Top firms hire staff and boost pay checks

Big enterprises in Greece are planning to move ahead with targeted hirings, according to the annual salary survey by Mercer Greece.

Despite the domestic economy’s constantly increasing structural problems – chiefly excessive direct and indirect taxation and the unstable financial environment – companies appear to have realized that strengthening their staff is a condition for realizing their growth prospects, the human resources consulting firm’s survey has found.

Of Greece’s top 168 companies that took part in the survey, 62 percent said they had raised salaries this year, by an average of 1.7 percent, while 35 percent estimated they would increase their staff within the year and 15 percent expressed their intention to make up for the additional taxation on managerial staff by supplying them with a corporate vehicle.

Next year’s outlook is positive too: More than a quarter of all firms (26 percent) expect to increase employee numbers, while 66 percent see staff numbers remaining the same.

Enterprises in new technologies forecast a much higher rate of hirings, with 65 percent of them responding that they would increase their staff within 2017.