Foreign employees left Slovakia during the pandemic either because they wanted to be closer to their relatives, or the lockdowns prevented them from living the life in Slovakia they originally wanted to. (source: Courtesy of IBM )
The Covid-19 pandemic not only accelerated the return of Slovaks working aboard back to their home country, but also squeezed the number of foreigners working in shared and business service centres in Slovakia. Nevertheless, companies operating these centres in Slovakia keep searching for foreign talents, even though it is more demanding than hiring Slovaks.
“We usually go for a specific qualification from abroad to build up new teams,” Christian Schulz, President of Henkel Slovensko and Head of GBS+ Bratislava and GBS+ Cairo, told The Slovak Spectator. “If we don’t get this initial core competence, we may fail to build up a new team, or in the corporate world, the new team might be allocated to another location.” The share of foreign employees in member companies of the Business Service Center Forum (BSCF), which employ about 37,500 people, decreased in 2022 for the first time since the BSCF started conducting its survey.
“It was usually around 10.5-11.5 percent. Last year it went down to 9 percent,” said Peter Rusiňák, AmCham Senior Policy Manager & AmCham BSCF Coordinator. The workforce at BSCF member companies increased by 4.31 percent.
The BSCs see the effects of the pandemic behind this decrease. Foreign employees left either because they wanted to be closer to their relatives, or the lockdowns prevented them from living the life in Slovakia they originally wanted to.
