Taking a dip in the Central European talent pool

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been for several years an attractive talent pool for companies operating in global markets. The high qualifications of the regionís university graduates, along with their competitive salary requirements particularly in technical fields, have attracted many investors. Many companies have re-located sophisticated manufacturing procedures previously situated in western Europe to the Czech Republic and created their own development and technological centres there. Among them, for instance, well-known names such as Honeywell, IBM, DHL or Red Hat. And others are soon to come.

Promising qualified employees from Central and Eastern European region have also been sought by companies from other countries. And professionals from Eastern and Central Europe are interested in their offerings and willing to make the move for them. Understandably, cultural and linguistic affinities are involved ñ yet the predominant factor is the financial attractiveness and the quality of the jobs on offer.

And there is another new trend in globalising job markets - the coordination and centralisation of recruitment in many firms. The company IDC CEMA - active in the ICT market ñ clearly displays the tendency. Recruitment within the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa is managed by the regional office in Prague, Czech Republic. The IDC Human Resources Manager for this region, Svetlana äaötinsk, in cooperation with the country managers of individual branch offices, is currently seeking to fill twenty-five posts in Belgrade, Prague, Moscow, Istanbul, Warsaw.

These new impulses in the labour market have led the operators of several leading local job boards to create a network that would allow their clients efficient and rapid on-line recruitment across the entire region. In 2004, an alliance between the leading job boards in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic was founded. The On Line Recruitment Alliance (ONREA) became the basis of the current service ONREA Multiposting. Later, it added job boards in Bulgaria and Romania. Clients can now post a vacancy to several countries at once, and process the applications of candidates through the LMC G2 system, an application similar to the systems used in western Europe, such as Taleo or Mr.Ted. There is definitely interest in the service ñ from its start, the advertisements have increased tenfold.

Also IDC CEMA uses the ONREA Multiposting. According to Svetlana äaötinsk, it has had good results. Among the companies not based in the region but seeking through ONREA Multiposting technically trained employees is the British communications group KeTech, providing consultancy, software, systems engineering and maintenance services to the transport, defence and industrial sectors. KeTechís Group CEO, John Kearney, says that the response and the quality of the candidates is very good.

How does ONREA Multiposting work in practice? From one point and one mouse click, the client can easily cover a territory of several countries with a single ad. During one day, the posting appears automatically on the job board of the requested country. Automatic posting of ads in these countries is also common in local e-recruitment. Personnel managers place and edit job ads by themselves, thanks to very good ASP systems now in use. Even the basic module of the application LMC G2, an example of complex software for massive yet sophisticated talent relationship management, is linked to important servers in the entire Central and Eastern European region and allows for job advertising in all countries at once. Now, the market is the six countries mentioned ñ but the network is likely to expand soon to Ukraine and the Baltic states.

Libor Mal, CEO of the Prague-based company LMC, the operator of the job site www.jobs.cz.