Aleksandar Hangimana started his career at ManpowerGroup Serbia in 2012. as a part of the Sales team. Shortly thereafter he was recognized as a leader of the company, which still leads with great success at the position of Managing Director. The company Manpower-Group share their knowledge, expertise and resources, in order that everyone understands what is important now and what are the next activities in the labor market. Vision, that Aleksandar share is that the company need to become a leader in creating and providing innovative HR solutions and services. In December 2016, at the Serbian Association of Managers Annual Awards event, Aleksandar received The Young Manager of the Year award.
His business is based on values that promote people, knowledge and innovation. The company’s success he attributes to its employees considering that every business success is conditioned by the quality of the people who work there. Business policy that Aleksandar follows is that each contribution – employees, clients and candidates, need to be encouraged and rewarded. ManpowerGroup today, with 90 internal employees and 3000 employees that are sent to work at the client, is one of the fastest growing companies in its industry in Serbia.
Which candidate profile is there the most demand for? Which are the hardest to find?
— We need to be aware that high demanding professions in Serbia are not as deficit as they are in EU countries. However, the market in Serbia is growing with foreign investments, mainly in automotive production industry thus different engineering profiles are in high demand. The market is furthermore being recognized as interesting for investments in R&D centers, so the demand for R&D engineers is rising. High demand for software developers is still ongoing and growing, and there need to be more ways of educating high quality experts.
What can companies do in order to attract and keep quality human resources?
— The entire process surrounding employment and employees’ satisfaction needs to be led by highest quality experts as it all influences motivation, employer brand and other factors that effect attracting and keeping talents. I mean firstly start by high quality recruitment process, followed by regular communication and transparency in the process, strong onboarding, and then continue listening to your employees. It’s not all about material benefits, employees want appreciation, recognition and to be heard. Along with this you need to keep being competitive and follow the market movements on the talent you want to engage and keep.
What are your projections for future trends in the labor market?
— Certainly, with the current Serbian industrial growth we can expect further decrease of the national unemployment rate going within next three year below 10%. The Internal demands and growth have been the strongest drivers of the labour market. Beside internal factors we can see two other, mainly external, factors which will be primarily shaping the future landscape of the labor market. Firstly, we kept receiving more and more FDI especially in an automotive-production sector. Unlike previous years where in the most of cases we had usually labour-intensive and low-paid production jobs, whereas, nowadays we see that new investors are not so concerned about labour cost but population – availability and quality of the local workforce. Therefore, they are eager to pay more than local market levels are, just to secure stabile intake of the local workforce. It is an interesting trend that where we can observe investors expectation shifting from low and intensive labour towards more qualified, available working population. Second driver is even more external. Serbia unlike other countries in the region of SEE can still offer a great pool of available workforce that is needed for markets in foreign countries predominantly in central and western Europe in countries such as: Germany, Austria, Czech and others. This potential has been spotted by the companies and agencies abroad which have started recruiting significant number of the population for these foreign markets. Even though it may seems minor but such job-immigration driven from outside will have an impact on the labour market. Similar experience has been noticed in the neighboring countries where big part of population found jobs in EU.