Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report:Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can't find the candidates. After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he's given up and is casting his net elsewhere. "We were looking for people for two months," Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. "We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others." Pimentel's experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country's efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need. "It's a paradox," said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. "The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we're seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don't have the skills employers demand."

Comments

Or they offer too little

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why can't we find workers that will work for peanuts? They're all unemployed, they should be happy with anything!"

Re:Or they offer too little

[fibonacci8]

Or my favorite aspect of the "paradox", when employers demand a 4 year degree, or 5 years equivalent experience with technology that has existed for 2 years. Then the problem isn't the workforce, it's the expectation of far more than the required skill set to perform a job.

Re:Or they offer too little

[layabout]

Sounds like you are acknowledging that the welfare state causes unemployment.

only in that is allows workers to say no to unreasonable employer demands.

Re:Or they offer too little

[AmiMoJo]

They don't want to pay for training either. Used to be many people were taught their trade by their employer, but now they expect the cost to be covered by the government and the employee.

Re:Or they offer too little

[Solandri]

That's due to an often-unnoticed failure mode of HR. There are two possible hiring candidates (qualified, unqualified) and two possible HR actions (hire, don't hire). This creates four possible outcomes:

Visible outcomes:

• Hire a qualified candidate. Everything is good here. HR gets commended for a job well done. Company gets a good employee.
• Hire an unqualified candidate. Company gets a bad employee. HR gets yelled or fired for failing to do their job.

Invisible outcomes:

• Don't hire an unqualified candidate. HR did their job here, but company doesn't know it.
• Don't hire a qualified candidate. HR failed at their job here, but company doesn't know it.

The only way to see the invisible outcomes is to test HR by sending in a few eminently qualified resumes and fake (but talented) people to do interviews. Almost nobody does this, so HR lives in a bubble where only the visible outcomes matter. That means their strategy is to eliminate unqualified candidates at all costs, even if it means you also eliminate some qualified candidates. So if HR is supposed to fill a job which requires 2 years experience in a new technology, play it safe and ask for 5 years experience in that tech in the job listing. It doesn't matter that their shoddy listing eliminates all honest applicants competent in the technology. As long as the dishonest applicant they eventually hire is also competent in the technology, HR can only be commended.

Re:Wrong Problem

[layabout]

No loyalty to the hands that taught you how to fish.

companies get as much loyalty as they give.

Lack of Planning

[Blue Stone]

The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?

"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.

Re:Lack of Planning

[AthanasiusKircher]

The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?

I think we're going to see more and more of that tension in a lot of places. The reality in the world is that for most jobs, "on the job education" is the most effective. We've created a system that tells young people to go to college, but traditional universities were never really designed for job training. That happens at technical schools. At a higher level where theory is required in addition to practice, it can happen at a "professional school," like med school, which tends to combine some theoretical coursework with apprenticeships (i.e., clinical training, often at a teaching hospital).

We're seeing a greater and greater problem for college graduates finding jobs, because they don't have practical skills that one will generally learn on the job over the course of several months or a few years. And it's also very inefficient because the theoretical material students learn in a college classroom is often forgotten quickly without practical reinforcement, forcing graduates to relearn the material needed on a daily basis when they finally find a job (rather than integrating it into more permanent and practical knowledge as they go). College was designed to be "higher education," not job training -- it was meant to expose students to a wide variety of ideas and disciplines, not teach only the specific skills for a job. It makes no sense to segregate theoretical and practical training if you actually want students to learn skills for a job.

If employers really wanted better (and more loyal) workers, they should stop just requiring a degree before getting a job and instead help train workers on the job, perhaps partnering with a higher-ed program to provide a bit of theoretical instruction as necessary to complement the work.

Why aren't they doing this?....

"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.

Sort of. But I suspect this is primarily being driven by a desire to have lower-cost employees. A few decades ago, companies were mostly limited to whomever they could find locally. It was really expensive to look beyond the local labor market, let alone internationally, so it was mostly done only for major jobs in the company.

Nowadays, it's so much easier and faster to just find someone on the other side of the planet who has most of the skills already and is willing to work for a fraction of the cost of a local worker.

Re:internal training

[HornWumpus]

Or maybe they have laws that once you hire someone you're stuck with them for years. Hence nobody hires unless they know the person is already skilled.

Re:Proof the EU is Working

[cardpuncher]

London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country

This is, in essence, why the rest of the UK voted to leave the EU and take London down with it. The EU counterweight to the free movement of people and capital is regional development which is supposed to have a redistributive effect and even out the gains and losses. I'm afraid the hollowing-out of talent from many regions and countries of the EU is proof precisesly that the EU is not working as intended.

Re:Abusive government

[geoskd]

it also puzzles me why the Spanish government and employers association are not actively providing facilities to educate unemployed workers to take the vacant positions.

Because you don't train someone, who has been manufacturing doorknobs for the last 20 years, to now be an electrical engineer. The majority of these unemployed people are incapable of developing the skillset necessary to handle the work that is available. Given the extremely high payscales listed in TFA, if the unemployed people were capable of learning it at all, they would have already availed themselves of the higher education system to achieve those degrees.

There is a fallacy in this world that anyone can be anything they want. The sad reality is that most people simply don't have the basic talent to become a rocket scientist. Pretending that we can fill an urgent need for rocket scientists by retraining a bunch of gas station attendants is just stupid.

Its time the world faces the reality that there is already an entire class of people who have such a low value to society that the only reason they can survive is because governments artificially maintain minimum wages. Every advance in technology renders an ever larger subset of the population into this class. It is time that humanity stops and decides what the future of the race is going to look like, because if we don't, then the matter will decide itself, and will do so the way it always has: through warfare.