Grupa Pracuj's profit falls, even as Polish staffing market stabilises

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By Julia ZmarzlikPolish digital recruitment company Grupa Pracuj GPW:GPP reported a 3% drop in its first-quarter profit on Tuesday, as growth in its home market and Ukraine only partially offset weaker German revenue, stemming from Softgarden recruitment software for corporations.Grupa Pracuj is Poland's biggest provider of HR technology. It also operates the country's largest online job recruitment platform, Pracuj.pl, along with Robota.ua in Ukraine.Its net profit was 62.7 million zlotys ($17.2 million) in the first quarter, below the 66 million zlotys seen in a Reuters poll.The company also said reaching its revenue target of 1 billion zlotys by 2027 may be challenging under current market conditions, but a core profit of more than 400 million zlotys remained "entirely achievable"."Our measures are offsetting moderate demand in the white-collar segment - the strategy’s assumption of a 10% volume increase in this category by 2027 currently appears to be a significant challenge," CEO Przemyslaw Gacek said in a statement.Despite this, the company expects revenue from its recruitment services to rise between 7% and 9% in the coming quarters, instead of the previously estimated mid-single-digit percentage growth.The growth will be driven by pricing optimization and a favourable shift in job postings toward pink- and blue-collar categories, which the company views as more AI-resilient, it said."After a difficult start to the year linked to the war in Iran, we are seeing signs of a recovery in the Polish recruitment market, which gives us a degree of cautious optimism,” Gacek told an earnings call.Poland’s recruitment market is showing tentative signs of improvement, with job postings across 50 major portals slipping only slightly in April compared to a year ago, potentially nearing a return to growth after 11 months of declines, research by Grant Thornton showed.($1 = 3.6372 zlotys)

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