Recruitment in the Brave New World of Work 10/2024
Where are all the fish in the sea?
Dear friends, dear readers,
I hope that this week’s newsletter finds you safe and well. One of the nicer experiences of this week was having lunch with Industrial Relations scholar Vincenzo Maccarrone. I first met Vincenzo when I arrived in Brussels in 2018 and he was about to finish his PhD. Since then, he has grown to be an intellectual powerhouse publishing academic articles across highly-ranked academic journals that I used to read when I was working at Queen Mary University of London many years ago.
Eearlier this year, Vincenzo spent some time at Cornell ILR in the United States, where we have some common friends and acquaintances. Up in Ithaca, New York he found the time to write about the United Auto Workers’ strike. Besides that he has written lots of stuff on workplace solidarity among courier riders, Irish labour politics as well as on EU governance and labour. I don’t think Vincenzo will take offense when I say that it isn’t your light beach reading but it’s worth recommending his stuff because he was one of the new generation of Industrial Relations scholars who think both bottom-up and top-down, and try to make sense of the different complexities of the world of work. If you enjoy reading academic articles, his work might be down your lane.
For all your less academic takes on the world of work, please make sure to subscribe to this newsletter, share it with your friends, family and loved ones.
Other than that, I watched a very interesting FT video on YouTube which deals with recruitment. The video stipulates that companies have moved to assessing CVs and motivation letters with Artificial Intelligence, and job seekers are using AI by simply copying and pasting job descriptions into ChatGPT. This recruitment crisis is leading companies to reinvent recruitment by focussing more on aptitude than traditional qualifications and previous jobs. Nonethless, companies are complaining that they aren’t able to fill vacant positions. Meanwhile, many workers are ageing and the cohorts of younger workers coming through are becoming smaller and smaller. One person in the video hits the nail on the head: People are not having enough sex.
If you’re interested in demographic changes and don’t want to get stuck in the culture wars between pro-natalists and anti-natalists, I recommend watching the below episode of Novara Media’s Downstream
I recently visited Galway, Ireland for work. There, I ended up going to a Starbuck’s at the train station because we still had an hour to kill. Each table had flyers on it advertising open vacancies at the company. The benefits on offer were generous, including a company pension plan, paid training and above all free coffee. My Belgian union colleague immediately called it out as paternalistic. But for me the job flyer underlined a shift. Whereas millenials were entering a job market offering zero hour contracts, the labour shortages are perhaps facilitating a new kind of corporatism that we haven’t witnessed in a long time.
I imagine everyone of us has the experience of never hearing back from a job one applied to. However, a CNN article from 2021 wrote about how employees started ghosting employers because there were so many jobs on offer. What did companies do in response?
Feeling a sense of connection to a company can help reduce the number of first day no-shows, and more companies are developing welcome committees to help establish relationships before the official onboarding process
I wonder what happened to all those welcome committes by now. Especially as a BBC News article from April 2024 states that companies are cutting back on their in-house recruitment teams. This and the advent of video technology is leading to both an increase in the number of interview rounds as well as the waiting time following an interview. In 2021, applicants could expect an answer in two weeks. This has now lengthened to up to three months, forcing applicants to look elsewhere.
Companies are course-correcting for mistakes made during the battle for talent. This means they're now being pickier to ensure they make better hiring calls, at an unhurried pace with more robust processes and decision makers in place.
In Germany, the government meanwhile has introduced a new scheme offering long-term unemployed persons a 1000 euros bonus if they accept a job subject to social insurance contributions and stay within the job for a year. The Germans even have ONE word for this ‘sozialversicherungspflichtig’. You really got to love the language. Jokes aside, this labour market activation policy is pushing into the same direction as those handing out bonuses to workers who recruit their friends to become colleagues, such as the security company at Brussels Airport has been doing to find security guards.
But it’s not only private security companies feeling the recruitment squeeze. A recent NY Times article from earlier this month details how the US Secret Service is facing difficulties recruiting new staff. Staff are leaving in droves due to excessive overtime. But one initiative backfired in particular. Older employees quit their jobs because they were eligible to work and collect their pension at the same time.
Recruiting standards slumped, longtime agents said, as the agency ushered more people in the door. Training, which takes years to adequately prepare a new hire to protect a president under the best of circumstances, was slowed by a decrepit facility where the fight-training room flooded during downpours.
If one is to believe an article published in the Guardian prospective Gen Z employees are coming to job interviews under-prepared, avoid eye contact and have too high salary expectations.
Are young people really the corporate crybabies that older generations make them out to be? Or are they resisting a brutal grind that isn’t working for anyone?
The article concludes that the job market for Gen Zs just isn’t looking great. I guess the journalist writing this was an elderly millenial like me who graduated into the financial crisis of 2008-2009 or the Eurocrisis.
I hope you like what an elderly millenial like myself, however, have to say from time to time and that you come back to read this newsletter.
Hugs,
Mark xox