BestJobs: Lifting Covid 19 restrictions accelerates prospects of office workers' return

March 8 represents the end of the state of alert in Romania, after two years of pandemic. 62% of Romanian candidates declared in the latest survey made by BestJobs recruiting platform, that they would choose working in an office or at least in hybrid format, while 38% would prefer exclusively remote work. “March 8 represents the end of the state of alert in Romania, two years after the beginning of pandemic. This period brought many changes in the labor market and in the employees' lives, who have experimented remote work, but also hybrid work, and now they can choose how they would like to work. After two years of being deprived from direct interaction with colleagues and affected by the impossibility to separate personal time from time allocated to professional activity, 62% of Romanian candidates declared, in the latest survey made by BestJobs recruiting site, that they would choose working from office or at least in hybrid format, while 38% would prefer exclusively remote work.” At present, 48% of employees declared they work in offices, 42% from home and 10% in hybrid format. Even if employees return to working in offices, 24% say the possibility of remote work represents a benefit to be taken into account when they negotiate their work contract. When they evaluate a new job, with a view to being hired, only 7% of candidates consider that exclusive office work would be a compromise they would have to make, while 14% declared they would hardly accept a position involving exclusively remote work. The interest in remote jobs is still big, as candidates recorded over 62,000 applications in the last 30 days, most of them for opportunities in Sales, IT/Telecommunications and Management. In February 2022, about 3,500 positions offering the possibility of exclusively remote work, on BestJobs platform, twice more than in February 2021 and the most since the beginning of pandemic. Moreover, over 1,000 jobs supposing hybrid work are available for candidates. In the last 30 days, most of the remote positions available on the platform were in IT/Telecommunications, Management and Engineering. BestJobs is one of the biggest online recruiting platform in Romania, with over 4.6 million professionals connected to the labor market, over 32,000 jobs and thousands of freelancers, recruiting agents or specialists in personal development, lawyers and other types of specialists).