84% of companies are ready to hire new staff in the next six months. But he cannot find the answer to his needs on the job market. This is the gist of the latest survey conducted by Fòrema among Veneto companies. 84% of the panel (188 companies) declare an explicit need for new staff, immediate or in the next 6 months, in line with what was found at the end of 2022. “This trend – explains Matteo Sinigaglia, general manager of Forema – is particularly evident in metalworking sector, where 90% of companies are looking for new collaborators, with growth compared to the previous survey. The majority of companies, both large and small, are involved in this recruitment process, with 71% of companies looking for specialized staff for their production processes.”
But it won’t be easy to hire. In fact, 83% of companies declare that they experience difficulties in finding the necessary professional figures. It must be said that the demand for professional profiles is concentrated in the production sector: almost half (46%) of the panel is looking for specialized personnel for their production processes. The figure grows further considering the entire operations area (71%). In this context, almost 54% of companies identify the main cause of recruitment difficulties in the lack of staff available on the labor market.
“We are faced with a knowledge intensive economy”, declares Roberto Baldo, director of the Fòrema study centre. “24% of the panel states that they are unable to find the right skills or the right experience among the staff available to join the company and only 5% attribute the phenomenon to the lack of attractiveness of their organization, a decreasing figure considering that it was the 17% in 2022. We have been used to the skill shortage phenomenon for years, i.e. the lack of professional skills necessary for industrial development; now we add the people shortage, the lack of personnel at all organizational levels, accentuated by the demographic trend and the outflow of talent from our territory”
It should also be noted that in manufacturing the personnel requirement is concentrated in the operations area (i.e. the sectors connected to production, purchasing and logistics) which accounts for 44% of the total personnel requirement and involves almost all companies looking for new collaborators. Meanwhile, the search for professional figures for the technical office and R&D shows the most accentuated growth trend: 26% of vacancies focus on these professional roles dedicated to product innovation and company processes, an activity which concerns 57% of the companies involved in the survey.
Going into detail, the most requested professional profiles are technical designer (18% of the total, sought after by 27% of the companies interviewed), sales assistant (13% and 19%), CNC operator (10% and 14%). The reasons? The majority of new hires are determined by the processes of replacing staff leaving the company, due to reaching age limits and due to the volatility of the labor market; in second place the quantitative growth of activities and the increase in orders. When it comes to hiring, entrepreneurs invest in the leverage of contractual advantages and economic incentives, in the form of differential pay, benefits and job stability over time and favor, rather than curriculum or courses, direct experience in the field which is the privileged area (51%) of learning technical skills, followed by participation in specialist training courses (37%), while PhDs, post-graduate training and short-term continuous training record the lowest relevance scores (they are very important for 19% and 16% respectively).
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