The seasonal revival of the job market brought more than 800 visitors to the Kyiv Post Employment Fair that took place in Champions Hall of Olympic Stadium in Kyiv on Sept. 16.
They were met by plentiful prospective employers: 40 companies from retail, banking, information technology and agricultural sectors were looking for talent at the fair.
The Kyiv Post Employment Fair takes place twice a year, in spring and autumn. The September fair attracted not only frequent participants, such as Auchan Retail Ukraine, Danone, Leroy Merlin, but newcomers as well, including IT companies EVO and Hexa, online website-making platform Wix.com, PUMB Bank, and even the National Guard of Ukraine.
“We have already got many CVs from good candidates, met with interesting colleagues and discussed possible cooperation. I hope next year we will have more time to prepare and the results will be even better,” said Nelly Bezkorovaynaya, the Wix.com representative at the fair.
The employment fair opened at 10 a. m. and within two hours more than 200 visitors came in to study the job offers. It isn’t unusual for the job market to get brisker in early autumn.
“Traditionally, autumn is the start of the new business season. Employers start new projects and intensively recruit the new people to their staff,” Sergei Marchenko, Work.ua HR website development director told the Kyiv Post.
The numbers prove it: As of September, employers have 94,915 active vacancies on the Work.ua website, compared to 86,027 in May.
The companies’ representatives told the Kyiv Post that during the employment fair they were approached not only by students, who often felt lost and weren’t sure what career they wanted to pursue, but also by many young and middle-aged professionals that had very specific expectations for the employer.
Not only job seekers, but the companies as well were being appraised at the job fair.
The Kyiv Post and EY auditing and consulting company identified the top 10 employers — leaders of Ukraine’s market, based on a survey conducted among human resource specialists and CEOs of more than 90 companies.
The winners were: pharmaceuticals and science corporation Bayer, Ciklum international IT company, Coca-Cola Ukraine, DTEK energy holding, Kyivstar mobile operator, Mars Ukraine, McDonald’s Corporation, Metinvest holding, Ukrainian branch of the international confectionary holding Mondelez, and agrarian company Syngenta.
Experience exchange
HR professionals and successful business people advised the participants of the employment fair about finding the dream job.
Setting one’s eyes on the right vacancy is only the first step on the road, many said. The competition is always high, especially for the Ukrainians who want to enter the international labor market.
One shouldn’t be too confident or too shy: Even a small mistake during the interviewing process can knock one out of the game, to the joy of dozens of competitors.
The recipe to nailing a well-paying job is: sacrifice sleep, be passionate, stop whining and learn that nobody owes anybody anything.
“Work Hard and Play Hard” was the theme of the conference. It also encapsulated the advice of this year’s Kyiv Post Employment Fair speakers: Maksym Bakhmatov, a leading partner of the Unit.City innovation park, Tymofiy Mylovanov, VoxUkraine co-founder and Kyiv’s School of Economics president, Dmytro Vyahirev, Cargill Ukraine agrarian holding project director and Andriy Fedoriv, Fedoriv Hub founder and the head of Fedoriv marketing company.
Maryna Fomenko from Eterna Law firm spoke about preparing oneself for a job interview. In the social media age, the applicant should start by cleaning his online profiles from radical and unacceptable content. And yes, Fomenko said, one should pay attention to what one wears for the interview.
Bakhmatov inspired visitors by his own experience of turning state-owned 560-hectares exhibition complex VDNH that he took over from the state in 2014 with a Hr 20 million debt and no central heating into a modern hub of innovations, a concert hall, a family hang-out and a business center.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, VoxUkraine co-founder and Kyiv School of Economics president, tells Kyiv Post Employment Fair visitors that Ukrainians must compete harder than people from other nations to succeed internationally. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Vyahirev of Cargill shared the company’s hard-earned but successful experience of leading business in Ukraine independently, without shady deals and bribes to the government officials.
He said that it took more than 20 years for Cargill to start its ambitious $100 million grain terminals construction in Yuzhny Port of Odesa Oblast. But such a project was worth to wait.
Vyahirev announced that a number of vacancies would soon be posted on Cargill Ukraine website.
Reality bites
Mylovanov decided to aggressively challenge the job seekers in the audience.
He urged the visitors not to consider themselves smarter than the others and said that Ukrainians must compete harder than people from other nations to succeed internationally.
“Believe me, as I can judge from my own experience, you can be the smartest in Ukraine. But people from another country will always be ahead of you,” Mylovanov said.
Fedoriv challenged visitors in an even more daring way while sharing his business philosophy.
He asked some of the bravest ones for an onstage job interview, simultaneously filming the candidates for his own blog. No one stood for more than a minute.
“Guys! If you want to work in a (top) company, like mine, start with the basics! Know what we are doing in Fedoriv, be confident and brief. And please learn English, because without it you won’t achieve a thing in modern marketing,” Fedoriv said.
