Raiffeisen's secret: no changes in key personnel

The pressure on the banking human resources market is created artificially, but it eventually disappears naturally, because the salary growth has to be sustained by a matching revenue increase, and the revenues’ growth potential is conditioned by the market, says Marinel Burduja, first vice-president of Raiffeisen Bank. “Those interested in recruiting personnel are putting pressure, but they cannot sustain such high costs indefinitely. They doubled and even tripled salaries in order to attract people, but their performance did not measure up to expectations, and salaries fell again. The salary race has to be matched by the revenues race. If revenues don’t go up faster, somebody is bound to lose money because the revenues can only grow in correlation with the market,” says Burduja. He says Raiffeisen’s corporate division was a target in 2006 and 2007 for just about all the banks in the system, which needed personnel. “This was a big problem for us, but over the last few months, we have managed to stabilise the personnel. The secret to preserving our position on the market has been that in 6-7 years, we have not changed any of our fundamental elements in our corporate team, and this has enabled us to have a strong and flexible backbone.”