Will there be fewer unemployed? How 2022 will change the Ukrainian labor market

In 2021, the balance in the labor market shifted towards the jobseeker again. After people were forced to stay inside the country due to quarantine in 2020, they now have the opportunity to earn money abroad.

Sergey Saroyan, the founder of Performance Management, told Segodnya about this.

According to him, in 2021, employers are starting to recruit people again after the level of uncertainty associated with the coronavirus has decreased – pent-up demand is being implemented. All this contributes to the fact that the number of open vacancies again exceeds the number of posted resumes.

“The greatest choice now is with qualified specialists: they may well receive about three job offers at the same time. If we look at the data of recruiting services, we will see that the number of vacancies has doubled compared to last fall, to more than 110 thousand,” – says Sergey Saroyan.

Who’s salaries are growing?

Compared to last year’s figures, open borders and a shortage of workers are driving wages up by up to 30%. In the fall, job seekers always started asking for more money, but now they have objective reasons for their requests.

Retention of existing employees is also an urgent problem. Since most of the migrant workers are representatives of working specialties, it is for them that the largest numbers on salary revisions – about 20%, while office workers began to receive on average only 10% more. However, the expert believes that these are rather isolated cases.

Why are salaries being cut?

For the most part, employees report a decrease in their salaries by reducing working hours, or simply because of the difficult financial situation in the company. However, according to surveys, 58% of employers plan to expand in 2022, which is encouraging.

“Everything will, of course, depend on the situation in the economy. Due to high inflation, household expenditures are growing (+ 40%), while real wages are falling (-2.2%). , – says Sergey Saroyan.

He believes that the hiring structure is not changing much. As before, the driving forces are finance, agribusiness and IT. However, there are laggards… For example, the pharmaceutical industry, which required a large number of employees in the past year, is no longer actively looking for new people.

Employment centers will work in a new way

The Cabinet of Ministers is introducing a new model for the provision of customer-oriented services by employment centers in Ukraine.

The new model of work involves the introduction of fundamentally new technologies and methods, among which, in particular, the provision of services already at the first visit to the employment center and the provision of data exchange with the authorities, allowing clients to submit as few documents as possible.

As we wrote earlier, the number of employed citizens aged 15 to 70 has increased in Ukraine and now amounts to 15.8 million people. According to statistics, 1.6 million citizens are left without work in Ukraine.