The taxi and delivery market in Ukraine is facing a serious challenge: a shortage of staff. Industry leaders, including the Bolt service, are recording a slowdown in the hiring of drivers and couriers. In the context of the ongoing war and economic instability, companies are forced to rethink their personnel attraction strategies.

The complex arithmetic of the labor market

The Bolt management team in Ukraine, in an interview with RBC-Ukraine, voiced a worrying trend: the growth rate of employees is slowing down. According to Serhiy Pavlyk, General Manager of Bolt in Ukraine, the situation is influenced by a complex of factors. This is not only mobilization, which undoubtedly plays a significant role, but also the emigration of the population, as well as increased competition for staff between various sectors of the economy.

"It would be wrong to link this only to mobilization, although it is one of the factors strongly affecting the market," Pavlyk emphasized. Companies have to compete for every potential employee, as the supply of labor is shrinking.

Challenges for couriers: from weather to air raids

The situation in the food delivery segment (Bolt Food) has its own specifics. Vyacheslav Levchenko, General Manager of Bolt Food in Ukraine, noted that attracting new couriers today requires significantly more time and resources than before the start of the full-scale war.

The paradox of the market is that demand for delivery services continues to grow, while the pool of available workers is shrinking. An acute shortage of couriers is felt during peak times and under difficult external conditions:

  • During air raids;
  • During severe frosts;
  • During black ice and other difficult weather phenomena.

At such moments, delivery logistics become critically vulnerable, and the workload on existing employees increases many times over.

Economy of survival: new pay standards

In order to maintain supply on the platform and attract new people, the company is forced to raise the pay bar. Bolt reported that the average earnings of a courier are now about 30,000 hryvnias a month.

Vyacheslav Levchenko explained that this is not just the company's desire to be generous, but a "competitive necessity." Working conditions and pay must be significantly better than in alternative places of employment to motivate people to work in the delivery sector in current realities.