organizations, which could have generated jobs, remained unchanged.
One such example is the sales area, where the number of area sales manager or regional sales manager positions have seen a decline. The two positions are for people who manage teams and can hire people. If the decline slows down, the labor market will pick up, and this year is following an upward trend, is different from the past few years, but not enough, she added.
Even some local human resources managers say that albeit they plan to hire tens or hundreds of people maybe, the available positions are for young people with one to three years of work experience.
Fewer than 15% of Romania’s population (20 million people) are college graduates and the number of those holding a BA may decline in the coming years considering the poor results of the high-school leaving exams of the last three years.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)