You're reading: Kyiv Post Employment Fair attracts 3,000 job seekers

Job fair draws a big crowd and 29 companies.

On a sunny Nov. 5, dozens of people lined up for start of the Kyiv Post Employment Fair at the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce.

The fair attracted nearly 30 companies and almost 3,000 people, a clear sign that qualified employees are in strong demand and that plenty of job seekers are out there as well.

Herman Ovcharenko, director of the SuperJob.ua portal, said there are more jobs on the market now than last year. “Our online job portal currently offers around 2,000 jobs, which is 30 percent more compared to November 2010,” Ovcharenko said.

That trend should be welcome news for the nation’s 404,500 officially unemployed people.

Those who flooded the fair’s venue were overwhelmingly young people in their 20s or early 30s, either looking for their first fulltime job or trying to find better opportunities for their skills and experience.

Colin Burdeniuk, a director of rooms at the soon-to-open Fairmont Grand Hotel in Kyiv, was happy to see the big crowd. “I thought we would be packed by afternoon, but people are coming and coming, which is good for us,” Burdeniuk said.

There is obvious reason for his joy. Fairmont, a Canadian chain with hotels in many of the world’s capitals, is looking to hire some 300 people for its hotel in Kyiv. It is scheduled to open in March 2012.

This season, information technology specialists and sales people are in greater demand, said SuperJob’s Ovcharenko. There are also plentiful jobs for engineers and production workers.

The revival of the country’s job market was noted by Diamond Recruiters, especially well-paid, high profile jobs.

Anita Taraniuk, a recruiter at the Diamond Recruiters, said that job market is slowly reviving from the dead summer season. “Although there are more job openings now, many of them also get frozen after failure to find properly qualified personnel,” Taraniuk said. “For instance, there are many jobs for sales managers, but it’s very hard to find good ones.”

The Kyiv Post’s Iuliia Panchuk and Olena Grisyuk help fair visitors at the newspaper’s booth.

Diamond Recruiters’ job database includes 50 job offering now, with an average salary of Hr 16,000 monthly.

Compared to Kyiv’s average monthly pay of Hr 4,000, or $500, and nationwide monthly average pay of Hr 2,700, or $340, according to the Ukraine’s State Statistics Committee, such salaries are highly competitive.

But official figures don’t give the full picture, since a good share of the nation’s labor market is in the shadows.

Hanna Krupa, a young university graduate, said she has already spent a month in a job quest as an HR specialist and still can’t find anything in Kyiv. Due to lack of experience, prospective employers are not even interested in hiring her for Hr 2,500, or $310, a month.

Google, whose stand attracted most of the youth at the fair, seeks to hire employees while they are still in college. They offer them various internships and professional training opportunities to prepare them for a full-time job at the company by the time they graduate.

Despite a generally good start to the fall labor market, Diamond Recruiters’ Taraniuk warns that the future is not looking very bright in some sectors.

“We expect that due to unstable political and economic situation, companies with foreign investment will start to wrap up their presence in the country next year, thus, shrinking the number of their employees,” Taraniuk said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected]