According to KSH, in the second quarter of 2017 there were some 48,460 vacant positions in the private sector, an increase of 10,000 over the same period last year and two and a half times larger than four years ago.

Based on KSH’s data, there are 62,970 total vacant positions in Hungary. However, this number might be much higher as the latest available data for the public sector (14,510 vacant positions) is from the last quarter of 2015. The number of vacant positions in the private sector might also be higher as the statistics do not reflect all vacancies.

Some professionals argue that the Hungarian economy could soak up as many as 100-200,000 trained professionals.
The high number of vacancies is causing a deceleration in economic growth.

Although many enterprises have already lowered the requirements for vacant positions, companies still struggle to hire the adequate number of employees.

The labor shortage affects the processing industry the most, which has the capacity to immediately hire more than 19,000 employees. However, the public sector also suffers from serious staff shortages, especially public administration, education, public healthcare and social services. The latter sector alone has over 7,000 vacant positions.

MTI Photo: Sándor Ujvári

Source: The Budapest Beacon

Republished with permission