December 12 (SeeNews) - Employers in Romania report the strongest first-quarter hiring intentions in nine years and the most optimistic ones in the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region, recruitment company ManpowerGroup Romania said on Tuesday.
About 22% of Romanian employers intend to increase staff numbers in the first quarter of 2018, recruitment company ManpowerGroup said in the latest edition of the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey.
The survey was conducted in 25 EMEA countries.
With only 12% of employers foreseeing a decrease in staffing levels and 64% anticipating no change, Romania's seasonally adjusted net employment outlook (NEO) stands at +17%.
The outlook is the strongest reported since the first quarter of 2009, improving over the quarter by 3 percentage points.
Perspectives at the beginning of 2018 are positive across all regions, industry sectors and organization sizes, with the exception of micro-organizations, with up to ten employees, where employers report a negative NEO of -2%.
The most optimistic hiring plans for the first quarter of next year come from employers in large organizations, with over 250 employees. They report a +30% seasonally adjusted NEO, the strongest for their organization size in the history of the survey in Romania.
Also at their most optimistic in the almost 10 years of survey deployment in Romania are employers in manufacturing, who report a +39% NEO for the first three months of 2018. Perspectives in this sector improved by 4 percentage points on the quarter and by 8 percentage points on the year, the study showed.
Employers in the construction sector are also more optimistic than in the past, forecasting their strongest NEO in nearly six years, of +21%, up 6 percentage points on the quarter and by 11 percentage points on the year.
The largest quarter on quarter improvement, of 14 percentage points, is reported in the wholesale and retail trade sector, but the +16% NEO for the first three months of 2018 is weaker by 11 percentage points on the year. This is the most notable year-on-year decline among all sectors included in the survey, Manpower said.
Conversely, employers in the electricity, gas and water supply sector forecast the largest year-on-year improvement of 14 percentage points, reporting a NEO of +9%, one of the two most optimistic outlooks for this sector in the history of the Romanian survey.
Hiring plans are most favourable in the northwestern region, where one in three employers intends to hire during the first quarter of 2018, and only 6% forecast payroll decreases, resulting in a NEO of +33%, the strongest reported in the region in nearly 10 years.
The least optimistic are employers in the southwestern region, with a +6% NEO, up 2 percentage points on the quarter and by 9 percentage points on the year.
The ManpowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey was published for the first time in 1962 and is now polling almost 59,000 employers in 43 countries and territories to measure their intentions to increase or decrease the number of employees in their workforce during the next quarter.
In Romania, the present survey was conducted by InfoCorp Ltd. between October 18 and October 31 on a representative sample of 625 employers. The margin of error for all national, regional and global data is not greater than +/- 3.9%.