Custom Labor Market Research for Planning in Unpredictable Times

As a strategic HR partner of companies and talents in Bulgaria, Manpower’s focus follows the current needs of the market and those of our partners. At the beginning of 2021, this naturally led to the expansion of our portfolio with three new service segments - Labour Market Research, Talent Assessment, Training and Workforce Development.

We’ll present each specific product they provide in three separate conversations with the colleagues leading the relevant units.

Today Maria Stoeva, Sales and Business Development Manager and Gerasim Naydenov, Senior Market Research Consultant, will tell us more about Assert Research:

One of the new pillars in Manpower's portfolio is Assert Research. What exactly do these new services cover?

The challenges that our partners face daily are various. Many years ago, we realised that a successful selection process, for example, requires several preparation and post-selection steps. Over time we gradually focused on the most important first step there is in all HR processes - information support.

We aim to provide a solid base for our customers to build their plans, budgets, and systems properly. This is how we started conducting market researches, and since the beginning of this year, we already have a specialized team working only on such projects. We are happy that the companies we work with value the data they receive from us highly and as a result in the face of the market research, we have the fastest growing business line in years.

How did you come to the decision to add labour market research to the portfolio of services during a pandemic?

2020 added COVID-19 as an unprecedented and especially large-scale hurdle to the usual labour market challenges. Fluctuations have become even greater, forecasting has become even more difficult, and it has proved almost impossible for many companies to build well-functioning processes and strategies.

High-quality and up-to-date information on various HR trends, metrics, and practices became one of the most sought-after products and a critical component with which we support our partners with. Working monthly with hundreds of clients from various industries, regions of the country, and sizes and working with a huge number of candidates every day, we have the unique advantage of seeing trends ahead of everyone else. This gives us the opportunity to stay on top of the fast-changing situation and consult our partners in the best way.

Which are the most preferred researches by your clients and partners?

As a standard, for years now we see the greatest interest in the research of salaries and the so-called talent mapping - the study of the talent availability on the market. The rapid growth of salaries and the constant shortage of staff has led to the fact that there is almost no company that is not interested in this type of benchmarking.

It is a great surprise for us to see that even in times of crisis, organizations are keenly interested in researching also other aspects that are of key importance when we stress on establishing and maintaining companies as preferred employers. Increasingly, we are engaging in studies of compensation packages, employee commitment, and satisfaction, employer brand, organizational culture, etc. All such projects give us the belief that the business in Bulgaria is headed in the right direction and the HR function manages to establish itself as a strategic element to the success of any business, indeed.

We also see increased interest towards labour market researches from new investors, considering Bulgaria as a suitable destination for their business plans. In such cases, our research provides detailed information on company-specific criteria such as remuneration levels, regulatory framework, and other fundamental factors that we define together with the investors.

Instead of using general information, our goal here is to get to the key details that are important for the specific project, so that new companies could plan their strategies, budgets, and expectations accordingly.

High-quality data is the basis of good market research - what is Manpower’s method here?

This is perfectly true, and as we all know, it is not uncommon to find blind spots in the official information which makes it unfit as a single source of analysis. That's why adding Assert to our portfolio is so crucial – it gave us access to statistical analysis methods specifically developed for labour market researches. The methodology is based on the official data of each country, integrating with the internal database of our company and thus allows the combination of multiple channels for information collection in one analysis.

This new approach allows efficient data collection and processing and enables us to provide up-to-date information in real time. We are proud that we were able to present Assert Research products on the Bulgarian market and many companies are already taking advantage of them.

In which cases are personalized surveys most useful for companies?

For years, our customers from various industries suffered the disadvantages of traditional market researches, struggling to attract candidates and finding it hard to keep talents in their companies. That is why we advise against relying on general information analysis and our researches aim to be as specific as possible. We all know that the devil is in the details and it is the details that we focus on.

For each research, we adjust our comparison algorithms to the specific industry, case, company structure, responsibilities distribution, etc.

This way we manage to get accurate data and measures and give our client a report that clearly answers his questions on a topic. This is the reason why we are the preferred source of information in situations such as opening new companies or business units, budget planning, process readjustment, etc.

For further question get in touch directly with our Assert Research experts - Maria Stoeva ([email protected]) and Gerasim Naydenov ([email protected])