After one year of activity in the Romanian market, CareerBuilder, world’s largest online job site, still aims at knocking off eJobs and BestJobs from their top spots, in an online recruitment market evaluated at ten million euros in 2008. However, the economic crisis and massive job shedding have pared job sites’ business over the last 12 months.
When the job site was launched in Romania, in August last year, Lampros Latsaras (photo) country manager CareerBuilder said he aimed third spot in 2009. The site failed to come in third so far, but fourth by the number of job ads posted.
CareerBuilder, that has a monthly traffic of 34 million unique visitors worldwide, posts a total of 1,000 job ads in Romania, and has a client portfolio that includes Pepsico, Coca Cola, IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. At the same time, eJobs posts almost 3,600 jobs, and MyJob 3,000.
The US giant launched its platform in Romania when the crisis was about to erupt. In the last three months 2008, the financial crisis was already leaving more and more people out of work, as companies were starting to chop recruitment costs.
Romania stormed headfirst into a deep recession in April and is expected to come out on of it no sooner than second quarter next year, as analyst predict. Under these conditions, when companies go to job sites only to advertise replacement positions rather than newly-created jobs, the new player had to battle an unproductive environment for business growth.
However, Farhan Yasin, chairman of CareerBuilder for Europe, Middle East and Africa said he was confident in the growth opportunities the market offers and reaffirmed its investment plans for Romania.
“We certainly didn’t come here to come in fourth. We came here to be the first and we will continue investing in the platform in Romania. We aim top or second spot in three-five years”, said Ya
