Recruitment for freelancers projected to grow by 40% in 2021 as a consequence of the pandemic

Representatives of the recruitment website Bestjobs.ro predict that recruitment for freelance positions will grow by 40% by the end of this year. The pandemic created the conditions that radically transformed the labor market and accelerated the development of recruitment for project-based positions with a fixed-term, suitable for freelancers, News.ro reports.

“Since the outbreak of the pandemic, more and more Romanian employees have begun to consider the possibility of becoming freelancers and working on specific projects. About 21% of respondents to a survey conducted by BestJobs in March-April 2021 say that they are tempted to make the transition from a full-time job in a single company to freelancing jobs “, an analysis of the recruitment site shows. Almost 60% of employees say they have enough time and are interested in taking on freelance projects outside of their current job hours to supplement their income. The fields with the most interest for people looking to work in a freelance system are IT (36%), marketing and creative services (29%), finance (19%), transport (15%), and outsourcing (14%), according to BestJobs.ro.

On the other hand, companies are also increasingly interested in working on some projects with independent professionals. Thus, over 45% of managers who responded to a survey conducted by BestJobs at the end of last year said that, in the current context, they are much more interested in hiring on a project-based system than they were before the pandemic started.

According to data from Eurostat (The European Institute of Statistics), in 2019, about 14% of the total employees in the local economy were self-employed, Romania being ranked the first among the other member states in the European Union in terms of the number of self-employed persons in the local economy.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has radically transformed the labor market and has accelerated the development of recruitment for fixed-term jobs, suitable for freelancers,” representatives of the recruitment platform added.