Future plans of a newcomer in Romanian online recruitment market

A high penetration rate of the Internet, the opportunity of working with great companies, and an extremely attractive market are only few of the reasons why CareerBuilder.com chose the Romanian market for business development, said Lampros Latsaras (photo), one of the attendants at RoNewMedia 2.0 event, organized by F5 WebCorp advisory and investment company.

“We have noticed certain difficulties as in some countries; people are not used to sending job application on the Internet. I am coming from Greece, and I have to tell you that the penetration of Internet here in Romania is much higher than it is back in my country. So, eventually you’ll see that people, when looking for a job, they would go directly at the job site, and this is very surprising, as we don’t see something like this in many other countries,” said Lampros Latsaras.

Using the international platform in Romania, Latsaras considers that the cutting-edge technology is one of the advantages of the recruitment website he runs.

“We offer to our companies the opportunity of building their own recruitment sites within CareerBuilder.com.ro. Furthermore, these companies can use the service for a year tax-free. On the other hand, we are trying to understand what the profile of the candidate can be, and to understand how he can find the right job. We are working on how the candidates behave or what exactly he is looking for, what sites he visited, what newspapers or magazines he reads, where he works, where he lives,” Latsaras added.

According to own studies, 54% of the candidates are looking for quality of the job, while 24% of them are looking for advancement opportunities.

Acknowledging the fierce competition in the online recruitment market, Lampros Latsaras said the company targets third position in the industry in 2009.

“We are number one in United States and UK. In India we reached third position after six months since the launching. We are trying to globalize, to make this business relevant to all people in the world. The biggest challenge for us is for people to understand what is our offer, how they can use it”, representative of CareerBuilder explained.

Number one “online head-hunter” in Romania is eJobs.ro, with 500,000 visitors per week in average, holding 1,500,000 CV database. EJobs is the leading online recruitment in Eastern Europe, the fourth “non-English” website in Europe, and seventh in the world.

Another competitor for CareerBuilder is BestJobs, held by Netbridge Development. Launched in 2000, the website encloses 1 million CVs database and approximately 20,000 signed up companies.

CareerBuilder is the leading online employment website in United States with over 23 million unique visitors per month and 1.5 million job ads uploaded on month-by-month basis.

Online recruitment market, same development pace in the next five years

According to Lampros Latsaras, the online recruitment segment will still develop in the next five years, at a rhythm almost the same as it was up to now, despite the economic context.

“Romanian market had a boom in the last period. There is a financial crisis, I understand. There are some things blocked, Romanian elections will start, but starting from January, things will start moving again at the same rhythm that it was before crisis. I don’t expect the same development pace, but after ten years of developing the recruitment market, people will start looking for quality and better opportunities in bigger companies,” said Latsaras.

Translated by Camelia Oancea