Job seeking foreigner number rises in Turkey

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

The total number of foreigners applying for a work permit in Turkey is 48,279 this year, up from around 10,000 in 2010, according to data from the Labor Ministry.

Some 100,000 foreigners have applied to obtain a work permit in Turkey over the last four years, and 64,279 of these applications were successful.

The majority of those who obtained a work permit in 2013 are composed of Georgians, Chinese and Turkmens, the ministry’s data revealed.

According to existing Turkish law, a workplace needs to employ five Turkish citizens for each foreign worker, although this rule is not applied in the representative offices of foreign airlines, educational units and housekeeping posts.

Some 210,000 foreigners are now seeking a job in Turkey by using one of Turkey’s leading online human resources and human recruitment sources, Secretcv, representing a 23 percent increase from the previous year.

“One in five of them applies for a high-level job. We see that around 42,000 foreigners have applied for around 170,000 open management posts,” said the general manager of Secretcv, Okan Tütüncü. He added that a majority of those seeking work in Turkey were from Bulgaria, Germany and Azerbaijan, followed by northern Cyprus, France, and the U.S.

Most of these people are seeking work in the retail, textile, banking and finance sectors, according to the Labor Ministry data.