A job ad for a Hindi-speaking fleet operator published in a Hungarian job-seeking portal last week was widely shared among lorry drivers in the Central European country on Friday.
The advertisement evoked a strong reaction and many questions. To find out if the advertisement was genuine, Trans.INFO reached out to the Waberer’s Group for comment.
As we have learned, the company is in the process of employing 79 Indian drivers, 3 fleet operators and an HR manager.
The first 19 drivers are expected to arrive at the company in the first part of the week. First, they need to take a 2-week-long CPC training followed by an exam; then they will be further trained at the company. This will be followed by at least two weeks of work experience in Hungary, after which UK freight orders will be assigned to them.
The Waberer’s Group has already employed many foreign drivers, although they have mostly been from the neighbouring countries – especially Ukraine and Romania. However, the driver shortage is not diminishing – the profession is slowly ageing, fewer young people are willing to drive trucks. Moreover, the Western European labour market is often more tempting for many young Hungarians. Finally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has significantly limited the pool of HGV drivers from Eastern Europe.
As a result, the company has had to look for new ways to fill in the vacancies.
Drivers from Asian and African countries have been employed in Great Britain, the Netherlands and France for a long time, but this has not been a practice in Hungary so far. Waberer’s has now taken the step that several other companies appear to be mulling over.
Waberer’s are nonetheless not the first company in the Central European region to take this step. As we reported back in November, Lithuanian logistics company cargoGo said it expected to be hiring “dozens or even hundreds” of “highly experienced” drivers “from India and other Asian countries in the coming years”. In the same month, the RHA’s Rod McKenzie also wrote an article about the prospect of HGV Driver visas for Indians.
The news comes after the Waberer’s’ 2021 financial figures recently showed how it had just managed to recover from several loss-making years. One of the key ingredients of its new business model that helped in this recovery was its driver and fleet reduction. Indeed, its fleet of trucks in 2021 decreased from 3,021 to 2,803. It is thus interesting to ponder how its new Indian workforce fits in this picture. It could simply be the case that the Indian drivers are to replace some of the Ukrainian workforce that have left their jobs in order to defend their country.