Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz has repeatedly assured that there will be no major resignations in Spain. This is how, in the United States, the phenomenon has been described that more than four million workers in this country have left their jobs after the pandemic to live on the savings accumulated during the crisis or to take advantage of public aid and because they are very unhappy are with their jobs.
It is true that this great resignation did not take place in Spain, as this American phenomenon is also known, but many companies in the Spanish market suffer from the same consequence: the lack of manpower for their positions. For example, the latest official data from the European Statistical Office (Eurostat) indicates that at the end of last year and in this first quarter, almost 1% of the vacancies cannot be filled because they cannot find employees for them. This would correspond to more than 109,000 vacancies. Despite the fact that Spain is one of the European countries with the fewest vacancies, it registers the biggest paradox of having numerous vacancies despite having three million registered unemployed, which represents one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU (13.65%) .
In addition, when you go into practice, the proportion of vacancies is much higher in day-to-day job placement. According to a calculation by the human resources group Adecco, the number of vacancies rises to 9% and eight out of ten companies (80%) admit to having difficulties finding the workers they are looking for. That last percentage has skyrocketed by more than 30 points over the past five years.
Faced with this situation, the Minister of Labor has today asked employers and unions to analyze where these vacancies occur and the reasons why this phenomenon occurs in Spain, with the aim of seeking solutions through social dialogue.
The director of the Adecco Group Institute, the study service of this multinational human resources company, Javier Blasco, explains the problem in Spain by referring to the “existence of a triangle with three sides that do not correspond: what companies are looking for, what employees are looking for and the training offer”. . In this sense, he points out that the largest gaps between demand and supply are found in hospitality (cooks, waiters, etc.) in regions such as the Canary Islands or other Mediterranean coastal cities, and in industry (skilled occupations) in less industrialized areas , where there is no training offer, but also mobility from other areas of Spain.
But Blasco sees other differences in the Spanish case compared to the American one: “In Spain there is more than great resignation, great demotivation,” he explains, “the worker cannot quit his job because he cannot find an attractive wage or conditions outside and he stays, but he burns out.” “.
However, the head of human resources at the consulting firm Mercer, Juanvi Martínez, assumes that a large number of workers will be looking for other jobs. “I don’t see the big resignation as much as the big rotation (moving from one job to another), especially among young people who are increasingly prioritizing work flexibility.”
Against this background, Martínez shows the government and the social partners some solutions. “The job market is changing a lot, and post-pandemic, the war for talent is brutal,” he explains. For this reason, he advises government and companies to “look at how to make jobs attractive” and “make jobs fit life, including the least skilled”.
Here he proposes two lines of action for negotiators: make hiring seniors more attractive and offer more benefits linked to workers’ well-being. For his part, Blasco (Adecco) finds a possible solution to the problem of inadequacies between supply and demand in improving counseling for young people who are already unemployed. In this sense, he believes that “the public employment service’s remedy should not be to hire 1,000 advisers, but first to train the workers that this institution already has”.
And as a background to all these changes, analysts point to teleworking in general: “The ability to work from anywhere in the world makes the war for talent much more global,” says the Mercer manager.