Salary expectations of Russians have increased by an order of magnitude: “Employers need to adapt”

Analyst Bryauzov named companies with the most acute staff shortages

The average time to search for a job in Russia has increased to 90 days. For IT specialists it is 60 days, for workers in heavy production – 100 days. Only one in four (27%) finds a job within a month. Such a long period of searching for a position is associated with a discrepancy between the salary expectations of candidates for positions and offers from employers.

One of the authors of a large-scale labor market study, Antal Talent CEO Konstantin Bryauzov, announced this at a conference on employment. 4.5 thousand Russians took part in the survey.

48% of respondents say that salaries in their company have increased over the past year, 43% say they have remained at the same level. In almost all organizations, coupled with the growth of wages, the trend towards their indexation at the level of inflation (by 10-12% per year) has continued, and, as the expert emphasizes, not only to key employees, but to the entire team.

According to the survey, 16% of respondents were laid off in 2022-2023 – mainly those who have been working for less than a year. The “old-timers” of the company, as a rule, remain.

Salary expectations for four out of five candidates increased by 10-15%. “We are moving into the era of the 2000s, when people moved from company to company to increase their income by at least a third. Then there was a “market of candidates,” says Bryauzov. The difference is that now, when moving to a new job, only every tenth person receives an increase in salary, on average by 15%.

“Employers need to adapt to the wishes of job seekers,” the analyst is confident, emphasizing that many industries are experiencing an insane shortage of personnel.

In particular, the situation in hiring mass personnel has changed critically, where there is a catastrophic shortage of people. “For example, in a tobacco company in St. Petersburg, where an ordinary worker earns 90 thousand rubles a month, personnel rotation in 2021 was only 0.3%. The other day the director called us and asked for help, because he couldn’t fill the vacancies even with this money,” says the expert.

The hardest hit in Russia are IT companies, many of whose employees have gone abroad. Companies associated with pharmaceuticals suffered the least losses: they saved the market, profits, and people, the analyst concludes.