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:Or they offer too little

[pablo_max]

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

You would think so, but no.
That is more of an American thing I think.

I am an American expat living in Germany. I was recently offered a job in Spain for a lot of money. Much more than I make in Germany. I don't speak a single word of Spanish. Poor German and English only.
I actually thought about it, but at the end of the day, it's Spain. Great to visit, but not to live.

Re:Or they offer too little

[nctritech]

This discussion reminded me of this now nine-year-old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers."

Re:Or they offer too little

[war4peace]

Here's an interesting anecdotal evidence that confirms your point.
My team has an opening for a Business Intelligence person. HR provided us with 4 candidates. Three of them were below our expectations and one was way above (both by target salary and skillset, not surprisingly). My manager went back to HR and asked for another batch of candidates, and HR "found" another candidate which was almost perfect but was "overlooked" in the first batch. HR lied by saying the candidate only applied during round two, which the candidate proved it wasn't so by showing the job application date.

Re:Or they offer too little

[Gr8Apes]

This is why the most reliable way of getting hired is bypassing HR entirely, and using your network.

his policy of driving down wages

[turkeydance]

quote from article

Re: his policy of driving down wages

[roman_mir]

I would never let anybody come close to touching my codebase without them training in my company on a standard set of test projects for a few weeks, which is the training they are receiving. The test projects are the same ones for everybody, they start with a completely empty machine, installation of the OS and of all systems and software, compiling the db, doing a bunch of training with he os first, building the same test applications that everybody else working for me already built, learning the concepts they are missing that they must know before touching my code.

The people that are able to perform in the test projects and who show good team skills are hired.

As to Spain, you have no idea how difficult and expensive it is to hire and fire people there, which is the reason for the insane unemployment and it is not just Spain. Italy, Portugal, France as well, they are preventing employment with laws designed to prevent employment under the guise of 'protecting the employees'.

Wrong Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't that workers lack the skills needed. It's the fact that the companies are looking for the perfect candidates. They have no interest in training people to do the job. When entry level programming positions require compsci degrees and 3 years experience in 5 different languages/libs you know the barrier to entry is a bit too high...

Of course, part of the problem is the employees themselves. The company trains them then poof. The employee runs off to a different job that pays more. No loyalty to the hands that taught you how to fish.

Re:Wrong Problem

[layabout]

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

companies get as much loyalty as they give.

You made your bed.

[Iamthecheese]

What happens when employers stop re-training employees and start shitcanning anyone as soon as possible, relying on obtaining trained people from the rest of the economy when people are needed again? That's right: trained people are quickly drained from the economy leaving only the trained who command very high wages and the untrained, who cannot be employed.

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

[Mashiki]

There's several EU countries that have young adult unemployment rates at, near or above 50% now. Seems to me that there's a more serious problem then simply that. Either they don't want to hire people and train them for the jobs, they have requirements for jobs that are stupid or they're shitcanning people who could have been retrained and kept within the company.

Proof the EU is Working

[Person147]

Well it is quite likely that the ones with the required skills have already been snapped up by companies from other parts of the EU that tend to have more contracts. A two month contract is hardly a basis for a reliable income. Move to somewhere like Berlin or London and there will be far more opportunities. Working in FinTech in London I find all the time that the people are am working with are from all across the EU as there are so many more possibilities here in London. This empties the talent pool from the source countries. I hear this all the time from Lithuanians in particular.

London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country. Just the same happening but at an international level.

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:Proof the EU is Working

[ffkom]

You forgot to mention the billions of Euro that the EU spends on aid payments to support specifically the structurally weak areas of Europe - including Spain.

If Spain wasn't in the EU, their clever youth would still leave the country for a better career abroad - but Spain wouldn't get anything back.

Or do you think that in a nationalist euphoria, spanish youngsters would suddenly decide to stay in their sucking local job market if Spain left the EU?

BTW: A colleague of mine relocated from Germany to Spain (for the warmer weather). He still works for the same German company - just remotely. So he at least supports the spanish economy by buying stuff where he now lives. If Spain wasn't in the EU, such a relocation might have been too cumbersome to do it just for the sake of warmer weather.

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:Abusive government

[Zumbs]

The summary suggests that the Spanish labor market is not raising wages to draw the migrant workers back home, but rather importing workers from Argentina to keep wages low. Given the high unemployment in Spain, 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. Or look for skilled Syrian workers, but that is another discussion.

Re:So Slashdot is a blatant propaganda peddler now

[ErichTheRed]

I'm not sure why people deny the reality of a shrinking employable labor pool. I've mentioned below that I do feel people can be trained, but my experience has shown that even among skilled employees, there are some capable of handling higher-level work and others who aren't. As much as I think Trump would be a disaster of a President, the experiment he proposes (cancelling NAFTA, implementing across the board tariffs, etc.) would be very interesting. if it overnight became prohibitively expensive for every company regardless of size to manufacture overseas, the domestic manufacturing base would have to return, including companies supplying tools and parts. Instantly, you'd have the blue collar labor force back, paying taxes and spending money in the economy. This would in my opinion restore a measure of balance. It would be suddenly OK again to have just a high school degree if that was all you could handle academically. People wouldn't be forced into debt getting a degree they're not interested in or qualified to have.

I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money. There's no easy way to dismantle our money-based economy short of a revolution or some disaster that causes a full reset. This is why the basic income has appeal...it allows a transition so the angry older workers who had to save for retirement, etc. age out and a smaller active labor force comes in.

Re: higher skill required = less people to do it

[orlanz]

Having come from two small villages... Bullshit.

Most villages are labor intensive, low mental req, and low profit systems. People share the work because there is too much of one thing to do in the window it must be done. You start working with the sun up (meaning you get ready well before), rest when high, and return home when down (you wash, eat, and sleep quickly). And every day of every season there is a natural schedule that must be followed else you will fall behind.

In most places, most of the family works and contributes in one way or other. You have your upper, middle, and lower classes. Only the upper and middle can afford education.

In return for all this, you are in the upper class if you can afford the middle class equivalents of 1st world countries. You look at any well developing country and one of the first things you see is the lack of youth in villages... Because they all left for the cities.

Yes, a village is a nice relaxing, low stress environment... Mentally. And if you already have the monies, physically too. If you visit a village and see people sitting around... These are the well off rich people. There 4-6 people for each that they are paying daily who work from sun up to sun down.

Re:internal training

[lgw]

This. Socialism leads to high unemployment. You can argue about why, about how everyone is doing socialism wrong, about how this is no true socialism, whatever, but what the EU nations do right now creates high unemployment. And the problem worsens over time.

Free to move - how free is that?

[fyngyrz]

Those 5 million workers are free to move around the EU to better labor environments.

So how easy is it, do you think, to pick up and move yourself (and possibly your family) from here to there, when you have only the dole as income, if that?

"Free to move" is only a valid statement if you have money to move with, not to mention a place to go where you will immediately find employment to pay your bills.

Which is to say, it's not usually a valid statement at all.

Re:Abusive government

[geoskd]

What's the average pay for American engineers in fantasy land?

Same as it was ten years ago, and only marginally higher than it was 20 years ago.

When I graduated in '01, the median starting pay in my field was $65k, and average pay was $91k. Today, the median starting pay is $70k, and average pay is $93k. That is an average annual increase in starting pay of 0.45% per year. The increase in average pay across the whole field has only increased by 0.133% per year. Meanwhile, unemployment in my field is pretty close to zero. There are almost no qualified applicants out of the hundreds of resumes we receive for any given opening. In spite of the incredibly low unemployment, there has been no increase in salaries, due to several factors. First, employers know that their employees will not be able to get significantly better elsewhere, so they do not offer any better than they have to. Second, filling open positions is typically done by job postings, and referrals, not by "poaching". What this means is that the company has to wait longer to find a qualified applicant, but they don't have to pay the premium in cost that is associated with poaching employees (10-20% higher salary than the poached employees current salary). It is the effect of poaching that significantly drives salary increases. When companies have to resort to poaching to achieve staffing levels, industry salaries rise fast. That is why the anti-poaching agreements between silicon valley companies should have been punished by virtue of an automatic 15% raise for all of their current employees. This would have been sufficient punishment to make the companies rethink that policy, and also would have effectively undid the damage that had been caused by the anti-poaching in the first place.

The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.

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.

Re:Abusive government

[Lonewolf666]

My experience in Germany is similar. I'm currently looking for a new job, and based on the (sparse) feedback I get from potential employers the €55k/year I'm asking for are a realistic market value.
This is only marginally more than what one could expect ten years ago. Counting inflation, low as it is, this amounts to a decline in purchasing power.

The likely reason in case of Germany is that the trade associations have successfully lobbied our politicians to allow more immigration of qualified people from outside the EU.
The immigration permit is called "Blue Card EU" and bound to
1) graduation from a university
2) a minimum wage of currently 48.400 €/year (or less for some occupations considered having a manpower shortage, especially MINT professions).

Obviously this is driving down wages, similar to H1B in the US. Because there are quite a few competent MINT graduates from the former Soviet Union, and they do (understandably) take the opportunity. I've worked with some of those guys, and they are by and large decent people, so i don't begrudge them the opportunity to make money here. But it still leads to rather meager increases in salary for us MINT graduates.
 

Re:Abusive government

[Fire_Wraith]

The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.

Absolutely. Not everyone is capable of doing every job, no matter how much training you give them. Even of those who can be trained, some are going to be a lot better than others. This has a lot of consequences, because the low-skilled but high-paying jobs of the old days are vanishing at an increasing rate, and they're not coming back. When we put 3 million professional truck/etc drivers out of work, we can't just stick them all in a web development class and call it even. At some point - maybe not today, but eventually the day will come, where we have to entirely rethink our employment paradigm, institute a minimum basic income or the like, and accept that not everyone will be directly employed the way they used to be.

Read the article ...

[golodh]

Well ... to some extent. Lets look at the article itself, shall we?

From the (Bloomberg) article: "From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe".

Yea, right. Mathematical modelers are always thin on the ground and software developers can be, depending on what you ask. Geriatric nurses are an impopular specialisation, and demand is growing fairly quickly. Working conditions tend not to be the best though, so it's not the most popular specialisation. Takes a year and a half to qualify though, and not many hospitals are willing to pay you to do it. Those that are pay you a pittance, fire you the day you graduate, and start with the next bunch of trainees.

Problem is: can you trust current industry demand to guide your choice of curriculum?

Answer: No you can't. Companies (with the exception of the likes of Shell, IBM, GM, Unilever etc.) don't plan any further ahead than 6 months. Easier and cheaper that way. So, current industry demand isn't a very good indicator.

And this: "Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in "Agile" project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."

Salary's pretty good, especially for Europe. But "trained in agile". Does that mean "attended a few lectures in scrum or whatever"? No. From the rest of the article: you need to have sufficient experience to know what software development is and what the issues are. And then the article lets it transpire that you'll be talking with senior management ... on your project. Sounds like a "development lead with experience in agile" position to me. Definitely not for your average coder, with or without course in "agile" development bolted on.

I can only conclude that the Slashdot headline is a bit misleading. The Bloomberg headline is more accurate, and the article goes on to lambast the Spanish educational system for not paying sufficient attention to industry needs (STEM subjects).

However ... about a year and a half ago I made the acquaintance of a (very smart) Spanish PhD in experimental physics who (1) couldn't find a fitting job opportunity in Spain when she graduated (6 years ago) (2) went abroad to do a doctorate (3) was subsequently unable to find a faculty position (two years ago) in Europe) and went to work as a data analyst for the government.

Several interesting things in this story: she couldn't find a decent job even though she was smart, motivated, and well-educated, she had to look outside Spain to do a PhD (well, some would call that a valuable education in itself), then couldn't find a job in the field for which she had just qualified (experimental physics), and went to do work for which she wasn't "formally" qualified but for which she was quite well prepared (kudos to that HR department).

Now think of your average HR department. Would they have hired her as a data analist? Nah ... too many boxes not ticked. No Hadoop experience, no Java programming certificates, no certificate in SAS, not SPLUNK certified, no Python programming certificates, no Linux certificates (although she did her PhD work on Linux systems like all physicists). Yup. Probably no MS Office certificates either (but perhaps those can be overlooked).

So it's a sum of circumstances: insufficient attention to trivial but "in-demand" qualifications on part of educational authorities to please box-ticking HR departments, HR departments being generally unable to bring any understanding and intelligence to their job (costs too much to have somebody working there who actually understand what the job entails, right ... so keep with the box-tickers). industry as a whole being unable to provide reliable forecasts of future personnel demands.

Being "that guy"

[fyngyrz]

So yeah, if you ever sit on this side of the table you'll discover there are a lot of folks who aren't qualified to do the work they seek.

I've sat there. Way back when, I was on the interviewee side of the table, generally looking for either an EE or programmer job (or both.) I wasn't hugely impressed with most interviews, either. Later, having gone out on my own, I did the interviews myself, and later yet, after my companies had grown large enough, supervised those who did the interviews. My experience has been that if the job is specified well enough, and you don't suffer from application of non-skill-based criteria such as age, weight, credit report, arrest records, sex, degrees and certifications, and you don't proffer an abusive workplace or shitty remuneration, then there's no problem whatsoever hiring qualified people with sufficient or superior skill sets and quite easily recognized ability to learn. I've never, ever hired anyone who couldn't / didn't do the job they were hired for. Sure, yes, lots of people interviewed who weren't qualified by skill set. None were ever hired for something they weren't capable of either doing or learning. This was neither unexpected or a significant burden. It was a very rare unqualified or over-the-top abrasive person who didn't reveal their lack of suitability in just a few minutes of questioning. Not one made it to a job offer. Not in 30 years.

In software, my companies have done image and signal processing, both hardware and software. We put the very first morphing software for a desktop PC on the market, and our image processing / special effects software was used in myriad movies and television shows. We also did artificial life software, paint software, cross-assemblers, microprocessor emulators, and some of the earliest object-oriented CAD systems, among other things. We did absolutely top-notch technical support, second to none -- that's the thing I remain proudest of to this day. In hardware, we designed and manufactured graphics engines / accelerators; fax systems; status display systems; software oscilloscopes, FSK modems that were 100% DSP before DSP was a term on anyone's tongue; blitters; etc.

As to security clearances, I can't say. If you want to hurdle that particular wall, then you've bought into whatever requirements they lay on you from above, and yeah, I could see where, especially today, you'd have trouble. Fortunately, I'm mostly retired now, writing free software and only taking the occasional really interesting consulting job for myself, and I won't ever have to put up with that particular brand of oversight. Not that I ever did.

WRT criminal records, some of my best employees were those whom others had simply refused to hire for that very reason. None ever did my operations any harm at all, and a few were real stars.

I can't say I have any sympathy for operations that impose non-skill set criteria on their hires. No matter what size. it's a choice. Not an imperative. You make the choice, okay, certainly you can do that, but I am utterly deaf to your complaints about the consequences to you -- my sympathies lie entirely with the people who remain unemployed in the face of job opportunities they could handle perfectly well.