These are plumbers in Germany, postmen in the United States, engineers in Australia, nurses in Canada, masons in France… Everywhere, labor needs have picked up sharply since the Covid-19 crisis. 19. But the arms are missing.
CEO of the German SME Currentsystem23 specializing in software, in eastern Germany, Michael Blume confides to AFP that he has “clearly a lot of difficulty finding employees”.
“Wherever you look, there is a shortage of skilled labor everywhere”continues this entrepreneur, pointing to training problems in Germany where 887,000 jobs were waiting to be filled in August, both in social or construction and in IT.
The American figures are even more dizzying in a country where the signs “We are hiring!” abound in front of restaurants or buses: more than eleven million positions were vacant at the end of July for almost half as many workers available.
“Companies continue to say in global opinion polls that it is very difficult to hire” since the Covid-19 crisis, notes Ariane Curtis, economist in Toronto for the firm Capital Economics.
It points to acute difficulties among the countries of Western Europe, North America but also in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Latin America.
According to an OECD report from July, tensions over vacancies increased significantly at the end of 2021 in the United States, Great Britain, Australia and Canada compared to the pre-crisis.
Education, hospitality, health…
At a time when the world economy is already slowing down under the effect of the war in Ukraine, the shortages of workers are all the more worrying as they affect sectors as varied as teachers in Texas, the hotel and catering industry in Italy or health workers in Canada.
They also lead to a destabilization of the functioning of many companies: pharmacies in Wisconsin have to close at certain times for lack of pharmacists, care units in Canadian hospitals in Alberta for lack of doctors and restaurants on the Australian “Sunshine Coast”, near Brisbane, for lack of servers, the local press recently reported.
White-collar trades are also experiencing the dip. “Before, the most difficult thing was to find client companies. Now it’s the candidates”testifies Clément Verrier, who co-directs a Parisian recruitment firm specializing in senior executives.
Its sector of activity “Faced with an unprecedented number of candidates disappearing in the middle of the recruitment process, without even calling back”he adds.
Already at work before the Covid-19 crisis, worker shortages suddenly flared up during it.
The sources are multiple: early retirement, too low wages, too difficult working conditions, professional reorientations in the name of a quest for meaning, removals outside the big cities that provide jobs… Never in modern history has an event not will have affected the very notion of work as much.
“Treasures of the Imagination”
Companies are trying measures to attract or retain employees, starting with wage increases, which vary from one sector to another.
Telework is becoming a prerequisite in many professions, which have also seen the emergence of initiatives such as “bonus” leave or time granted for a personal cause.
“You have to deploy treasures of imagination” in order to seduce candidates, notes the Parisian recruiter Clément Verrier.
“The big question is whether what we have been seeing for months will calm down or not”asks Mike Smith, head of international recruitment expert Randstad Sourceright in the Netherlands. “We believe this is not a transitional change”he says.