“The unemployment rate of young people in Spain is more than 50%. However, looking towards the labour market in 2020… What type of skills and competences will be needed to be competitive? What type of gap are we facing if we don´t start preparing the new generations?”
Those issues were presented at the Foment Human Resources Forum in Barcelona on the 12th of June 2014 . The presenters shared their views and data about those themes.
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María Ángeles Tejada, Randstad Public Affairs Director highlighted that a 43% of recruitment processes in Spain ended without finding the right candidate demanded by the organisations, there is a “mismatch of what the labor market is offering and what the companies are demanding and in the future we will need to compete to attract talent”.
She pointed out that the job positions demanded in the future were related to Engineering, ITC, Business Administration, Economics and Chemistry. She commented there was a real gap in the area of language skills and technologic profiles, great part of the talent needs to be imported from abroad, this was the case of Softonic– a software platform company- which will be mentioned below.
In general she highlighed the following:
1.Spanish workers still have a lack of geographical mobility, despite the economic situation. There is a need of working on the language skills gap and it a working experience abroad is highly desirable.
2.Organisations are increasingly valuing candidate´s attitude and in front of an excellent academic record they are taking in consideration previous work experience, related or non related with their speciality.
3.Candidate´s attitude needs to be positive, accepting mobility, being good communicators, flexible and to have leadership and motivation skills.
4.Organisations are facing an extremely important challenge , they need to be professional and knowledgeable performing recruitment processes, improving the working climate of the company –motivation and engament are key- and they also need to offer an attractive remuneration package.
María Franquesa, VP of Softonic Human Resources, explained that great part of her workforce comes from other spanish regions and countries-35 nationalities in total-. Her challenge is to attract and retain talent. “candidates from abroad want an attracting project, the company also needs to care about corporate social responsibility, employees value their personal time, they enjoy travelling and living and working in other countries”. She also talked about a culture of achievement, team spirit, respect… One of their specific challenges is to offer remote working to their employees, as the company still have must of the people working onsite , this proposal will enable the company to retain more talent.
At the end of the conference and during the question time there was an interesting debate about recruitment criteria, the impact of candidate´s age to access to certain job positions and the inclusion of personal data on the CV- age and and photo-. There was also a question related to the real capability of companies to implement a competency evaluation system and the use of assessments centers.
In my personal opinion, the need of attracting and retaining talent entails a great level of professionalism in the human resources practices applied. In addition to this, I think that it is important to ask ourselves why, despite the great level of unemployment rate and the emigration of qualified people- some, related to the specialism mentioned above- so many companies are having a difficult task finding the right match.
Finally I would like to highlight that if workers need to be adaptable, eager to learn, and also wanting to acquire life experience that increases their soft skills… Employers need to find a way of measuring the success of their recruitment processes, a lot of serious self-evaluation and a strong employer branding. An employer branding that has to align with the current culture of the organisation.
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