Salespeople and IT professionals were most in-demand in 2016

Salespersons and IT workers were by far among the most wanted professionals in Central and Eastern Europe, Baltic, Balkan and Finnish recruitment markets.

Regardless of differences between the recruitment portals in use in the different countries, with some focused on white collar positions and others offering jobs to applicants of all skill levels, sales positions were among the top five job types most often posted by companies in 2016. In 10 out of 11 countries surveyed, employers searched for salespeople with a broad variety of titles, ranging from shop assistants to managers of sales departments.

IT people wanted throughout the market area

Following closely at the heels of sales staff in terms of demand were IT professionals, who were highly sought after in eight out of the 11 countries surveyed. Employers looked for IT workers with various types and levels of expertise, with listings posted for programmers, Java developers and engineers to mobile web specialists, to name a few.

There was a lack of jobseekers with university-level technology degrees in the Czech Republic. Consequently, positions requiring high-tech knowledge made up about 40% of all jobs posted on Jobs.cz. In Finland, one interesting observation was the common practice among companies of posting openings in IT positions as a marketing tactic to raise their profiles against competitors.

In Hungary, where a significant part of the labor force has been leaving to seek opportunities abroad, there is a continuing shortage of workforce across the board. Some of the most posted job titles in 2016 included engineers and specialists as well as interns, sellers or shop assistants. Notably, number one in terms of demand in the country were shelf-stockers for stores. Due to an insufficient number of available candidates for the task, large retailers like Tesco, Aldi, Lidl have been forced to compete for employees, causing wage hikes in the effort to attract and retain workers.

Administrative workers, finance professionals also in demand

Trailing behind in the number of openings posted, but in joint third place among the top five most wanted recruits in the market area, were administrative workers as well as accountants or finance professionals. Candidates with both types of expertise were listed as among the most in-demand in four countries each out of the 11 surveyed.

Customer care representatives and drivers were among the top five most wanted types of workers in three countries each. Staff in the customer care function, for example, call agents, were wanted in Poland, Bosnia, Serbia and Estonia during the year, while drivers were in great demand in Croatia, Poland and Serbia. Not surprisingly, service industry openings, such as those for waiters, chefs and drivers, for example, continued to dominate the listings in the Croatian market, where there was a total of 31,000 job postings on MojPosao, 33% more than in the previous year.

Finally, sharing fifth place in the top five types of openings most frequently posted in the market area were cooks and medical health workers. In Finland, for example, postings for nurses surpassed those for any other profession in the number of openings listed on Monster.fi in 2016.

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