Gabriel Florea CEO  of Geologic HR answers your questions

Part one

Gabriel Florea CEO of the personnel leasing company Geologic-HR in Romania answers our partners’ questions about how our agency works and what principles apply. Find out more in the interview below about the benefits of the temporary employment agency scheme, why it works well both in times of crisis and in times of economic boom, in what other areas it can be applied, but and how we managed the lockdown period.

What exactly does staff leasing mean, how is it done, what is the method, how long does the “rent” last, how big is the need and what are the contractual details?

Basically, our company hires a person who  we place in a unit of a partner’s industry chain, for a determined period of time, depending on the partner’s personnel needs. If no extension is needed, after the end of the period, the person is moved to another unit, either of the same company’s chain or of another.

As a leasing company we are more likely to provide the employee with a job all the time, precisely because he works for several companies.

Specifically, we provide transparent costs for recruitment, selection and placement at the national level. We also delegate a team leader who accompanies the teams in their first days of work, to ensure a correct and harmonious integration in our partners’s work chain. By having such a coordinator, in relation to our partners we ensure the possibility to find out other internal needs and later customise our  services.

At Geologic HR we constantly innovate, finding temporary workforce that meets the needs of each partner. We present the best practice situations to all our partners, thus making it possible to expand the portfolio of services. 

How deep is the issue employees’ retention during the pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period? What are the causes?

 Dealing with the lockdown measures while securing workforce for our partners was indeed a real challenge, as we are a personnel leasing agency providing heavy blue-collar workers for  infrastructure projects, railway or geology sectors, . And causes were far more powerful than we anticipated.

We could hardly identify and populate the databases, even with unqualified staff. There was a great need for staff; salary offers were in a permanent dynamic, because each employer wanted to cover the immediate needs. .

In practice, we had to push for interviews based on catching someone’s attention and make sure all health and safety measure were understood and kept by our active workforce. Another difficult step was that of evaluating correctly expectations or keeping temporary workers on our list during lockdowns or sudden border closings. It was an unusual situation so we had to constantly reshuffle our personnel or put in place new clauses in case our temporary workers were stuck at home. But luckily for us, the EU managed to contain this medical problem in order for us to take on new projects in 2021. This is an important external factor, which now works in favor of our business activity, and we look forward to speeding up our recruitment activity. 

What trends have you identified for the future?

We learned over the years to work with scenarios. Given the past year, one scenario is that of taking responsibility for health measures and vaccination in order to avoid a potential return to the limitations of mobility. In the EU this limitation is a real problem. 

Once we have all our personnel on board regarding the health and safety measure which work in their best interest, we estimate a new increase in orders, especially in the area of renewable energy, infrastructure maintenance and development – e.g. railway, motorway, green energy etc.

Another scenario is the one in which we will continue the current state of uncertainty. We will have to be more respectful towards resource allocation, workforce allocation and safety measures in order not to jeopardize our active workforce’s contracts or our partners’ businesses.

More to follow up in the second part of this interview.