The country’s job market is welcoming to managers, executives and blue-collar workers alike, a survey of recruiting firms is suggesting.

In its recent survey of Moscow-based recruitment and executive search firms, which The Moscow Times conducts twice year for Jobs & Careers, the outlook for the jobs market was strong.

Conducting a successful job search in Russia, in particular in Moscow, is feasible and, according to some estimates, will produce an excellent job for the well-qualified candidate, especially at the executive level. Staffwell, a Russian executive and manager recruitment firm, in fact is saying about 60 percent of its job vacancies are for newly created jobs, an indication of development among Russian companies and foreign affiliates here. All of the firms surveyed for this article — Penny Lane Personnel, Antal Russia, Flex, Kelly Services CIS, Ancor Holding and Staffwell — gave a positive assessment of Russia's job market from the job candidate's perspective and laid out a number of promising trends.

Some of the firms reported positive trends for job-seekers with a note of caution — that is, with the observation that the global economic situation is weak and that some of the hires are replacing personnel laid off during the global economic crisis. Other firms, meanwhile, said the hiring environment is excellent.

Noting that a majority of vacancies are for brand-new positions, Staffwell said companies are creating those positions as they build out their business, launch new products and set up new projects.   

"We would like to count on this trend continuing until the end of the year," Staffwell said.

The market for executive hires looks especially positive, a handful of firms said. According to Antal Russia's quarterly research on hiring and layoff trends, Russia is seventh worldwide in terms of its turnover for managers, Michael Germershausen, managing director of Antal Russia, said in the e-mail survey. Also, Russia is second in that category in Europe, he added, behind Ukraine.

"We haven't observed a damping of the value of executive search services in the recruiting firm sector," said Tatiana Dolyakova, general director at Penny Lane Personnel.  

View From the Top

Sergei Gadetsky, director for Ancor Holding in Russia, wrote in his survey response that the overall job market has been much livelier in 2011 than it was last year. According to Ancor's data, the number of employees sought by employers increased 60 percent in the first half of 2011, he said. "It can be said that the labor market already is becoming a candidate's market," he added.

Kelly Services CIS sees a steady, but not heightening, demand for executives. Yekaterina Gorokhova, general director for the multinational firm in the CIS, noted that some sectors have a shortage of employees in leadership positions and need to fill those spots. Those include the chemical industry and certain areas of banking and finance.

A steadiness of management openings was noted by other firms as well. Ancor said the demand for high-level supervisors is stable, while Penny Lane Personnel made a similar observation.

"We haven't noticed a trend this year of extreme shortages of top managers in those market segments in which we work, in particular the industrial sector, IT, HoReCa or legal affairs," Dolyakova said. (HoReCa stands for the hotel, restaurant and cafe sector.)

"In Moscow, there is an especial need for managers in sales, financial staffers, lawyers and bank staffers, IT specialists and technical or engineering specialists for the oil and gas fields," Staffwell wrote in its survey response. "Companies have begun to index salaries and to pay out bonuses," the firm added.

For staffers in blue-collar jobs or managers within industrial segments, it also is possible to make a fruitful job search. Besides the banking sector, the demand for  is greatest in the heavy industrial, consumer goods, and oil and gas sectors, Gadetsky said. There is a significant increase in the need for qualified specialists and middle managers in mining, mineral equipment and engineering and mechanical engineering.

Gorokhova of Kelly Services CIS said "the issue of attracting blue-collar workers is most acute in sectors where there is active investment and development of production means." Examples include the carmakers and automotive parts makers in the Kaluga region outside Moscow.  

Trends This Year

A fresh trend appeared in the September survey of the six recruiting firms: an increase in merit-based hiring practices in Russia, where the country's largest companies often bring on relatives and friends as executives. "Russian-owned companies have increased their interest in middle- to senior-level managers," Staffwell said, citing its own statistics.

"We have recently signed on three more clients from the 'state-owned' business area," the firm said in its survey response. "We see the changes being made in their HR policies regarding hiring methods."

Penny Lane Personnel's Dolyakova said she is expecting the number of recruiting firms to increase in 2012 — indicating rises in both the amount of hiring and the independence of the candidate search. She added that she is also expecting competition in the jobs market to tighten.

In the previous survey of recruiting firms, which took place in March, Jobs & Careers found that hiring was robust in the pharmaceutical sector, one of the five industries that President Dmitry Medvedev has singled out for modernization. The Pharma 2020 program, which is supported by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, calls for increasing the share of domestically produced medicines "to 50 percent in value terms" by 2020, the plan's strategic web site says. That share is currently just 23 percent.

Vigorous hiring in the pharma sector is continuing, the recruiting firms said in the September survey. The drugs sector is "the leader" in hiring activity among all of the job sectors, said Tatiana Sonovskaya, a partner at Flex. The demand for pharmaceutical personnel has remained high for the past year, she said, noting that this trend showed up in Flex's analysis of its data from September 2010 to September 2011.

Russian candidates in the sector might have brighter prospects, according to analysis by the head of Flex's pharmaceutical division, Yekaterina Shiryayeva.

"Domestic factories and production facilities are 'rearing their heads,' gradually ousting foreign companies from the market," she said. The Pharma 2020 program is reducing the volume of imported medicines, she said, as well as developing high-tech manufacturing and creating new jobs. There also is a trend of replacing expat managers with Russian ones, she said.

Outlook for 2012

Even in the upbeat assessments of the labor market, there were signs of caution about the global economic situation and how it could affect Russia's economics and business development. Greece continues to stagger under its debt load, threatening the euro zone's stability, and Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy also have dragged on Europe's economic recovery from the 2008-09 crisis. Meanwhile, political frictions and the federal deficit in the United States have damaged its economic reputation.

If the economic trends stay on their current path through the end of the year, then market observers shouldn't expect a sharp uptick in the activity of the labor market, Ancor's Gadetsky said. Under the current situation, Gadetsky said, the rate of growth in 2012 will be moderate.

Overall, Russian businesses have been holding back their spending on staff expansion and looking at use of their resources with extreme caution, the Ancor executive noted.

"Several months ago, we were confidently giving the prognosis that the labor market will continue to grow actively in 2012," said Svetlana Chernyshyova, a senior consultant on the financial sector at Flex. "But now, because of the possible risk of an economic crisis, we are inclined to forecast that the labor market will fall considerably."

Though Staffwell said the job market is strong, it had an even blunter assessment of 2012. In its survey response, the firm said that "owing to the unstable situation that has taken shape in global economics and the recent announcements of leaders of major countries, we cannot make a long-term prognosis."

The general fiscal picture is modest at best and, at worst, a threat. In a global economic outlook paper that it released in September, the International Monetary Fund predicted that Russia's gross domestic product will grow 4.3 percent this year and 4.1 percent next year. The GDP growth in 2010 was 4 percent.

Meanwhile, fellow BRIC nations India and China are expected to post far larger gains: India's GDP will grow 7.8 percent this year and 7.5 percent next year, and China's will rise 9.5 percent this year and 9 percent next year, the report projected. The IMF labeled the economic development of Russia and the rest of the CIS as "moderate growth performance."

This fiscal outlook hasn't affected the job market thus far, according to the recruitment firm survey. Sonovskaya at Flex noted that global economic weaknesses "continue to destabilize the world economic situation," but the Russian jobs market "is showing stability."