It’s a problem that business owners have been complaining about for some time. The jobs that remain unfilled, with the added contradiction that this happens in a country with 2.8 million unemployed. Cepyme has warned today that the problem is getting worse and that there are already 71% of SMEs that declare having difficulties due to the lack of workers.
It is one of the conclusions of the report “The challenge of vacancies in Spain”, which highlights the mismatch between supply and demand, caused by training shortages, social changes and also the disconnection between passive policies and the labor market. Furthermore, the difficulties in filling vacancies end up causing only 44% of SMEs to continue actively looking for employees, due to their lack of resources. This is what the author of the report said. Diego Barceló calls “hidden vacancies”, companies that stop searching.
“There is something that is not working if we do not achieve employability for all workers,” said the president of Cepyme, Gerardo Cuerva, adding that “Spain cannot allow a company that can grow not to do so because it does not find workers for “The consequences are less production, a drop in turnover, stagnation in productivity and a drop in competitiveness.
The report points out that “it is of capital importance to contain the worsening of the lack of labor for the good performance of companies, their greater productivity and competitiveness,” and places the deficit in continuous training and technical and technological profiles as the main causes. , the depopulation suffered by an important part of the country, in addition to the disconnection between training and what companies actually need. Barceló highlights that Spain is one of the countries with the highest proportion of students studying arts and humanities in relation to the countries European peso and on the other hand, with a lower percentage in engineering, for example.
Aging also has its consequences in this area because as the average age of workers increases, the rejection of jobs that require physical effort or that involve night shifts also increases, and at the same time salary expectations increase. In this area, there is a complaint from SMEs, with one in four of those having difficulty filling vacancies identifying salary as the obstacle. More so, they say, when they cannot compete with large companies in this field.
There is little reliable data on the number of vacancies in the Spanish labor market, a rate that is difficult to locate. The only official source, the INE, estimates them at around 150,000, but they are difficult to quantify, especially among SMEs, because having fewer resources they allocate them to a lesser extent to the active search for workers, which means that their offers decline. more quickly. Furthermore, employers also question the reliability of these data because, they indicate, in recent years they have not recorded any problem with vacancies in sectors such as real estate, the extractive industry, gas and electricity.
Another of the complaints of SMEs is the ineffectiveness of current employment policies, with a SEPE that they describe as ineffective, with aid in theory designed to encourage employment, but which, according to Cepyme, is not fulfilled in practice.
