Small Business Entrepreneur Blog

I need to keep with my preview I did on future posts and now it’s the time to speak a little about doing business in Romania.

There is of course a particular reason for writing about Romania, and that is because I’m Romanian. The thing is that Eastern Europe causes fear to Western or USA companies (for a number of reasons I’m not going to discuss here). Well, to tell you the truth, I also fear doing business with some countries, so I really understand how, we, Eastern-European are regarded from the other side of the fence. On the other hand, Romania is came in second in the Top 10 Reformers, which means things are changing and improving. Moreover, here are some interesting details on the Romanian “Economic freedom“

Although I have written about Romania before, sometime from pure real experience, sometimes with statistics, this time I want to write a little more on human resources. We don’t have a lot of studies on the Romanian work force, so some of the things are based on personal assumptions.

So why would you be interested in the Romanian workforce (which is about 5 millions)? Well, for the same reason, Adobe, Oracle and Microsoft did:

• The skilled labor is still cheaper here
• Non-skilled labor is much more cheap here

Basically, it’s already a little hard to find skilled workers, and the wages have increased constantly. If you are interested about non-skilled workers, the medium wage is around 300 Euros.

Mobility. Comparing with the mobility of the Western Europe, I think Romanians (in general, and the workforce as well) have a lower mobility. It’s quite hard to attract workers in a specific area, unless it’s Bucharest. Therefore is really important to locate your business where the workforce is.

Difficult working conditions are accepted. The Romanian workforce usually accepts non- standard working conditions (like working overtime, bad office space, lack of security and training). As a conclusion, offering “normal” Western working standards could be a great competitive advantage in attracting skilled workers.

How easy is to hire? Hiring is done quite easily through head hunting companies, job sites and on a larger scale through governmental programs. Here are some statistics about Employing Workers in Romania

Trainings and improvements. The Romanian workers tend to have a great theoretical base – due to the exceptional Universities across the country. However, they mostly miss “real life experience”, especially if they need to work on International Markets. Therefore, if they need to work abroad, it will take a little time to accommodate to other economic environments.

There are a lot of particular things about the Romanian workforce, so I can’t write about everything. So let me add some links to other blogs and resources about doing business in Romania:

• From the The World Bank Group, some statistics about doing business in Romania
• CIA – The World Factbook — Romania
• Business in Romania blog – http://business-romania.blogspot.com