Employment Growth Reported for Q4 2017, Employer Labor Costs on the Rise
Fourteen percent of the Bulgarian companies plan to hire more people in Q4 of 2017 according to a study by the human resources company “Manpower Bulgaria”. The study was conducted among 620 Bulgarian employers in 10 different industries who answered the question “How do you expect the total employment in your company to change in the last quarter of the year, compared to the current quarter?”
A total of 14% of the respondents said they planned to increase the labor force in the fourth quarter of 2017, thus increasing the net employment forecast by 3% compared to the corresponding period a year earlier. A total of 80% of the companies said they did not plan any change in terms of hiring, only 5% had plans to reduce their staff, 1% did not respond.
The trend is evenly distributed among the ten industries studied. The forecast for the Construction sector is the most positive, where an increase in demand by 24% is expected. There will also be greater demand for employees in Mining (+ 20%) and Manufacturing (+ 15%). The sectors of Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Business Services and Transport, Storage and Communications ranks next in terms of employee demand. A growth in demand is also expected in the Public and Social sectors as well as in Wholesale and Retail trade – + 11%. The lowest recruitment rate is seen in Electricity, Gas and Water, Agriculture, Forestry, Hunting and Fishing and Wholesale and Retail. These three sectors reported an expected decrease in the demand for people.
All five regions studied, Sofia, Plovdiv, Rousse, Burgas and Varna, enjoy positive employment forecasts. Broken down by regions, the most optimistic expectations are for Plovdiv, where an increase of 18% is expected. This constitutes a four-percentage-points increase, compared to Q3 of 2017 and 5 percentage points year-on-year. The estimates for Sofia and Varna are for growth of 13% and for Burgas – of 12%. The region of Ruse expects an increase of just 8%.
Broken down by company size, the large companies with more than 250 employees reveal the boldest plans, with an expected increase of 32%. Medium-sized companies see a stable hiring rate with a forecast of + 13%. Small and micro-sized enterprises expect a growth of 9% and 8% respectively. Improvement is reported for all four enterprise categories, compared to the previous quarter. Even medium and small-sized employers face relatively stable employment prospects.
Detailed data is available here.
Employers’ cost of labour increased as well. According to preliminary NSI data for the Q2 of 2017, the total costs of the companies per hour worked by an employee rose by 11% year-on-year. During this period remuneration costs increased by 10.7% and other expenses, excluding salary by 12.4%.
The full data from the Labor Cost Index for Q2 of 2017 are available on the NSI website.
